Word in the Herd: The Power of Stereotypes

DIFFERENCES BAD. HOMOGENEITY GOOD.

Ladies, gentlemen, variations thereof, and none of the above, I left you hanging in my last post. I revealed to you the unearthly horror that was Rachel Maddow's choice in fashion before she came out, and used this to make a point about femme invisibility. Femme lesbians, because they do not adhere to the stereotypes that lesbians hold about themselves, are passed over. But why do these stereotypes still exist? We know better!

When I was younger, I, against my will, attended a large ultraconservative Catholic parish with a sizable youth program. Sometimes they would have the boys and girls meet in separate rooms to have a nice chat about Theology of the Body (read: don't have sex before marriage, be gay, or diddle yourself, or Baby Jesus will cry). Now, to start us off, the ~~wretched gender traitors~~ female youth leaders would say things like, "Every girl wants their wedding day to be special and all about them" or "Aren't guys so silly when it comes to emotions?". We'd all laugh and play along. It was like being in a play, or being in on a joke because women are supposed to be overly emotional and boy-crazy! Get it? What's more, none of these girls went to my school and I only saw them twice a week. The only culture we shared was that of greater American society and that of the Catholic Church. It was such a relief to have a common language, if you will, a common template in which to interact. When the other girls spoke of boyfriends or school plays or school-specific events, I was lost. But when girly-girl references came up, I was in the zone. I knew this stuff! It was a game that every American girl knew how to play.

Now all these ladies need is a pack of trite cliches and you have a TEAM. Source: David & Rachel Landin, Creative Commons License.

Suddenly, to my utter horror, I found the female youth leaders saying things like, "I know you ladies want your wedding to be all about you, but there's more to marriage like that." or "Because your boyfriends don't understand emotions the way we do, it's up to you to keep his and your purity safe". NOW WAIT JUST ONE MINUTE. I didn't know why at the time, but I felt a very specific type of unease, like when you see someone use the wrong fork or someone asks a confirmed dyke how her husband is doing. It was a purely social faux pas, almost as if...they were playing the game wrong...or we were playing it differently than we were.

You see, when I was laughing and going along with those stereotypes, when every other girl in the room was doing the same, the youth leaders were taking that as confirmation on their own ideas about femininity. We were playing the game of "laugh at what society thinks of us", they were playing the game of "confirm what society thinks of us. Do you see how easy it is to go along with?

In the morning of June 28, 1969, a watershed moment in gay liberation took place in the dingy Stonewall Inn of New York City. A routine police raid that was supposed to take defeated gays into custody instead inspired massive demonstrations. The first Gay Pride parades were born from the Stonewall Riots. How did our pissed-off, desperate forefathers and foremothers conduct themselves during this revolutionary moment?

As some patrons of the inn were being lead out into police cars, they rallied the crowd by saluting the police, by flouncing, fixing their hair, flicking their wrists, and receiving applause like a drag queen on her debut. A transvestite smacked a policeman with her purse. One person started singing "We Shall Overcome". While some rioters upturned police cars, set things on fire, and tried to break back into the occupied Stonewall Inn, others started kick lines. Fucking kick lines, you guys.

Exactly like this, except everyone's gay and EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE.

Why? The clients of the Stonewall Inn came from all walks of life. There were homeless kids with nowhere else to go, well-to-do middle-aged gay men, dykey women, femme-y women, transvestites, people of all genders, social classes, and colors. Back then, there was very little awareness of a cohesive queer identity. The only thing uniting the clients of the Stonewall Inn was the lifetime of oppression, the slander, the jokes, the cliches that had been imposed upon them. That common experience bonded that crowd. It was the only heritage, the only mother language every single person that room had in common. They used it to scream rebellion.

After Stonewall came the vast disavowing of trying to pretend to emulate straight society. The stone butch/femme relationship dynamic, for example, went out of vogue as people realized that there were other options. However, those stereotypes represent everything that was wrong with society's attitude towards gays, and to this day we queers use it as a whispered signal, a secret "all is not right, but all is not lost". In the irony of its use, those stereotypes are now a common culture of dissent. So every time you sarcastically mention appletinis or Birkenstocks or flannel or the gay lisp, you are part of a fine tradition that knows where it's coming from, and is ready for the day that will render that tradition obsolete. So yes, stereotypes are bad. But we perpetrate them because they offer something that binds queers of all classes, creeds, and colors. And it is in unity that we find our strength.