Greg_L wrote: βSun Jan 23, 2022 6:36 pm
Armistice wrote: βSun Jan 23, 2022 6:22 pm
I could posit that the main reason L and G are in the grouping at all, is that, after years and years and years of their own struggle, they finally got - legally at least - pretty much everything they wanted, and, facing relevance deprivation syndrome, needed to find a new battle or fade into the limelight where we white middle aged male hetero honkies all live...
So let's all band together...
I don't know if it's true, but I like it as an unsubstantiated theory.
So what you're saying is...without something to gripe about, they've turned on each other?
Not quite - I've heard it referred to as "St. George In Retirement syndrome" - after you've charged around like a hero and slayed the dragon and saved the world - what do you do next? Sit and home and take up a hobby? No - you have a taste for the fight now, so you find new dragons to slay, and make them up if they don't actually exist.
Faced with normal boring lives like the rest of us, having won all the legal rights they've been fighting for for decades (they have here, anyway), what do your activist-orientated gay and lesbian types do? Find another battle - and join in with everyone else who is marginalised and form this ever growing collective of LGBTQI++ folks (and whatever other letters get added) who don't really have that much in common with each other, apart from the fight for understanding and various legal rights.
It's a can of worms, and I'm only half serious, but I reckon there's a bit of that in there somewhere. The gays and lesbians don't like each other thing was just a throwaway comment - I heard somewhere - not sure if it's true. I reckon the movement itself could slough off the Gs and Ls and probably better direct their energies, but the Gs and the Ls are where the numbers are.
And I'm mainly referring to those with an activism bent. I work for a bank, which is an employer of choice for the entire community and there are so many L and G people around and largely they're all just completely normal folk who'd rather the focus was on their work, not their sexuality - and in big corporates like banks, it is. If they're activists for the LGBTQI++ cause, I'm not aware of it.
I had a team of 5 and one of them, I still don't know whether he's gay or not. You don't ask, and as we've been working from home for 2 years, actually rubbing shoulders with actual people is rare, and I'm still not convinced he's straight, despite his chucking "girlfriend" into the conversation every now and then - but only with me - never mentions it in team meetings as we shoot the shit about our lives ... he's certainly not dated anyone that he's mentioned, of either gender, in the year or so that I've known him. And it doesn't matter. Just human curiousity.