After posting yesterday about The first Gay Jordan blog, I got several messages where some felt for the guy, some didn’t, and some even attack homosexuals as whole.
One comment by Tala stopped me, she said:
imagine a head of an arab political party who is gay! it is possible but not credible, i wont have faith in his leadership, its like pedophile pope,, a gay doesnt qualify by the laws of arab culture!! ma 3am tinbale3! the first thing that occurs to me is “biddak shad baraghee ya 7ilu”
It triggered me to write more about this subject in an attempt to raise more awarnace towards this issue that is starting to reveal itself more than anytime in our Arabic history. There are many aspects regarding the whole homosexual thing that I would like to address in several posts.
Gays and Femininity
There is a strong stereotype among people where they percieve feminine men as gays while in fact there are many gay men who are as musculine as any other straight man, and where there are man feminine men who are straight.
Femininity is a relative matter, and in the contrary of what a lot of people believe, it has nothing to do with someone’s sexual orientation. It does have a strong relationship with the sexual identity of the person which is different than sexual orientation.
We tend to put everything different in the same basket. We don’t differenciate between a man having sexual attraction to another man, and a man who feels like a woman from the inside, or a man who has neither this nor that and still likes to wear the other gender clothes (cross dressers).
Sexual orientation, sexual identity, and sex are three different conceptsand are not a set of 2 or 3 distinct options. For example it isn’t either Gay, Bi, or Straight in terms of orientation, or Male, Female, in between in terms of sexual identity, or Man, Woman or both in terms of sex.
All of those factors comes in a spectrum. Some studies claims that 90% of the population are in fact Bi-sexuals. The strength of attraction to certain gender varies from a person to another. It depends on how strong are those urges in order to someone to act on them. We, people, are different. We usually scale on ourselves in order to judge the other. We try to acknowledge our differences, but we find a hard time doing so.
I am not sure what is exactly that we hate to see. A man who has an attraction to other men, or a man who looks and acts as a femininie man? Is a gay masculine man accepted in our society? Is a straight femininie man accepted?
Is it a matter of sexual orientation or a matter of sexual roles?
Or is it a matter of us not accepting anything that look different than what percieve to be the norm?
Do you have something to say?