DJL said:
Perhaps homosexuality suffers more amongst young people today because of its huge growth in terms of mainstream media coverage.
if media coverage is to blame its because of the type of coverage. queers on teevee are not much past the black-and-white-minstrel stage. i can't think of alot of gay 'personalities' in mainstream media that i've been encouraged to sympathise with, who have been portrayed as anything other than strange, incomprehensible, vain, capricious, childish and idiotic.
no-one i could imagine wanting to be, or being friends with.
gays on tv have to reinforce hi-jacked camp. gay men always have to show a bunch of supposedly feminine negative attributes and (like women) are therefore useless. its not a deliberate conspiracy but its what we're expecting from the token gay, in the single track world of tv if the definition is going to be subverted the subversion usually has to be the point of the show, the gag.
big brother has to incude one queer cos they (gays) are something everyone likes to gawp at, a relatively newly voided taboo. we can all group round and point and (quietly) laugh at them, the flamer, like the loud mouthed girl, the dim model, the conservative. isnt that what big bother is about? anyway gay people are well known to be loud entertaining insecure neurotic freaks. perfect BB material. so its not about quota filling.
in a random sample the chance of picking at least one queer to be in the ten or twelve or whatever would be relatively high anyway. gay characters are certainly are not over represented on tv with respect to the ratio of gay and straight people in the audience.
[/QUOTE]Some people don't like homosexuality shoved in their face in the same way it can be off-putting if say a flat mate and his new girlfriend are constantly making out on the sofa opposite you when you are trying to watch TV in that f-ing room! We've had homo-overkill recently imo.[/QUOTE]
the kissing gay couple isnt just offensive on your sofa its offensive all over. if its "rammed down.. throats"
the lounge is a grey public/private space so its awkward. straight couples can kiss in the anonymity of a public space or in privacy but in a shared in-between space its wierd.
if youre queer the whole world is an alien controlled space, public space is owned by someone else, youre never going to come correct.
the public world is packed full of images of normality as purely heterosexual, homosexuality as pain and loneliness or weakness, hetero-erotic and soft porn imagey, sexist imagery and happy marraige and children myths. everywhere. 24-7.
there's very little gay space, if you go to compton street you have to listen to shit music, if you go to clapham common you surrender the protection of the police or you get arrested.
i used to make sick faces or shout at straight people being normally intimate because i wanted to turn round the idea that this was 'thier world' and i was always outside. that they had a right to feel comfortable doing things that i had to be careful not to ram-down-throats.
the ram-down-throats thing is meaningless really, a polite way of saying dont do it anywhere near me. something you dont have to feel homophobic saying, but basically equivalent to "i dont mind asians as long as i dont have to see them anywhere ever and dont have to deal with anything they might introduce into society, the media, culture, consumtion or my family"
personally i think younger people are more tollerant of homosexuality because it has become something which has a normal (if often somewhat circus-like) place in the world -through-television.
using gay as a synonym for bad is a confused one for me. i know plenty of people who just use it in thier vocabulary without it having even a subliminal connection to the other meanings, just like i dont usually even think of the other (gay=joyous) meaning. though clearly just like gay(2) came from gay(1), gay(3) came from gay(2).
hmmm sorry to go on... not really music related anymore
