Passing Gay

Dwight of The Office with his official Gaydar machine.

Yesterday, my two best friends came to visit and spend the day bumming around Fayetteville, spending money on more books and candy than we probably needed.
While in Romancing the Stone, one of my friends nudged me and pointed out two (hot) guys who were semi-obviously a couple. We proceeded to see them throughout the day at the mall, the encounters culminating into a point where we passed each other, and I turned around to watch them leave, and one of them turned around to look at us in much the same way. We grinned a little, and his boyfriend nudged him back into walking forward, and then they were gone. My friend pointed out that he probably thought we were a couple.

How did I know these guys were gay? Granted, they walked together everywhere, but so did a lot of guys. Other than that, there was nothing- except maybe the way they dressed (very neatly), or the way one of them, the more obvious of the pair, walked (with his hips) and talked (with his hands).

However, I wouldn't consider these sexuality cues so much as gender cues. This man was not presenting himself as being particularly masculine the way so many men in the South do. Of course, my friend's proposed assumption, that the guy thought we were together, followed much the same guidelines of gender cues. Wilting Southern belles we are not.

The thing is, so much of what I read about gender identity makes a huge deal about taking gender identity and sexuality and putting a vast canyon between them. I can understand the point, to differentiate between who you are and who you are attracted to, but you can't deny that in the queer community, gender identity and sexuality blur together a bit.

I think that, as members of the GLBT community make more strides towards legal equality, they also assimilate into straight, vanilla culture, as if to say “Look, we're here, we're queer, and we're just like you!”
There's a quote, I'm having trouble finding it, that says something along the lines that “Gays want you to think that we're just like you, only the sex is different. Actually, we are nothing like you; only the sex is the same.” And I can see this. Few things considered to be gay/lesbian sex are exclusively practiced by gay people.

I know lesbians who like straight girls, who love finding the most feminine, most straight laced coughs girls and “converting” them. They've given me shit for the girls that I like, and God help me if they found me looking at the boys I, on occasion, like. But I'm not queer because I like straight, normal girls. I'm queer because I like other people who are queer, and I wish people would stop drawing their black and white lines in my happy gray area.

Also, reading this book, which will hopefully help me deal with my issues of assimilation and such.