From the book: "Outing Yourself" by Michelangelo Signorile
Many gay people were so psychically damaged when they were young that they still suffer greatly from the disease of loathing even after having been out of the closet to friends, family, and coworkers for many years. In the most extreme cases, they become quite vocal. They will often lash out at the transgendered members of the gay community, people who are out- spoken and visible. In essence, what they are doing is directing their own internalized homophobia outward onto other gay people.
This attitude is very common, and you may share it. You may believe, for example, that drag queens, effeminate men, and butch lesbians give the community a bad name and cause straight people to dislike gays even more. You may think that if gays were to show that they are just like everyone else they would be more accepted. This is the externalization of your own internalized homophobia.
You should fight this response. First and foremost, we gay people-like all people-should tell the truth about who we are. We should let it be known that many of us look like the average straight person next door. But we must not hide the fact we are a diverse community, made up of many sexual minorities, and that all of us, however different from the norm, have the right to be visible. Often, in fact, it is the people who are more flamboyant and outspoken who force heterosexuals to confront their own homophobia-even if at first their flamboyance makes heterosxuals uncomfortable. Ever since the riots at Stonewall that ushered in the gay- rights movement, it has been the more extreme and loud gay people who have secured much of our progress and cleared a safe space for gay people of all stripes.
Those among us who appear more extreme have often had lives tougher than those gay people who fit in more easily. They were the ones who got tagges as "faggot" or "dyke" when they were young, and they were the ones whose psychological nature or innate bravery required them to be forthrightly gay. If you are one of these stand-out types of gay people, it is important not to be bitter at those who more easily fit in, to have patience with them, and to empathize with the self-loathing they experience. Conversely, if you are someone who can operate unobtrusively in the world, it is important that you accept and get to know those who are different from you and realize that your discomfort with certain gay people is a product of your own homophobia.
So there you sit and perhaps you have great discomfort inside of yourself with your lesbianism, or perhaps you have trancended this, either way I am sure it is not difficult to, in seeing another gay person feel, at times, as equally alientated from them as from a straight person. This is a facet of the homophobia that we too are raised with. The last thing our community needs is one type or stereotype of lesbian alientating another. I have witnessed this and it is distressing. As we alienate another from self, so to are we alienating self from self. If you find that you loathe anyone, it is likely that you still loathe yourself to some degree.
I think by sharing with others some of our struggles around these issues we can come out of much of the denial and self-loathing that we have held ourselves within and move to an new and healthier understanding of self: an understanding based on self-acceptance, self-love and self-worth and esteem. This is the ultimate goal for us as individual lesbians, and as a community as well, in my opinion.
Acknowledging and understanding self-hatred is the easy part. Fighting it off is the hard part. It requires enormous perserverance.
© January 1997 A.J Mahari