Yolo Akili explores how gay men’s sexism and male privilege shows up in relationship to women.
At a recent presentation, I asked all of the gay male students in the
room to raise their hand if in the past week they touched a woman’s
body without her consent. After a moment of hesitation, all of the hands
of the gay men in the room went up. I then asked the same gay men to
raise their hand if in the past week they offered a woman unsolicited
advice about how to “improve” her body or her fashion. Once again, after
a moment of hesitation, all of the hands in the room went up.
These questions came after a brief exploration of gay men’s
relationship to American fashion and women’s bodies. That dialogue
included recognizing that gay men in the United States are often hailed
as the experts of women’s fashion and by proxy women’s bodies. In
addition to this there is a dominant logic that suggests that because
gay men have no conscious desire to be sexually intimate with women, our
uninvited touching and groping (physical assault) is benign.
These attitudes have led many gay men to feel curiously comfortable
critiquing and touching women’s bodies at whim. What’s unique about
this is not the male sense of ownership to women’s bodies—that is
somewhat common. What’s curious is the minimization of these acts by
gay men and many women because the male perpetuating the act is or is
perceived to be gay.
An example: I was at a gay club in Atlanta with a good friend of mine
who is a heterosexual black woman. While dancing in the club, a white
gay male reached out and grabbed both her breasts aggressively. Shocked,
she pushed him away immediately. When we both confronted him he told
us: “It’s no big deal, I’m gay, I don’t want her– I was just having
fun.” We expressed our frustrations to him and demanded he apologize,
but he simply refused. He clearly felt entitled to touch her body and
could not even acknowledge the fact that he had assaulted her.
I have experienced this attitude as being very common amongst gay
men. It should also be noted that in this case, she was a black woman
and he a white gay male, which makes this an eyebrow-raising dynamic as
it invokes the psychological history of white men’s entitlement to black
women’s bodies. However it has been my experience that this dynamic of
assault with gay men and women also persists within racial groups.
At another presentation, I told this same story to the audience.
Almost instantly, several young women raised up their hands to be called
upon. Each of them recounted a different story with a similar theme.
One young woman told a story that stuck with me:
“I was feeling really cute in this outfit I put together. Then I see
this gay guy I knew from class, but not very well. I had barely said hi
before he began telling me what was wrong with how I looked, how I
needed to lose weight, and how if I wanted to get a man I needed to do
certain things… In the midst of this, he grabbed my breasts and pushed
them together, to tell me how my breasts should look as opposed to how
they did. It really brought me down. I didn’t know how to respond… I
was so shocked.”
Her story invoked rage amongst many other women in the audience, and
an obvious silence amongst the gay men present. Their silence spoke
volumes. What also seemed to speak volumes, though not ever articulated
verbally, was the sense that many of the heterosexual women had not
responded (aggressively or otherwise) out of fear of being perceived as
homophobic. (Or that their own homophobia, in an aggressive response,
would reveal itself.) This curiously, to me did not seem to be a concern
for the lesbian and queer-identified women in the room at all.
Acts like these are apart of the everyday psychological warfare against
women and girls that pits them against unrealistic beauty standards and
ideals. It is also apart of the culture’s constant message to women
that their bodies are not their own.
It’s very disturbing, but in a culture that doesn’t see gay men who
are perceived as “queer” as “men” or as having male privilege, our
misogyny and sexist acts are instead read as “diva worship” or
“celebrating women”, even when in reality they are objectification,
assault and dehumanization.
The unique way our entitlement to women’s physical bodies plays
itself out is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to gay cisgender
men’s sexism and privilege. This privilege do not make one a bad person
any more than straight privilege makes heterosexuals bad people. It
does mean that gay men can sometimes be just as unthinkingly hurtful,
and unthinkingly a part of a system that participates in the oppression
of others, an experience most of us can relate to. Exploration of these
dynamics can lead us to query institutional systems and policies that
reflect this privilege, nuanced as it is by other identities and social
locations.
At the end of my last workshop on gay men’s sexism, I extended a
number of questions to the gay men in the audience. I think it’s
relevant to extend these same questions now:
How is your sexism and misogyny showing up in your own life, and in
your relationships with your female friends, trans, lesbian, queer or
heterosexual? How is it showing up in your relationship to your mothers,
aunts and sisters? Is it showing up in your expectations of how they
should treat you? How you talk to them? What steps can you take to
address the inequitable representation of gay cisgender men in your
community as leaders? How do you see that privilege showing up in your
organizations and policy, and what can you do to circumvent it? How will
you talk to other gay men in your community about their choices and
interactions with women, and how will you work to hold them and yourself
accountable?
These are just some of the questions we need to be asking ourselves
so that we can help create communities where sexual or physical assault,
no matter who is doing it, is deemed unacceptable. These are the kinds
of questions we as gay men need to be asking ourselves so that we can
continue (or for some begin) the work of addressing gender/sex inequity
in our own communities, as well as in our own hearts and minds. This is a
part of our healing work. This is a part of our transformation. This is
a part of our accountability.
Photo—Kyle Taylor, Dream It. Do It. World Tour/Flickr 
