11 Roxane Gay Essays and Stori You Need to Read Right Away

Contents:

• WHAT TO READ IF YOU HAVEN'T YET READ ROXANE GAY
• ‘I AM GAY – BUT I WASN’T BORN THIS WAY’
• GAY ESSAYS
• 2ND PLACE ESSAY: “DEFN OF GAY: STEREOTYP AND THE IMPORTANCE OF AFFIRMG TORS”
• ESSAY SAMPL ON GAY

WHAT TO READ IF YOU HAVEN'T YET READ ROXANE GAY

And if all the chatter mak you want to dive to Gay's work, here are some fantastic says and stori by the wrer you n read now, for ee, to nvce you why you should be a Roxane Gay fangirl, Magaze: "Motherfuckers"A brief and quietly vastatg story about a kid named Gérard who mov to Ameri om Hai. Gay, who has Haian parents and grew up Nebraska “raised as a Haian-Amerin, ” imbu the short scen wh a potent mix of sendhand and firsthand sentence: “'Je te tte, ' he says.

”BuzzFeed: "Not Here to Make Friends"The tle is a monly tmpeted battle cry for female realy petors, whether they’re fightg for a bachelor or a molg ntract, but Gay to ame her wish for more unlikeable female characters lerature. "xoJane: "My Body is Wildly Undiscipled and I Deny Myself Nearly Everythg I Dire"In the aftermath of this year’s Biggt Loser fale, which a nttant lost what many nsired to be an unhealthy amount of weight, Gay nsired her own relatnship to her body.

” She ticks off a list of ways she tri to make her “wildly undiscipled” body more acceptable — by wearg dark cloth, by not eatg junk food public, and by nyg herself over and over problem of body image Ameri is real, and Gay is not aaid to reveal the parts of herself that don’t f to the typil female weight loss narrative of privatn → thns → happs. ”New York Magaze: "The 10 Bt Books About Morn Virgs"Ask a normal person for a list of book remendatns, and you’ll (probably) get one, but ask Gay for a list of book remendatns and she’ll give you a genre-hoppg digt of lerature that registers pretty much across the board on the high-low culture matrix. ” A ton of those piec me out after he scribed g Twter as “like wrg a novel whout the letter P, ” and all of them said he was out of touch, a lame du who jt didn’t get , yadda yadda Here To BuyWhat set Gay’s piece apart was that she criqued Franzen for ignorg somethg important — wrers who aren’t as succsful as Franzen need Twter to promote their books, munite wh their fellow thors, and build a lerary work.

‘I AM GAY – BUT I WASN’T BORN THIS WAY’

Acrdg to Gay, the problem is not that Girls is a show ma by and about privileged whe people — the problem is that there are not enough other shows creatg stori that ls privileged and ls whe women n relate Here To WatchKey sentence: “Every girl or once-was-girl has a show that would be bt for her. The now-funct journal Kill Author published Gay’s story s send issue, and reads like eher a cryptic third-person diary, an aspiratnal stctnal manual, or not om a spy, pendg on who you thk is sentence: “She tak dictatn and mak note not of what he says, but rather what she thks.

You so obvly nnot be gay, was her implitn, bee this is good was 2006, a full five years before Lady Gaga would set the Born This Way argument atop s unassailable cultural perch, but even then the popular unrstandg of orientatn was that was somethg you were born wh, somethg you uldn’t change. But what feels most accurate to say is that I’m gay – but I wasn’t born this people may fd their sir changg directn - and n't jt be explaed as experimentatn (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)In 1977, jt over 10% of Amerins thought gayns was somethg you were born wh, acrdg to Gallup.

Throughout the same perd, the number of Amerins who believe homosexualy is “due to someone’s upbrgg/environment” fell om jt unr 60% to ias reached cril mass pop culture, first wh Lady Gaga’s 2011 Born This Way and one year later wh Macklemore’s Same Love, the chos of which has a gay person sgg “I n’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to. ” Around the same time, the Human Rights Campaign clared unequivolly that “Beg gay is not a choice, ” and to claim that is “giv unwarranted crence to roundly disproven practic such as nversn or reparative therapy. ”People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often st as homophobic, and their thkg is nsired backwardAs Jane Ward not Not Gay: Sex Between Straight Whe Men, what’s tertg about many of the claims is how transparent their speakers are wh their polil motivatns.

GAY ESSAYS

“Such statements, ” she wr, “fe blogil acunts wh an obligatory and nearly ercive force, suggtg that anyone who scrib homosexual sire as a choice or social nstctn is playg to the hands of the enemy. ” People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often st as homophobic, and their thkg is nsired backward – even if they are themselv, for example, Cynthia Nixon of Sex and The Cy fame. ”Gay rights do not have to hge on a geic explanatn for sexualy (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)For Aravosis, and many gay activists like him, the public will only accept and affirm gay people if they thk they were born gay.

Patrick Grzanka, Assistant Profsor of Psychology at Universy of Tennsee, for stance, has shown that some people who believe that homosexualy is nate still hold negative views of gays.

In fact, the homophobic and non-homophobic rponnts he studied shared siar levels of belief a Born This Way Samantha Allen not at The Daily Beast, the growg public support for gays and lbians has grown out of proportn wh the rise the number of people who believe homosexualy is fixed at birth; would be unlikely that this small change opn uld expla the spike support for gay marriage, for stance. “It don’t seem to matter as much whether or not people believe that gay people are born that way as do that they simply know someone who is currently gay, ” Allen spe of the studi, those who ph agast Born This Way narrativ have been heavily cricised by gay activists. Siarly, Ward has received her own hatemail for phg agast the lg LGB narrativ, wh some gays tellg her she’s “worse than Ann Coulter, ” the ntroversial US thor of books like If Democrats Had Any Bras, They’d Be Republins.

2ND PLACE ESSAY: “DEFN OF GAY: STEREOTYP AND THE IMPORTANCE OF AFFIRMG TORS”

And when I published my say on choosg to be gay, an irate Amerin lbian activist wrote me that had “jt been nfirmed” to her that my wrg was “directly rponsible for four gay aths Rsia. There is a unanimo opn that gay “nversn therapy” should be rejectedLet’s first be clear that whatever the origs of our sexual orientatn, there is a unanimo opn that gay “nversn therapy” should be rejected.

The efforts are potentially harmful, acrdg to the APA, “bee they prent the view that the sexual orientatn of lbian, gay and bisexual youth is a mental illns of disorr, and they often ame the abily to change one’s sexual orientatn as a personal and moral failure.

ESSAY SAMPL ON GAY

The APA, for example, while notg that most people experience ltle to no choice over their orientatns, says this of homosexualy’s origs:“Although much rearch has examed the possible geic, hormonal, velopmental, social and cultural fluenc on sexual orientatn, no fdgs have emerged that perm scientists to nclu that sexual orientatn is termed by any particular factor or factors. ”Siarly, the Amerin Psychiatric Associatn wr a 2013 statement that while the of heterosexualy and homosexualy are currently unknown, they are likely “multifactorial cludg blogil and behavral roots which may vary between different dividuals and may even vary over time. ” Acrdg to LeVay’s rearch, a specific part of the bra, the third terstial nucls of the anterr hypothalam (INAH-3), is smaller homosexual men than is heterosexual as they might, scientists have stggled to inty any particular gen that nsistently predict the directns of our love and sire (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)Read moreYou n spot the problem wh this study a e away: were the gay bras LeVay studied born that way, or did they bee that way?

Bis the dividual criqu leveled agast each new study announcg some gay gene disvery, there are major methodologil cricisms to make about the entire enterprise general, as Grzanka pots out: “If we look at the raveno pursu, particularly among Amerin scientists, to fd a gay gene, what we see is that the ncln has already been arrived at. ”The other problem wh Born This Way science is summed up nicely by Simon Copland: “Scientists are askg whether homosexualy is natural when we n’t even agree exactly what homosexualy is. ” Our sir may exprs themselv many different ways that do not all nform to existg notns of ‘gay’, ‘straight’ or ‘bisexual’ is one of the bt takeaways of Ward’s Not Gay, a peratg analysis of sex between straight whe men.

”Gay or not, our sir are oriented and re-oriented throughout our liv (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)In fact, the straight-intified men Ward studied for her book sometim found themselv suatns that sparked the sire for homosexual sex: aterni, ployments, public rtrooms, etc.