“Once upon a time, you could just be gay. Gay was gay. Gay was nothing else. Gay was nothing more. You were either a dude who liked other dudes, or a girl who liked other girls.”
It’s never been that way. There’s always assholes around, and that’s exactly why there are gay pride parades and pro-gay organisations. It’s a counter against this type of attitude. If you could “just be a dude who liked other dudes, or a girl who liked other girls” there wouldn’t need to be any parades or demos. You don’t see parades for fans of Dr Who, nobody’s saying Whovians want to rape kids.
The ‘community’ precedes gays and lesbians having civil rights by decades. If people are marginalised they form a community.
Quotee says gays don’t have anything in common with lesbians… no. San Francisco has a big population of both. We know why the gays are there, the city being a drop-off point for military who had been in proximity to loads and loads of other men during the Second World War and who simply decided not to go home. So the lesbians? Can’t be just co-incidence that they turned up as well. Brighton has been gay even longer, and the lesbians are there as well. It was Pride parade yesterday where I work and there were mixed groups walking about in my supermarket.
Is this guy really gay? Is he a SIRL? I can’t say. If he is gay, he is incredibly naive, and in regard to his attitudes an older member of the community needs to ‘set him straight’. (Oops, very poor choice of words there.)