I can't believe I'm saying this, but here it is: please, cut Marcus Bachmann some slack because of his gender expression.
Don't let me stop you from attacking him:
- Call him a quack because he administers bogus "reparative therapy."
- Call him a hypocrite welfare bum because his clinic and his late daddy's farm draw huge federal subsidies despite his wife's position on government spending.
- Call him a fool for marrying such a mendacious idiot as a life partner.
- Please, call him a goddam quack again because he's inflicting psychological damage on gay people and calling it therapy.
But until you have more reason than just flouncy behavior, please knock it off with how he is sooo gay. Straight dudes are allowed to lisp, camp, and vamp,
whatever others might say; straight chicks can and do enjoy motorcycle boots and short haircuts; and we queer folk are allowed to express gender any old way we like, even in totally conventional ways.
I see I am not the first to complain about this.
Humor me as I restate the obvious: gender expression and sexual expression are not the same thing. Maybe there's a correlation, but these things don't run in lock step. Perhaps gaydar kinda works, but not 100% accurately. For example, many transgender folk are also gay or lesbian. That is, I could utterly reject the gender norms associated with my birth-assigned sex, but that wouldn't determine my sexual preference.
Gender transgressors can be heterosexual. I had a friend (call him Ray) in a college workout club who was naturally gender-transgressing. He was fit (everyone was in this club), very neat, an artist who talked quickly and was always kind of wound up. He was a club leader, but some called him the "club mascot," because he obviously enjoyed being the center of attention -- which sometimes took the form of jokes, including him being called gay. Sometimes he would play along: I remember him saying he was going to get a penis tattooed on his face. If he wanted to deny being gay, he wasn't trying hard. And it would have been fine if Ray had been gay, because the club was demonstrably friendly to the gay guys and gals who were members. I never heard the slightest gesture, not a raised eyebrow, not a whisper against us actually gay people (out or not). We were included in all the reindeer games. But Ray often got joshed because he was prominent and his gender expression was unconventional. Yet when he got drunk and fooled around with someone, he chose women. One year he dropped out of the club and kind of disappeared. Later I saw him with a new significant other, a girlfriend, and he looked really happy despite apparently being boringly heterosexual. He said he was burnt out with the club, and I'm not surprised.
On behalf of my own tribe, I assure you that a dude can be gay and still be gender-conforming. A gay dude can still like football, working on cars, camping, fishing, hiking, drinking beer, and working out. A gay dude might dance like Elaine Bennis, style his hair like Kramer, dress like Columbo, and keep house like Oscar Madison. God help him, a gay guy can apparently even run off and join the Republican party, and live in some kind of reality-defying log cabin or whatnot. Unfortunately a guy can be hateful, homophobic, and hypocritical and then (insanely) be brought to shame not for being a hater, not for being a hypocrite, not for being a homophobe -- but for something perfectly normal: liking sex with guys.
Sorry the last couple paragraphs are so male-focused; I'm sure there are sisters out there who can testify to the same story from the XX side. And sex and gender are not even binaries, they are spectra, and XX and XY are not the only ways to be born.
When I was younger, this idiotic insistence on a lock-step connection between gender and sexuality hurt me. I fit into my gender fairly well, thank you; not perfectly, but no one ever does. And for years I told myself I was not gay, because I was not effeminate, because Tom Selleck's mustache did nothing for me, and because my best friends felt to me like brothers. But although I liked looking at boys more than girls, I believed the foolish advice of people like Marcus Bachmann and Joseph Nicolosi who said I could be "repaired" and that all guys are really hetero on the inside. So I spent my 20's and my 30's questing to find this inner straight guy. Partly it was internalized homophobia, partly it was because of religious doctrine that I then hesitated to discard, but also partly I'll blame the myth that Gay Guys Are All Fabulous, and I was not fabulous. I'm still trying to untangle all the damage, and sometimes I'm angry about it.
So spot me an ounce of hyperbole: When you weld together sex and gender, you slam the door to gay liberation shut in the face of guys like me. Please don't do that to the next generation.
Furthermore, although I'm not trying to defend the "reputation" of anyone in the heteronormative hegemony (they don't need my help), it is not fair to mock any person because of her or his gender expression -- even when that person prefers the opposite sex. So leave Marcus Bachmann aloooone! At least, leave him alone about his lisp and his enthusiasm for dance and maybe corndogs! Please do discipline him for his "barbarian" views, but not for his mannerisms.