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Hail the Pretender
Oct. 15th, 2012 11:06 pmI'm sure a lot of you heard of this American fellow, Timothy Kurek, the guy who pretended to be gay for a year and then wrote a book about it.
In the article linked above it is stated that he was a devout Christian who grew up "hating homosexuality" and that when a friend of his told him how badly her family treated her when she came out as a lesbian he got the bright idea of "pretending to be gay" and essentially living as a gay man for a year.
Basically, to see what it was "actually like".
I find myself angry at this man.
I've been sitting on this story since yesterday and I'm angry, so fucking pissed, that the underlying assumption of the various articles that I've read about this guy in the mainstream media is that is guy is brave. That the fact that he had to deal with being called the other-fucking-f-word is this big huge hurdle that he had to overcome in order to view gay people as human.
Well, cry me a river.
I mean, this guy had a choice. He made the choice and the consequences he had to live with were temporary.
I'm supposed to be amazed that this guy discovered other Christians in the gay community in the South of the United States? Is this a joke? Gay Christians, gay Southerners, men and women who are not straight have been shunned for decades and have made their home there for decades, by creating a community this guy infiltrated because he couldn't conceive that these men and women were actually human just by the virtue of their existence.
No, he had to "walk among them", because in the end, for this guy, it was an anthropological experiment, one he's now cashing in on by publishing a book (all earnings go to an LGBT charity, of course, of course) about his experience as a straight man in living a gay life.
How exotic.
How special.
How appropriative.
We've been telling our stories for decades, for centuries, not all these stories are mine because I'm a woman (and not American), not all these stories are theirs because they are men (and American), but it is certainly not his story!
Pretender was never a better title.
In the article linked above it is stated that he was a devout Christian who grew up "hating homosexuality" and that when a friend of his told him how badly her family treated her when she came out as a lesbian he got the bright idea of "pretending to be gay" and essentially living as a gay man for a year.
Basically, to see what it was "actually like".
I find myself angry at this man.
I've been sitting on this story since yesterday and I'm angry, so fucking pissed, that the underlying assumption of the various articles that I've read about this guy in the mainstream media is that is guy is brave. That the fact that he had to deal with being called the other-fucking-f-word is this big huge hurdle that he had to overcome in order to view gay people as human.
Well, cry me a river.
I mean, this guy had a choice. He made the choice and the consequences he had to live with were temporary.
I'm supposed to be amazed that this guy discovered other Christians in the gay community in the South of the United States? Is this a joke? Gay Christians, gay Southerners, men and women who are not straight have been shunned for decades and have made their home there for decades, by creating a community this guy infiltrated because he couldn't conceive that these men and women were actually human just by the virtue of their existence.
No, he had to "walk among them", because in the end, for this guy, it was an anthropological experiment, one he's now cashing in on by publishing a book (all earnings go to an LGBT charity, of course, of course) about his experience as a straight man in living a gay life.
How exotic.
How special.
How appropriative.
We've been telling our stories for decades, for centuries, not all these stories are mine because I'm a woman (and not American), not all these stories are theirs because they are men (and American), but it is certainly not his story!
Pretender was never a better title.
