peripathetic

Gay people - the good, the bad, the ugly
I wrote all this today in my crappy little carpark job, when nobody was coming in and nobody was going out, and I had free time. Sometimes I write stuff in the carpark, but most of the time I just read things that other people have written, and draw puzzled glances from the drivers, who all think I'm uneducated just because I work there. :oD Anyway:

I've been forced to think a lot lately about how disappointing and inadequate and insulting many gay people are. Well - I say I've bene forced to think a lot about it, but I have been thinking about it quite willingly, and not just recently, but for years.

This isn't meant to be some sort of personal soapbox either. I think most people agree that certain ways of treating people are good; certain other ways bad. Meeting up with someome and being chatty and pleasant, and then not meeting them again is bad. Lying about things to avoid meeting is bad. Postponing for no better reason than that you just can't be arsed is understandable, but still bad.

Talking to people casually for 30 seconds in a bar once every couple of weeks and pretending that's a friendship is stupid. Scoping someone out in advance and not meeting them as arranged because you're not sexually attracted to them is dysfunctional, stupid and insulting - and just doesn't make any kind of sense if you're not meeting for sex.

I'm not posturing here, or exaggerating when I say that everything I've just described is what I've seen of gay people's behaviour - particularly gay people who socialise almost exclusively within the gay scene. (And particularly in Belfast.) Needless to say, it's not normal behaviour at all. Outside the scene, it's looked on as immature, dysfunctional behaviour.

And yet gay people in provincial scenes believe their small injustices are perfectly normal, not actually bad at all. What I would consider awful might only pass for mildly bad to a guy on a local scene who's never had the wakeup call of living in larger cities with internationally diverse people, or even the wakeup call of mixing regularly with straight friends.

Sceney gay people are, for the most part, predictable to know, shit to interactwith, and worse to depend on. Which is, for me, what makes knowing my well-adjusted, sane, friendly and dependable gay friends such a great thing. And I shouldn't take that for granted. Of course, thanks to the majority of gay people, I never can.