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Jul. 14th, 2021 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violsvaSo on Tumblr there was a Tiktok video going around, about Pride and whether gay people face discrimination anymore, which I don't want to hunt down the link for. But the video was a response by one queer man to another video by a much younger gay man, and it got me thinking about differences in campus queer communities in the past fifteen years.
So in 2007 (4 years after legal gay marriage in Ontario, 2 years after it was legalized across Canada) I joined my university's main on-campus LGBTTIA2Q group, and it, like basically all the other queer spaces nearby, was mostly composed of gay men. We were still trying to figure out what to do with the expanding acronym, but at least in that group half those letters weren't represented. I can't tell you how much gender diversity there was, because asking for or offering your pronouns wasn't really a thing at the time. I had fun, went to events, there was hella Drama which I mostly stayed out of, and eventually I settled into volunteering at the Pride Library, where the volunteers were also at least half men.
And then in January 2020, at a different college, I went to a different on-campus queer group. And less than a third of this group was men.
And I was surprised. And a little concerned, because maybe this meant that internalized homophobia was still a problem in teenage male subcultures in a way it wasn't for afab people, and/or maybe queerness was generally getting more and more identified with femininity in a way I find deeply uncomfortable, and/or maybe it was because the queer male international students at my college (which has a lot more international students than my university did) had more barriers to overcome...
But. I don't think it's actually any of those anymore, though some of them are likely problems.
The thing is, why do you go to an on-campus queer group? To meet people, or because you need support and recognition, or because you want to get involved in activism.
And it's very reasonable for cis gay Canadian men to not feel a need for activism anymore. And if cis gay men want to meet people, well, they can just go on Grindr.
So the ones who actually show up to queer events are the ones who want an actual supportive queer community. (And possibly activism, although the group in general was less political than my first queer group. Which is also reasonable.)
And honestly for the rest of us this is actually pretty okay. There were absolutely Young Conservatives in my first queer group, and if they're on Grindr now instead of going to community events that means the rest of us don't have to put up with them there.
But it kind of sucks for their own emotional development, if all of their exposure to other queers is filtered through "no fats no femmes no [racial slurs]".
So in 2007 (4 years after legal gay marriage in Ontario, 2 years after it was legalized across Canada) I joined my university's main on-campus LGBTTIA2Q group, and it, like basically all the other queer spaces nearby, was mostly composed of gay men. We were still trying to figure out what to do with the expanding acronym, but at least in that group half those letters weren't represented. I can't tell you how much gender diversity there was, because asking for or offering your pronouns wasn't really a thing at the time. I had fun, went to events, there was hella Drama which I mostly stayed out of, and eventually I settled into volunteering at the Pride Library, where the volunteers were also at least half men.
And then in January 2020, at a different college, I went to a different on-campus queer group. And less than a third of this group was men.
And I was surprised. And a little concerned, because maybe this meant that internalized homophobia was still a problem in teenage male subcultures in a way it wasn't for afab people, and/or maybe queerness was generally getting more and more identified with femininity in a way I find deeply uncomfortable, and/or maybe it was because the queer male international students at my college (which has a lot more international students than my university did) had more barriers to overcome...
But. I don't think it's actually any of those anymore, though some of them are likely problems.
The thing is, why do you go to an on-campus queer group? To meet people, or because you need support and recognition, or because you want to get involved in activism.
And it's very reasonable for cis gay Canadian men to not feel a need for activism anymore. And if cis gay men want to meet people, well, they can just go on Grindr.
So the ones who actually show up to queer events are the ones who want an actual supportive queer community. (And possibly activism, although the group in general was less political than my first queer group. Which is also reasonable.)
And honestly for the rest of us this is actually pretty okay. There were absolutely Young Conservatives in my first queer group, and if they're on Grindr now instead of going to community events that means the rest of us don't have to put up with them there.
But it kind of sucks for their own emotional development, if all of their exposure to other queers is filtered through "no fats no femmes no [racial slurs]".