By Bernadette Hoover, Columnist
What do you picture in your mind when you hear the word gay or lesbian? The common images are usually a flamboyant man who is well dressed and loves Broadway, or a thick-skinned woman who wears lumberjack clothes, no makeup and very short hair. I’m here to tell you that those stereotypes and generalizations are unacceptable, and simply not true.
“The problem with labels is that they lead to stereotypes, and stereotypes lead to generalizations, and generalizations lead to assumptions, and assumptions lead back to stereotypes,” talk show host Ellen Degeneres said in her book Seriously…..I’m Kidding. “It’s a vicious cycle, and after you go around and around a bunch of times, you end up believing that all vegans only eat cabbage and all gay people love musicals.”
My family often jokes around and says because my papa works from home and loves cooking and shopping that he is the lady of the house, and because my dad owns an investment company and loves sports and despises shopping that he is the man of the house. While on the outside this appears as a harmless family inside joke, it’s all too real for gay men everywhere.
Gay men tend to be placed into the assumed category of femininity, which can’t be further away from the truth. The startling truth is that gay men are people, and that in fact, people are all very diverse, meaning that yes, some love musicals and football, and some love John Stamos and country music, but in the end, they are just men who deserve to be treated as what they are: people.
Now, when people hear the word lesbian, they immediately think of someone who loves sports, is loud and tough, and wears hiking boots. This of course does not represent the entire lesbian population. In fact, many lesbians don’t dress or act that way. As the daughter of two lesbian mothers, I can account for the times when my mother’s femininity and individualism were ignored and she was automatically assigned stereotypes. For instance, I recently learned that one of my mothers would be called a “lipstick lesbian” because you would never guess her prefered sexuality by looking at her: she wears makeup and dresses and doesn’t have a “tough” persona. My other mother is what society apparently calls a “traditional lesbian” because she has short hair, doesn’t wear makeup or dresses, and loves football.
These stereotypes are damaging and hurtful. Ultimately, my parents are just people whose masculinity or femininity shouldn’t be defined by who they chose to love.
No one knows how these stereotypes started, but they are now blindly followed by those lacking first-hand familiarity, which results in an increased reliance on generalizations and a decreased dependence on understanding.