hello. did you miss by bi-weekly vaguepost minithread explanations about current events in our local community and the world at large?

no?

ah. well, small price to pay for hyper jackalope dick, right?

today's topic is one i've hammered on a lot: the desire to be mainstream.

with gay wrath month in full swing, it seems as important a time as ever to try to help people understand the generational conflicts in the lgbt community.

let's start with identities-of-exclusion: these are identities which are defined entirely by what they are not.

the mainstream, heteronormative identity, i will boldly declare without the slightest bit of irony, is not an identity which positively celebrates or embraces straightness, let alone any virtue at all, but rather one that rejects all things which are mainstreamed as deviant.

that is to say, the modern straight person, as you've probably realized, doesn't actually think or believe anything, and has a presumption that they are the example of normality.

to put a finer point on it, the mainstream mindset is "straightness is the absence of deviancy", and characterizes straightness not as sexuality, but as a set of mostly polite behaviors.

likewise, "whiteness is the absence of color, and color is the presence of criminality" is another mainstream of the modern identity of exclusion.

and i start at this point, because this is what is mainstream, and we all grew up in it, and coexist with it. this is most people.

so how does this relate to Gay Wrath Month and the vague mention of generational differences?

well, let's imagine briefly that you had a period of your life where you went from presuming you were normal to realizing you're homosexual, trans, or anything else.

this is a huge shift in identity, and it's extremely isolating. by virtue of this undeniable trait about yourself, you no longer belong to the identity of exclusion, you're ousted from the mainstream even if privately.

this is cause for grief.

grief is identity death, it's the loss of something which is essential to how you perceive yourself.

i think with a few exceptions, most of us went through a long period of grief over the fact that we're not heteronormative. it's a scary, endlessly threatening time.

so what does the denial period look like?

it probably looks something like attempts to appease or prove to the mainstream that they can still accept you, that you still belong to the ingroup, and if not for a few bad actors all queers would be accepted.

yes, it's the damn pup masks. that's why the straights won't accept you back into their club. if only the gays didn't have pup masks.

for the young queer between the ages of 16 and 21, their grief over being permanently divorced from the mainstream often compels them to outwardly blame their community, because they haven't reconciled the fact that they can perform as straight, but never be accepted as straight.

after all, they have all the right polite behaviors, they learned them their whole life.

they know to be prudish and treat sex with a confused reverence and incuriosity. they know to never expose the fact that they have their own thoughts and opinions.

but therein lies the trick. straightness is an identity of exclusion, and if you're any of the thing it isn't, then you're never allowed back in.

incidentally, you might have noticed a huge chunk of the fascy behavior in our community is mostly centralized around young members.

identities of exclusion and fascism share a lot of things in common. they're both hierarchical, they both gradually reduce who is entitled to wield violence based on arbitrarily selected traits, and they both really dislike non-conformity.

what i'm suggesting is, very clumsily, when you grow up in a fascistic system, with an imposed fascistic identity, it can take you a while to shed it once you realize you're in the excluded class.

so try not to be too upset at the kids who are desperately trying to claw their way back into the mainstream by trying to police the behavior of the gays.

sternly disagree, and give them the time to have the life experiences to inform their perspective, and their real identity.

or don't, fuck it. what do i care. yell at them, all this shit doesn't matter anyways.

thanks for reading, let's get back to jacking off.