queer 101

Cameron Scott has an excellent piece at AlterNet, “Queer 101: A Guide for Heteros,” where he dissects the “San Francisco values” slur, nothing that:

Blindness to difference has allowed the right wing to invent a sinister stereotype of "homosexuals" that has only tenuous links to reality. […] The right gets away with their smears because they have persuaded Americans that sex and desire have no role in polite society.

Scott’s “primer to help understand the people behind the values and what they stand for” deals with some of the gender issues, while Violet Blue’s piece on “San Francisco Values” observes that “When someone says, ‘San Francisco values,’ they mean sex.” She lists some of the sex-positive aspects of San Francisco, and concludes:

So that's fine by me if Bill O'Reilly and Gingrich (and all the rest) want to wallow in their homophobic male fantasy of San Francisco values. Sex between two men is normal. Sex is normal. Pundits and politicians want to scare people with San Francisco values because they don't fundamentally believe sex is healthy. They're the dinosaurs, and we're the meteor.

The fact that most straight people are completely ignorant of queer culture is a shame (and no, a passing familiarity with Queer Eye and Brokeback Mountain is insufficient!). Reflecting my bibliomania, I would suggest that curious straights begin by reading Martin Duberman, Randy Shilts, and Lilian Faderman for history; Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, Paul Monette, Camile Paglia and Michelangelo Signorile for commentary; Larry Kramer for anger; and Dan Savage for humor. (For those into comics, you can’t go wrong with Howard Cruse, Roberta Gregory, and—especially!—Alison Bechdel.)