How gay is too gay? | Relign | The Guardian

Contents:

• DEMI LOVATO: ‘I AM TOO GAY TO MARRY A MAN RIGHT NOW’
• COLTON HAYN WAS TOLD HE WAS 'TOO GAY' WHEN HE GOT TO HOLLYWOOD — AND WAS ACHED TO HI
• WHY CAN NEIL PATRICK HARRIS SAY THAT’S ‘TOO GAY’ AND STRAIGHTS CAN’T?
• ‘I AM GAY – BUT I WASN’T BORN THIS WAY’
• TOO GAY
• HOW TO ACCEPT THAT YOU ARE GAY
• HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE GAY
• ABOUT THGS BEG TOO GAY AND WHY WE THK THAT’S TOO GOOD
• HOW GAY IS TOO GAY?
• IS MY HBAND GAY? SIGNS OF A GAY HBAND
• 'TOO GAY FOR FACEBOOK': PRENTG LGBTQ+ INTY THROUGHOUT THE PERSONAL SOCIAL MEDIA ESYSTEM
• HOW TO TALK ABOUT BEG GAY
• TOO GAY FN, TOO GAY MEANG | ENGLISH DICTNARY
• ‘IT’S MY FLORIDA TOO’: PULSE SHOOTG SURVIVOR BRANDON WOLF ON BEG BLACK, GAY AND THE ANTI-RON DESANTIS

DEMI LOVATO: ‘I AM TOO GAY TO MARRY A MAN RIGHT NOW’

In a new first-person say, Colton Hayn shar his experience of navigatg Hollywood as a gay teen and now actor, 33, om MTV’s Teen Wolf and the CW's Arrow, wr about his heartbreakg journey, g to L. "To be a gay actor Hollywood, even 2021, is to be undated wh mixed msag: Consumers are mostly straight, so don’t alienate them, " Hayn, who officially me out 2016, wr a Vulture say. Then the owner of a management pany, who Hayn lls "Brad" for the story, exprsed tert potentially reprentg immediately, Brad told Hayn, "We’re fely gog to have to change your mannerisms, " sayg the way the openly gay teen spoke and stood were too "theater, " which was " for gay.

He later looked at the ntact and was for “, " a se for sex said he knew beg an actor wouldn't be easy, but he didn't know that "the thg that ma me valuable private — my nspicuoly gay sexualy — was a liabily as I tried to make my way through the dtry. " Hayn set the scene for the time, the mid-ghts, "when sual homophobia was still a regular punch le on TV ss, Morn Fay wouldn’t premiere until a few years after I arrived L.

However, "I unrstood bee was explaed to me repeatedly — by managers, agents, publicists, executiv, producers — that the only thg standg between me and the reer I wanted was that I was gay. "He wrote about those "mixed msag" for gay actors Hollywood, and how he qutns where he would be — personally and profsnally — had he jt gotten to be himself when he arrived Hollywood stead of hidg the real him.

COLTON HAYN WAS TOLD HE WAS 'TOO GAY' WHEN HE GOT TO HOLLYWOOD — AND WAS ACHED TO HI

22, 2013Every other Tuday, Steven Petrow, the thor of “Steven Petrow’s Complete Gay & Lbian Manners” (Workman, 2011), addrs qutns about gay and straight etiquette for a boomer-age dience. Dear Civil Behavr: How n we expect the nongay muny to stop sayg thgs like “that’s so gay” or “he’s such a fag, ” when many our own muny e those same words?

WHY CAN NEIL PATRICK HARRIS SAY THAT’S ‘TOO GAY’ AND STRAIGHTS CAN’T?

I was ntemplatg your qutn as I watched the openg number of this year’s Emmy awards, where I heard the uber-gay host, Neil Patrick Harris, cle Jimmy Fallon’s vatn to jo him a song-and-dance number bee “that is far too gay.

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

History, the phrase “that’s so gay” has bee a slur, ed synonymoly for “dumb, ” “nerdy” and “stupid, ” and s e ntribut, pecially schools, to a hostile environment and bullyg. Even so, do matter whether you’re gay or not — a straight man who lls a gay one “Mary” is on th for actual slurs like “That’s so gay, ” they’re offensive and ’s hurtful to e them mixed pany. ”To tt my theory about exemptg lavenr lguistics om the slur tegory, I also asked my Facebook followers to weigh on the e of “she” and “Mary” and siar words some gay men e to refer to one another.

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.

TOO GAY

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.

HOW TO ACCEPT THAT YOU ARE GAY

“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.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE GAY

“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.

ABOUT THGS BEG TOO GAY AND WHY WE THK THAT’S TOO GOOD

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.

HOW GAY IS TOO GAY?

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. 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.

IS MY HBAND GAY? SIGNS OF A GAY HBAND

”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? Another landmark paper on the origs of homosexualy was published 1993 by a geicist named Dean Hamer, who was terted to learn whether homosexualy uld be hered.

Begng om his observatn that there are more gay relativ on a mother’s si than a father’s, Hamer turned his attentn to the X chromosome (which is passed on by the mother). 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.

'TOO GAY FOR FACEBOOK': PRENTG LGBTQ+ INTY THROUGHOUT THE PERSONAL SOCIAL MEDIA ESYSTEM

” 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.

HOW TO TALK ABOUT BEG GAY

Ward thks this qutn is the next ontier of queer I first said I chose to be gay, a queer Amerin journalist challenged me to name the time and date of my choice.

I’m claimg that at some pot durg llege, my sexual and romantic sir beme reoriented toward menThkg back to my llege romanc wh women and men, I n beg to unrstand how my own experienc might have helped me to ‘cultivate’ my sire for homosexualy.

I want to be very clear: I’m not claimg I simply began to ‘grow to’ my homosexualy, or that as I beme more fortable wh beg gay, I allowed myself the eedom to exprs what had always been latent wh me.

TOO GAY FN, TOO GAY MEANG | ENGLISH DICTNARY

“Limg our unrstandg of any plex human experience is always gog to be worse than allowg to be plited, ” he gay rights activists pared sexualy to relign - a ccial part of our life that we should be ee to practise however we like (Cred: Ignac Lehamann)So what are we to do wh the Born This Way rhetoric? “That’s a very narrow unrstandg of what jtice looks like, ” says about the ncern that homophob will want to ‘enurage’ gay people to be straight if there’s no blogil basis for sexualy?

‘IT’S MY FLORIDA TOO’: PULSE SHOOTG SURVIVOR BRANDON WOLF ON BEG BLACK, GAY AND THE ANTI-RON DESANTIS

It don’t take too much creativy to image a scenar which homophobic parents, upon beg rmed their fet has ‘the gay gene’, choose what to them may seem the lser of two evils: abortn. ”Acrdg to surveys, ls than half of Generatn Z intify as "100% heterosexual", suggtg more and more people have embraced their sexual fluidy (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)Perhaps is time to look to the begng of the gay rights movement.