I'm a pretty limited essayist, because I tend to come to a conclusion and frame it as a declarative statement of some kind. I discard the process by which I came to the conclusion, because it's usually fact-bound and subjective, and hence resistant to being explained in a way that would enable you to follow the process. And I generally assume that, since you're intelligent, beautiful people, you're capable of working out the significance and ramifications of the conclusion.
For instance, I learned something last week, which made me starting thinking about how to connect it up to something else that's been kind of a problem, and I eventually worked around to the following:
The emotional territory of being gay or being straight is qualitatively different only as far as the closet is concerned.
That is, whether or not you're gay or straight, being in a relationship or breaking a relationship or how you interact with your friends and family and loved ones and their emotional entanglements, issues, and virtues, they're all pretty much the same. When Fred breaks up with Martha, the problems of emotional support, dividing up the friends, and the like, are just the same as when Fred breaks up with Martin. And when it's Martha, Bertram doesn't have any more insight into the problem just because he's straight any more than Clive does because he's gay when it's Martin.
Except for the closet. The closet is one place that being gay is qualitatively different from being straight, because society is heteronormative. I'm speaking very broadly here and sweeping homophobia (as the essential reason for the closet) into this category, though even there, being ostracized by relatives for having a gay partner is qualitatively similar to being ostracized for dating cross-race or cross-class.
But, like I said, I'm a pretty limited essayist; that's what I got on the subject and I'm pretty much done.
Posted by Greg at July 1, 2007 2:29 PM
As with the feminist doctrine in your other post, I feel you miss an important point: gender issues and sexuality issues aren't truly subject to picking up sides. They are part of the human condition. If I can't understand what it is to be gay or to be female then there are truly differences, and so that justifies prejudicial assumptions. Better, I think to treat people as human beings and assume that he differences you might want to include are not endemic to being woman or to being gay but similar to ifferences in height and weight and stength and intelligence.
So, for example, if I say "The Mary Jane Statue" offends me because it demeans women, that puts women ino a different category than men. If I say homosexuals experience of the closet makes it different for them, that puts them into a different category than straights. And while it might be useful to put people in a different category, I don't think many of the distinctions are helpful if they result in negative consequences.
I, for exmaple, try to avoid telling pople what I do for a living Am I closeted? Were it possible, I would be. I believe myself to be capable of understanding fear and prejudice, and unless we just assume I am not harmed by prejudice as well, then I don't think it is reasonable to let the people who are the targets of prejudice dictate the terms under which that prejudice is addressed, because if it doesn't harm humanity as a whole, then the moral calculus becomes not "treat people right because it is the right thing to do" but "their feelings are more important than your feelings." After all, why David Duke's hatred of black skin matter less than my indifference to it.
That's where it all falls apart, you see, because bigots consider things important which non-bigots are generally indifferent to. Anti-semitism, for example, is something that affects me directly, but why should Greg Morrow care? If the answer is "Because it is the right thing to do" that assumes a social and moral obligation that should transcend categories. But if the answer is simply "Well, because Greg Morrow thinks it is bad" then you've put yourslef in a position where the bigot can say "That's fine, but why should I care more what you think the what I think." And there's really no good answer to that.