Author: Balagtas-Badoy

Blog Post #2 – MB

The most memorable element of this week’s activities for me was how the Pascoe reading “Dude, You’re a F*g” acknowledged and explored the relationship between homophobia and race, and homophobia and gender, as opposed to merely homophobia and sexuality. It was interesting to examine homophobia not only as anti-homosexual bigotry, but as a tool of racism, misogyny, and transphobia (through fear of gender nonconformity). Then, in Bronski et al.’s “Myth 12: People of Color Are More Homophobic Than White People”, there is an almost inherent mindset that homosexuality and nonwhiteness are exclusive identities – this can be seen in the myth’s reliance on pitting the black community and the homosexual community against each other, which demotes the existence of black LGB individuals to that of an inconvenient side note for those who would perpetuate this myth.

One question that Thursday’s class raised for me was why people of color more readily identified themselves as LGB than white people, when LGB representation is predominantly white and would presumably make it easier for white LGB folk to be openly LGB.

Something I would want to explore in relation to this question would be the historical intersection of whiteness and homosexuality, as opposed to nonwhiteness and homosexuality – since it is my understanding that homophobia became more prevalent in many non-European cultures directly as a result of Western colonization. For me, it is hard to separate transphobia and colonization when the gender binary is an explicitly European construct that became enforced through Westernization of colonized cultures. I would like to know why heterosexuality became such an inherent value to European cultures (especially in religion), while it originally wasn’t in many non-European cultures. Perhaps belonging to a Western culture/colonizer culture is what makes it more difficult for white people to be openly LGB, despite white LGB folks having greater representation in the media. Another perspective on this might be that sexuality is not necessarily visible, the way that race is perceived to be. For non-whitepassing people of color, there is no way to conceal their marginalized identity, so it may be easier to also be open about their LGB identity. For white people, it may be harder to admit to membership to a marginalized community if they could choose not to.

Blog Post #1 – MB

Hello! My name is Max Balagtas-Badoy, and I am a junior psychology and philosophy double major, additionally pursuing an LGBT Studies Certificate. I identify as a queer transmasculine person of color and use exclusively he/him/his pronouns. I work in the Office of Multicultural Involvement & Community Advocacy as the Community Organizing Student Intern for LGBTQ+ Student Involvement, and have the privilege of serving on this year’s President’s Student Advisory Council on Diversity & Inclusion. I have been lucky enough to be involved with a lot of different organizations and initiatives during my three years at Maryland, and I am really excited to formally take a class on the community I am so proud to be a part of. Outside of school, I really enjoy writing, playing video games, and movie marathons.

Something I found interesting about this reading was that the basis for heterosexual gaydar during WWII was primarily gender nonconformity. To these heterosexual psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, homosexuality could be inferred from a man’s feminine traits or a woman’s masculine traits. As a teenager, I once overheard my parent explaining homosexuality to my younger brother as a man wanting to be a woman. I initially found it confusing, since a “man wanting to be a woman” would usually be someone’s crude way of describing a trans woman, but I then realized that my father was reframing homosexuality with a straight lens – if a man wants to date another man, he must want to fill the role of the other man’s “girlfriend”.

To people unfamiliar with homosexuality and discouraged from learning more about it, projecting heterosexual roles onto homosexual relationships might be the easiest way to “understand” and explain them to others, even if this makes no sense to me as a member of the queer community. This realization also makes it easier for me to understand why, no matter how many times I explain that gender identity and sexual orientation are separate, my mom might still ask questions like “what pronouns does a bisexual or asexual person use” or why my dad interpreted me coming out as a trans man as me coming out as a lesbian.

I also found the discussed use of gender stereotypes within the cisgender queer community very interesting. While not necessarily being transgender, communities within the LGB communities were created out of shared experiences of gender nonconformance. I recently attended Creating Change 2016, which is an LGBTQ+ rights conference held by the LGBTQ Task Force every year. One of the panels I went to discussed the future of trans politics, and a suggestion was made by Alok Vaid-Menon of Darkmatter to allow non-transgender folks to have just as nuanced and complicated an experience of gender as we trans people, because none of us are consensually gendered when we are born, and gender is indeed a social construct. We all have a complicated and nuanced relationship to heteropatriarchy in some way, whether our relationships place us in power over others or at the hands of oppressors.

So while my initial gut objection to gaydar being based on gender stereotypes having problematic implications for transgender identities may be valid, it also makes me think that gender stereotypes have so much overwhelming power in the social math we subconsciously perform every time we look at another human being to figure out their gender and sexuality that we all (transgender people, GNC people, cisgender people) need to feel free to deviate from them as much as we are comfortable and safe doing so, so we can maybe one day make it too complicated and overwhelming to do social math like gaydar and trans clocking for these practices to be common, necessary, practical, etc.

What I’m most looking forward to in this class is growing closer to my community through formal studying with others. I hope this can be an empowering experience, rather than an emotionally draining one. I’m really excited to write about queerness for school, because I’ve only been allowed to do so minimally within the psychology major and not at all in STEM or philosophy classes.