Is the “Gay Lifestyle” Real? : Why It Might Be and Why That’s Not a Bad Thing
A bunch of far-right Twitter users recently stumbled upon a tweet where I condemned journalist Glenn Greenwald’s insistence that YouTuber Steven Crowder, who had spent months using homophobic slurs against journalist and activist Carlos Maza from Vox Media, should remain on the video-sharing website in spite of clearly breaking its terms and conditions. In addition to enduring a myriad of homophobic slurs, I witnessed many of Crowder’s staunch supporters insisting that because society tolerates my lifestyle as a gay man, I ought to tolerate his right to disagree with it and with leftist politics altogether. I had heard people refer to being queer as a lifestyle before, especially in conservative media. Although media outlets who use that phrase don’t specify what they mean by this term, the implicit meaning of it is obvious to any queer person. Our queerness, sexual orientation and/or gender identity differs from the one those people see as the norm: monogamous heterosexual marriage. Many queer people lead lives that are absolutely identical to their straight peers, but their queerness alone, in the eyes of some people, sets them apart and makes them nonetheless a burden — they consider tolerating us as an act of kindness, and therefore us denouncing queerphobia comes across as ungratefulness.
I don’t need to explain why this line of thinking is absurd: queer people had had to defend themselves against it for decades, after all. However, the fact that in some ways queer people differ from straight people in the way they lead their lives still does not justify ostracizing, rejection and violence. Queer theorist Jack Halberstam explained succinctly in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives that some queer people do indeed intentionally rupture the lifestyle the straight majority has deemed appropriate and traditional. Inspired by, among others, French philosopher Michel Foucault’s studies about the ostracizing and categorizing of people who practice non-normative sex, Halberstam comments in the introduction that some queer people, for instance, have a different conception of time due to this very ostracizing and categorizing. Historical moments such as the AIDS crisis irreversibly impacted the way queer people thought about time and lived their lives. Their concerns and goals often did not align with those of straight people, who did not have to worry about blatant discrimination and neglect from both the authorities and their communities. Halberstam theorizes, furthermore, that since queer people were for so long excluded from traditional life narratives of forming a family and having children, less of us feel obligated to adhere to these expectations. This exclusion led to different understandings of what had to be done with time, space, or money as a queer person. Even social relationships are different for queer people: in the twenty-first century, lots of people still have to worry about not being accepted in their families, churches or workplaces after coming out as queer. The definition of friends, family and partner can vary for queer individuals who decide to step outside the goal of raising a nuclear family.
Halberstam, however, wrote that material fifteen years ago, before witnessing the progress made in queer rights in some places . In the United States, same-sex couples can now get married. There has been an increase of visibility of queer people in all fields, from entertainment to politics. An openly gay man is running for president, covering magazines next to his husband. A number of queer people now have the option to follow the more normative lifestyle the far-right often alludes to: the marriage, the two children, the white picket fence, and the neighborhood involvement. The concept of homonormativity, indeed, refers to queer people adopting the same life narrative as straight people. It is fantastic that queer people can — in some places — partake in this life narrative they used to be excluded from. On the other hand, when that comes at the expense of erasing queer people who choose not to, it becomes an issue worth discussing.
Ultimately, when a straight person uses the term lifestyle to refer to a queer person simply existing, one can be sure it is being used with a malicious, homophobic intent. When those people talked about my lifestyle as a synonym for my existence as a gay man, and without knowing anything else about me, I was confident I was dealing with homophobia. However, I also acknowledge that if some queer people do indeed live differently, it is because of historical and societal reasons. And this different lifestyle is not negative: queer people might, in fact, find it liberated not to be limited by the life narratives imposed on their straight peers. The gay lifestyle fundamentalists so loudly decry is, at the end, one of the most precious things the queer community can hold onto in spite of the possibility of being slowly accepted by the straight majority.
