So I was sitting at the aforementioned party, and this guy whispers to me, “There are two gays at this party and one of them still in the closet. Guess who?”
And so I point, randomly, to the two men who seem to not have a woman on their arm. One quite goodlooking, both the muscled kind. And I ask him, in a hushed tone, despite the loud music, why he thinks the other guy is in the closet. “Believe me”, he says, “we men just know”.
It’s two:thirty in the morning, everyone is fairly alcoholled up, all men are pulling shirts off each other playing some silly guy games which cease to be funny when one is sober, and I wonder why this guy would be scanning the crowd for gay people and even registering them. His potential diagnosis as a homophobe aside, I notice how men are obsessed with how they are perceived.
So where women classify *things* as gay, men constantly typecast other men – quickly and in one deft move. This totally amuses me – the amount of time and energy men expend in classifying people as gay and gay-like. Long haired? – gay. Earring-ed? -gay. Muscled? – gay. Wears a deo? – Gay with a capital G.. Knows names of three kinds of cheese? — Uh-oh, gay. Not a football lover? — Borderline gay. No cricket either? – Too Gay. Likes soft rock? – pansy ass *and* gay. Drinks anything but beer? – uh oh, swinging on the other side. Doesn’t drink whisky either? — oh, so so gay. What? Drink has a cherry floating on it? — Cover your ass and run far far far away from him.
Retro, for instance, says this and this. The world is fine with gay, he makes a tall claim in the latter. The world is — politically and to some extent socially — okay with gays, but the men as a class are not.
All men are homophobic, rest are gay.
I came back and told PD the story. He said, “Even I thought so.”
Touche!
[...] straight men, are all homophobic, as an acclaimed blogger had once (yesterday?) put it. And we, as men, will at some level generalise that women are a certain way; and we as Indians, [...]