The Betty Pages sprung out of some conversations Betty Desire a local drag queen and I were having in a gay bar. These editorials may be out of context now and were written for a local audience in the Bellingham area. but I am sure readers everywhere can make some sense of parts of them.

Assimilation, One of the Prices of Acceptance

August 2005

I was watching an old DVD of Queer as Folk the other day with a friend. Since the first season I have not seen the show, having pushed my TV into a corner to face the wall and cut the cable. It was kinda neat to catch up on the old characters and such but something struck me. Now maybe I am missing something here but that show is not the queer world I know. There were several components missing. While a lot of the archetypes, in the queer worlds are there I was struck by what was missing.

It first came out as I exclaimed, "Where are the fag hags?". But then I started ticking off other things that were missing. A big thing that was missing were the bisexuals. Every day there are more and more bisexuals out there. In same ways its the last closet. Bisexuality has the double whammy that you can be rejected by both sides of the equation. As more and more bi people come out that seems to be changing quite a bit. At one time a lot of bisexuals were actually in two closets at once.

Where were the heterosexuals. Not every gay or lesbian is cloistered in a ghetto with no friends or acquaintances who are straight. In fact most I know have as many straight friends as gay friends. Now I may be a bit off here as I am not taking a scientific sample, and am a straight guy with a lot of gay friends. But that is the world I see.

Where were the bears, dykes and leathermen. I know they have a few lesbians on the show, but not like most of the lesbians I know. But I end up hanging with dykes more than lesbians. And bears, and cubs, where are the bears and cubs.

But all those individual aspects aside, where is the diversity outside of the gay community. And what I mean by diversity is the assimilation. Assimilation is the byproduct of civil rights movements. Assimilation sometimes is seen as a bad thing. I have heard minority groups complain about it as if their culture is being weakened when it happens.

On a lot of nights these days when you walk into a gay bar, the crowd is mostly heterosexuals. I have heard gay men and lesbians complain about this as if it only happens in their bar. But really I have seen it pretty much everywhere. the exception would be leather bars which are even intimidating for a lot of gay people. The thing that used to keep heterosexuals out of gay bars was the stigma. Get seen walking in that door and folks would thing you were gay. More and more the attitude is "so what". The stigma of being gay or called gay is wearing off. The upside of this is acceptance. The downside is that when you go into a gay bar on Friday night 70% of the people are straight.

In a lot of ways the gay ghetto is dead. Along with a purely gay bar. It is the price of acceptance and diversity and we all better get used to the new assimilation. It does not mean your culture is dead when you are assimilated into the main stream just that you have to work to keep it alive. The natural forces of bias that formed your culture are withering away and it is time to choose the parts you want to keep alive.

So what exactly do you keep. Which traditions are hampering the community and which will be kept as symbols of pride. I am Swedish by ancestry. Every year at Christmas there is a small plate of lutefisk at the table. It is a traditional method of preserving cod fish by soaking it in lye. Not really appetizing in an age of modern refrigeration. We keep it around, but no one eats it except on a dare. Now there is also lefse, I like lefse, and will eat it all day. We keep lefse, because we like it, we keep lutefisk because it defines us as different even though we all hate it.

Somethings will turn into the LGBT lutefisk and others will be forgotten. The real trick for this next generation, what will be your lutefisk and what will be your lefse. But one way or another, no one is going to let you keep your ghetto.