Eteraz asked me via email about whether there’d been any movement to establish chivalry among queers. He started wondering after seeing a show on MTV involving gay people being mean to other candidates. I’m not familiar with that particular one, but I’ve seen many other examples.
…I have in the past heard people argue that being queer gives you freedom from gender relations, that it makes you more egalitarian. I have even heard that it makes you nicer. I will accept that this is true for some queers, and further accept that many of them use their queer sexuality to inform their egalitarian ethos and as a means of obtaining object lessons in anti-sexist gender relations. I will also accept that some queers have become saints by virtue of all that suffering. But otherwise? Not so much. We grew up here, too. We’re just as good at misogyny and unhappiness as you people are.
However, eteraz as I grok him is asking about something slightly different, namely chivalry. There are two operant definitions of chivalry. Both involve gendered generosity.
The first one is nostalgic: chivalry for men means being a gentleman who treats women like ladies. A gentleman is kind, respectful, honest, selfless, and always aware of his own strength and power. He does not strike women, no sir, nor seduce them. He precedes them downstairs and follows them upstairs. He holds doors, pays for dinner, and proposes marriage. The reciprocal counterpart for women is, well, ladylike behavior. A lady has style. She has grace. She always knows her place. She’s really thankful for her man’s refusal to rape/abuse/abandon/screw her. She doesn’t blow on another man’s dice. She’s the anti-bitch to his anti-rake.
The second definition is revisionist in the best way. Chivalry, involving as it did altruism towards an oppressed group, was limited. See, not all women could be ladies. That misogynist violence had to go somewhere, and so it was diverted from the good women onto the bad ones. The good women were chaste, wealthy, marriageable, white, and otherwise “our kind.” The bad ones were…everyone else. It was perfectly fine to rape, abuse, abandon, screw, or otherwise insult them. By some social calculi, they existed for that purpose. They had to be injured in order to keep ladies from being injured. Since most women could not be ladies, chivalry didn’t involve kindness to most women.
Both definitions of chivalry involve sexism. For purposes of this post, I’m gonna have to use both definitions. I don’t think eteraz was asking about a tendency on the part of privileged gay people to winnow out the good straights and scourge the rest, but it’s difficult to talk about the right way to behave without dealing with who gets to make right.
As to whether there’s gendered kindness and gentlemanly behavior on the part of gays…meh? There are gentlemanly butches. There are misogynist gay men. There are misogynist butches. There are gentlemanly gay men. There are anti-sexist lesbians and lesbians who don’t particularly care about sexism. There are feminist gay men and gay men who resent feminism. Between gay men, there’s femmephobia. Between lesbians, there’s femme invisibility. There are misogynist transmen and transwomen, and cisgendered queers who hate transpeople for reasons that seem to be closely related to woman-hating and sexism. There’s biphobia that also seems closely related to woman-hating and sexism, as well as to the slut-bashing that has traditionally punished women (and which is tied to the second definition of chivalry if not the first).
I would not argue that gay people in general have any allegiance to a chivalric code; it seems to be dated for most people, gay and straight. Much of the respect I see is a product of feminism or identity-politics investment rather than old-fashioned ideas about gentlemen and ladies.
Same-sex and same-sex-oriented environments include plenty of potential for sexism in the ways I’ve just described. However, they don’t always allow for the straightforward division–gentleman and ladies–that chivalry needs to function (setting aside for the moment that feminists can be vociferously uncooperative). Where would a drag queen fit into this picture? Should she be gentlemanly or ladylike? Does that change in relation to a gay man? A lesbian? A butch lesbian? Another femme? Another queer NOS? Do you draw the line based on sex, privilege, presentation, butch/femme quotient, or some combination of those three factors and maybe some others? Do you need more than one line? Would chivalry be compatible with an elaborate formal hierarchy like the one Louis XIV instituted at Versailles?
There’s also the problem of chivalry’s implicit division between bad and good women, and gentlemen and rakes. If femmes and butches are all dykes, where are the good women? What right do any of them have to demand kindness or freedom from abuse, since no man will ever make them honest? If all gay men are black sheep pervert faggots who will never marry or create any kind of stable household–who recruit and molest children because they can’t father them, who are characterized by their alienation from their fathers and overidentification with their soft and passive mothers–how can they be men in that old-fashioned patriarchal sense of justly exercised power? And if our communities are sex-segregated for orientation reasons, where do you apply a gendered code of behavior? If all the women are excluded, what reason is there to create a code of treatment for them? If exclusion is unproblematic, why would any other kind of mistreatment be cause for concern? If men aren’t considered members, why would any woman define worth or safety in terms of their protection? It’s possible to draw these lines, but I don’t think it’s always easy.
Competing power differentials are also at play in this instance. Gay men saying nasty things about women may not see themselves as speaking across a man/woman hierarchy. The might see themselves as speaking across a straight/gay hierarchy. Saying Mean Things–sometimes referred to as cattiness, bitchiness, reading, or reading someone’s beads–is a proud tradition among queers, and not just gay men. At its best, it’s a reversal-reversal: a way of calling the deserving out on their narrow-minded, selfish, heartless lives with incisive wit. (Here’s a better blog entry than mine on the subject.) At its worst, it’s just plain nasty and uncalled-for, and it supports oppression rather than laughing at it. We privilege scathing commentary, and can sometimes accept it less critically than it deserves. (I don’t think we’re too different from straight people in this respect.)
Tokenism is another function of the power differential. For some reason, mainstream media outlets are not falling all over themselves to help Imani Henry hold forth on social justice to everyone out there in TV Land. Queers aren’t yet allowed to speak, either as themselves or for their own sake. No one wants to hear from queer feminists, or devote attention to the relationship between queer rights and feminism. No one wants to feel implicated or uncomfortable. We’re allowed to be catty and fun, not angry and serious. While the fashion police (or whichever interchangeable hosts) aren’t the only woman-bashing gaymo assberets out there, they’re over-represented in a culture that would otherwise like the gays to shut the hell up.