I didn’t vote for Trump, but I’m glad he is driving out the Woke. He might be able to rid the federal government of DEI, but it’s going to hang on by its claws and teeth in academia which spawned it, and lash out in the media and elite “liberal” circles for some time to come before it eventually sells itself out. I put the word liberal in quotation marks because Woke is not really liberal at all. I am liberal. I believe in things like free speech, separation of church and state, the objective methods of science, capitalist markets, and biology and evolution. Those are liberal things. Woke is none of those.
Woke is leftist, neo-Marxist, and post-modern. Woke reduces everything to power, oppression, and personal subjectivity. Woke is anti-science, considers free speech to be hate speech, and is anti-capitalist, and anti-Christian. It’s against anything it considers “normal” because normal is power and privilege. It prizes that which is not normal, that which is “queer.” Queer is that which is opposed to the normal.
White, male, heterosexual society is considered “normative” by queer theory. Its normality thus creates, according to its “theory,” “systemic” patterns of oppression of minority groups to further its own personal “privilege” that creates a “lived experience” of oppression in those minorities, the BIPOCs for instance. Ironically, a “lived experience” that has to be reflected back to minority people as a “representation” of their true “identity” to promote “diversity” because identity is always an identity group thing. Apparently, identity is always something imposed on oppressed people by privilege, which nevertheless has to be celebrated as “valid.”
This is a highly schematic and reductive view that is mostly driven by resentment. It’s pushed by people to foster some personal sense of grievance and the moral virtue that is supposed to arise from combating this grievance in the name of social justice. It’s not a coincidence that “wokeness” is primarily a movement among the elite class of highly educated “liberals,” mostly women (and their grievances against men) who have “internalized” a sense of personal guilt about the historical treatment of blacks, Native Americans, and other oppressed groups like women (themselves), gay/lesbians, and now “queer” and transgendered people. However, my experience as a gay male person is not the “lived experience” of “Queerness.” It’s something else, and not what “queer theory” predicts.
What queer theory predicts is that all LGBTQ+ people have the same experiences, like there is some kind of generic template of oppression that produces group-based “lived experiences.” This is of course ridiculous. All the categories of people that the LGBTQ+ acronym tries to subsume are widely divergent groups with different interests.
The most basic is that the LGB segment is concerned with sexual orientation, and the TQ+ with gender issues, which are not the same, and which is also evidenced by the attacks they launch on each other. The TQ+ try to invalidate the LGB’s sense of sexual orientation by calling them “genital fetishes” when they are not interested in having sex with trans people. The LGBs attack the TQ+ for trying to destroy social institutions like gay marriage and family that they have fought to be included in, which the TQ+ disparage and undermine because they are too “normal.”
This is all disheartening, but let me get to my point. Suffice it to say, I think the TQ+ are in the wrong here. And most gay people don’t have a “queer” lived experience that they push. Even more so, in my case, I don’t even have a “gay” lived experience that is common to many gay men, which is largely grounded in the stereotype of the sexually promiscuous gay men hooking up for sex, who have limp wrists and talks with a lisp. Itself a cliché.
One of the problems that I encounter, is that so many people, and here I mean gay men, have an expectation of what gay guys are supposed to be like and try to shame or coerce them into a stereotype, or reduce them down to some “gay” type and label them as some kind of animal (how revealing): a bear, a wolf, a cub, an otter, a twink, and so forth.
The phenomenon that I find the most egregious is the assumption of sexual deviance and promiscuity. Even gay men will try to coerce each other into sharing this self-conception. They will shame each other into sexual abuse and insist that any gay man who is not promiscuous must somehow be “defective” as a gay man (and will often offer to “help” you get over your hang-up by having sex with you).
I understand that some gay men just can’t help themselves, and can’t stop cruising all the time. Nevertheless, I still resent this assumption. It’s as if AIDS never happened (if you get it there is a pill for it now), or just take your PREP and go a fucking. As a gay person, I’m grossed out by the vulgarity of gay culture, and even more disgusted by what passes as “queerness,” which is mostly sexual deviance. Straight people with sexual kinks and fetishes who call themselves queer because it makes them feel special to be some kind of pervert.
I seem to be having a hard time getting to what is bothering me, and why this is dragging out so long. Your “queerness” doesn’t speak to me. Your “gayness” doesn’t speak to me either. I feel like a bystander watching people participating in a false “lived experience” that is supposed to be true because someone said this is the way it's supposed to be. This is how to “do” it properly, and you (i.e. me) are doing it wrong, and thus have a “false consciousness” or have “internalized” some kind of phobia or -ism.
I really find this gross, the insinuation that to be a “real” gay, queer, or whatever, this is how you are supposed to experience that identity because it’s imposed by other’s privileged power, and shows your victimhood status. If you don’t have it, then there is something amiss about your “true identity.” That is such BS.
And, I’m expected to adopt THAT self-conception as an honest assessment of myself, one which somehow renders me a defective gay man, and as proof that I somehow refuse to acknowledge my oppression. I have had lots of shit happen to me, but nothing about this “queer theory” business even comes close to describing it. It tries to insist that I share some common consciousness, some awareness, or lived experience with gross deviant people I don’t like. I have a feeling that a lot of what passes for “queer” is really a manifestation of emotional instability or mental illness. People need real help, and what queer theory is offering them is not making their emotional or mental lives better.
But isn’t that how the world is? There are people on the right and on the left who shun me. Shunned for being a pervert by the right, and shunned for not being a pervert by the left. Let the pride parade march by with their gay flags, fetish bondage gear, their “puppy play” masks, and drag queens prancing around to entertain the children in the crowd. This is stuff that used to happen in the back rooms of a gay bar at midnight. Now it's just right there in the street and covered by the news media. And never at any point did it represent my own lived experience. Apparently, only certain “experiences” are worth “representing.”