Over the weekend, I spent my birthday in Dupont Circle, celebrating with some of my closest friends. We had decided to go to Teaism, a restaurant and tea house I have wanted to visit for some time now. After several cups of Earl Grey tea and some plates of Asian-fusion food, we left to walk the streets of Dupont. It was, perhaps, the perfect night. The night was clear and cool enough to walk without sweating too much. The air was still – moved only by the passing of a car or the exhaust of a bus idling at the corner. The lights felt more subdued than in other parts of Washington, and I almost forgot I was in the city at all.
Anybody who is familiar with the Washington area knows that Dupont Circle is infamous for its large contingency of queers (homosexual men and women, transgender and all those in between). Nicknamed, respectfully, the “Fruit Loop,” Dupont Circle is one of the most queer-friendly neighborhoods in Washington. You can step right off the Metro and right into a number of queer-owned shops, restaurants and bookstores. It is unlikely that you will visit Dupont Circle without running into at least one non-heterosexual couple. For a college student who grew up in the country, it was definitely a welcome change.
One thing that I respect about areas such as Dupont that are so queer popular is that it is a lot easier to be oneself and be understood. As a queer student, I have faced my fair number of stereotypes. The limp wrist. The lispy voice. Perhaps even a swish of the hip for the final number. Most of the time, I am all but fazed by these stereotypes, because the people they come from are either too uninformed to know any better or too well-intended to be taken seriously. However, more and more lately, as I start to develop my own personal image and sense of character, I find that these “stereotypes” prescribed to me simply because of my sexual orientation are offensive. Not because they are true, but because they limit me to this comical, one-dimensional character built up by popular media.
In all honesty, I accept that I am a very flamboyant person. I wear girl’s jeans, sometimes even in bright colors. I carry a man purse. I am also cursed with a higher-register voice than most men. However, I define all of these qualities to exist separately from my sexual orientation. Yet I may be the only one who does so. It is not that I am ashamed of the way I act – if I was, surely I would have changed by now. But at the same time, I am so sick of hearing my voice or my mannerisms or my sense of fashion either made fun of or made to seem more obvious than they are, simply because I am gay. When did being gay become the same thing as “acting” gay?
Young gay men and women (transgender too) are made to think they should act in hetero-normative ways: Men should be the masculine ideal (whatever that means), women should look pretty (or at least want to look pretty), and most people don’t even think about the possibility of gender extending beyond these two concepts. Michelangelo Signorile, a notable queer journalist, has written a lot about the negative affects of these limiting definitions of gender for maturing queers: drug addictions, unhealthy steroid use and depression related to identity issues to name a few.
Now, I do not intend to make the leap from rumination to blame. I would never say you, dear reader, are to blame for some of these inaccurate prescriptions and limitations. It would be condescending to say that every time you say “that is so gay” when referring to something that is definitely not a same-sex relationship, whenever you make judgments or whenever you assume something about somebody simply because of their expressions that you are to blame. You are not to blame. But there is something to be said about those who ignore the obvious for what is easiest. You are still responsible for changing and making a difference. We, as educated students, have to realize that identifying as gay or queer should not end the definition of a person. It’s merely the beginning.
Matthew John Phillips is a junior English major. He can be reached at mjphilli@umd.edu.
