cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16589408
Places like gay bars and cafes were made with the explicit purpose of creating a safe space for LGBTQ+ folk. We HAD to create safe spaces because so many straight people want to inflict harm on us or wish that we were exterminated. Being around you means we cannot be ourselves fully because we will always hesitate. We will always wonder “Are you one of the good ones?” We spend our lives tiptoeing around straight people wondering if we can be ourselves or if we have to hide it to protect us from the psychotic amount of negativity and hatred that we have to deal with for merely existing.
I don’t care if you’re one of the good ones or not. By simply being there you are changing the entire makeup of an LGBTQ+ space. You are adding in fear, apprehension and confusion into a place that was never supposed to have it. Moreover, you’re treating us like a novelty. Like we made this place for you to feel safe in. You are ignoring us and forcing us out of our own spaces. There are multiple “gay bars” that I have been to that no longer have predominately gay clientele and have started leaning towards advertising for straight people. Why? Because so many people showed up to “feel safe” that it pushed every single one of us out.
It isn’t for you. You do not belong there. Stop feeling and acting so entitled to a place that has nothing to do with you and that was made with the explicit purpose to be free from you. Give us back our spaces that we made for us and stop whining when we dare to say that.
Your feelings are not more important than our identity, safety and peace of mind.
Edit: Look at all the entitled straight people. Downvote me all you want. You are a genuinely shitty person if you go to a place that was made specifically to be free from you. You’re even worse if you’re trying to pretend you are anything but. At that point you’re lying to yourselves and us.
Maybe you should listen to the people part of that group though instead of feeling like you have the right to enter a space not designed for you, not for you and then turning us into a commodity for your own personal safety.
But very nice to see Lemmy so psychotically homophobic and self centered to believe that you belong in a place not for you. Y’all are worse than reddit. Didn’t think that was possible. I’m not engaging with the rest of you on this. The point has been made and more than supported in the comments. If you think you have the right to be there, you’re a shitty person. If you are actively inviting people who don’t belong there, you’re a worse person.
Yeah… I’m pretty freaking queer and straight people being in gay bars doesn’t bother me at all. If you have issues that make it scary to be around straight folks that’s your problem, and you need to deal with it yourself instead of trying to be exclusionary.
You’ve apparently decided that every straight person will inherently ruin the queerness and safety of the space just by existing in it, even if they’re totally supportive. I disagree and will not be excluding my allies, thank you very much.
The nice thing about explicitly gay bars is that if I see a cute guy, it’s ok for me to go offer to buy them a drink and if they say something hateful, I can go find an employee and tell them someone unwelcome is in our space.
My straight friends are a part of my support network and if I want to bring them to a gay bar, I’m going to. Your issues are your own, go talk to a therapist.
There will always be ignorant idiots who come to gay spaces and behave badly. If you want to keep them safe, be part of the overall system that makes those types of people feel unwelcome.
There is work to be done to defend our explicitly gay spaces, but it’s in the trenches, excluding those who deserve it and welcoming our allies with open arms.
This is it, I think: that when a straight person is in our space, it’s OUR space, and the rules and norms are in place for our safety and comfort.
So when my gay friend invites me to come over to the gay bar for a few drinks, I should refuse because it would make them unsafe?
Idk fwiw I’m pretty queer and I disagree with OP. As long as you’re an ally and respect the space and accept that you might get hit on by dudes or approached on the dance floor, go.
You should refuse out of common courtesy. Your gay friend doesn’t get to override the entire purpose of those spaces. Your gay friend doesn’t get to make everyone else feel unsafe. Your gay friend might know that you’re okay but the rest of the bar doesn’t. We go there with the expectation that other people are going to be gay. You know, thus the term ‘gay bar’. We go there to be amongst ourselves and not to have to worry even for a second that someone is going to be outside of the group and working against us.
We’re currently on stage 3.
I’m queer as fuck and downvoted you. I invite my non-queer but ally friends to chill with me where ever I please.
Then you are actively sabotoguing your own community. You are putting your personal feelings above those of everyone else and weakening the entire integrity of our spaces because you just want to hang out. You are proving your ignorance over the history of our spaces, ignorance of the present day rhetoric, ignorance of fear, and arrogance of entitlement. Fuck the rest of us as long you got yours. Repugnant.
You probably live over in the States, but here in Europe, pretty much all queer places are very welcoming towards non-queer allies. We work together for the same cause.
Since Dumbfuckistan chose to go backwards in time, I can’t blame your for being stuck in the past.
No, the us isn’t much different in this regard. OP is just being a fuckwit mcbumcrumble.
Thanks for clarifying that. OP also deleted their account or got banned. Good riddance.
I think you’re being ignorant. Sexuality is a spectrum and just because someone outwardly identifies as straight, doesn’t mean they are. According to your set-up, they would be excluded and that’s not right. As someone with lots of people around me in the LGBTQ+ community, I can tell you that the community is warm and welcoming.
Now if you want to talk about straight girls that cosplay LGBTQ+ on nights out, that’s a whole different discussion and you’ll find the reaction very different to what you’re receiving.
To add, this is not a hypothetical; it has real world consequences. When I was at uni, there was a queer night at the college bar. One of the guys there went off at my friend because my friend was in a straight relationship and had turned up. My friend got upset and left. My friend is bisexual, and at the time wasn’t out and was taking baby steps into the queer scene.
If you heavily police who is and isn’t allowed at queer nights, you bar those that benefit from it most: those who aren’t already a part of a queer community, and looking to test the waters.
Not only that, but you end up making cishet passing queers feel unwelcome and uncomfortable. Questioning or early transition trans people already have vanishingly few spaces where they can feel welcome and, crucially, safe, without having to worry about whether they’ll have their validity picked at by the Gay Police TM. Aces also have their validity questioned a lot too, which is cringe.
Bottom line: don’t try to police who is and isn’t allowed in queer spaces.
Holy crap what a good point. Exclusion of those who are ‘straight’ but closeted could cause so much harm.
Could and already does, which is depressing :(
Thank you for saying this, as a straight looking gay guy, who started going to gay bar as the “straight ally friend”, because I wasn’t ready to come out due to all the homophobic culture I was raised in, those welcoming gay spaces were my lifeline. They gave me a place to start freely being who I am, who I was so desperately trying to hide and deny.
People like you are the reason I have the courage now, to have a boyfriend, and hold hands on our way to the market, so thank you.
You are more than welcome, and I’m so glad that you and your boyfriend have found happiness and each other. To many more years of it!
If I do have time for a night out, my friends and I tend to favour queer establishments. Now a considerable portion of them are queer themselves, but considering the behaviour I’ve seen displayed towards female presenting people in straight clubs and bars, I don’t see how I could stand for excluding anyone from a space where they might feel less unsafe.
Also, I don’t walk on eggshells around my straight friends, or any straight people, really, especially not on a night out. There are OK straight people, and there are not-OK queer people. If someone behaves badly in a bar, they should be kicked out regardless of their identity.
As a nonbinary person in the middle of transition, I understand the point you are making but disagree. Yes the LGBTQ+ spaces were formed by a culture of exclusion - at many times and in many places this was absolutely needed for many to survive. Assuming you are talking about the States, we are at a place where the general culture is starting to focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion more than ever. Yes there are still times and places where queer-only might be needed, for example I am in an exclusive trans support group, it’s goal is to provide a place to discuss such topics, for therapies, support groups, resource provisions, etc - not for daily and social life. When it comes to general hangouts, we still might band together due to our similarities and natural friendships, but we go out into the general population, we immerse ourselves with society, we invite everyone and anyone to join us. This is in Alabama by the way.
In order to get to a point where queer people are no longer forced to hide, we must stop choosing to do so. Our social lives need to push into and knock down the remaining barriers that exist. This isn’t to say to remove Gay bars and the like, but to accept that as the general theme or atmosphere and to remain inclusive to all. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is precisely this. Additionally, both sexuality and gender are spectrums, and presentation does not dictate identity. Due to this, it would be ignorant to disallow certain people’s - you can never truly know another’s identity.
I am sorry if you, or someone you know, no longer feel as if your social hangout is a safe place, but I don’t believe they should act as an exclusive club in order to maintain that feeling. Society is changing, and the goal is complete immersion and acceptance. Other societies do it, and we can too.
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So based on this logic, some gay people treat straight people like a danger to their safety, and this isn’t nice and doesn’t make me feel comfortable. Sometimes I want a drink away from this judgment. So can I start a straight bar where gay people are not welcome? Or would that be awful and homophobic?
I know the baseline situations are not the same, there is obviously still prejudice. But the logic still applies. Likewise, should we have black bars with no white people allowed?
Also I wonder what type of homophobe would go to a gay bar? Would be an odd move unless you intended to harm/abuse people, and if that was the case wouldn’t you just lie and say you were gay to get in? Not like you’re going to make them kiss someone to get through the door.
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I think many women go there to escape the same type of people.
But cis outnumber non-cis by a great margin. When cis women go to gay bars to avoid straight men hitting on them, isn’t it bothersome to the lesbians who now have to filter out the straight women from the potential flirting pool?
I would say, that if straight women ended up flocking to gay bars, then gay bars would start looking attractive to hostile straight men, but I don’t think hostile straight men would feel comfortable in a gay bar, at least not until the atmosphere had gotten very straight.
I feel like OP is arguing that this is a slippery slope (more straights in gay bars eventually fizzles out the gay bar), and most of the opposition is arguing that it is not (I can invite a friend now and then and the gay bar is still a gay bar.)
I don’t think gay bars filter by cis-ness. Many gay people are cis.
I also don’t think lesbians struggling to get laid is the issue here. I could be wrong though.
Also the majority of women I know are bi to some degree, so I don’t think you can filter most people out that way either. But that may just be selection bias.
I think if bars wanted to cater to only certain demographics then they could make that clear.
This doesn’t seem to be the opinion of the majority by a long shot. I’ve often been invited to gay bars. I mean I am bi but I’m not massively open about that.
You’re completely missing the point. When straight women go to our places they become that type of people. They become the person who makes us unsafe. They become the one taking over our spaces and making us hesitate in a place for us.
It is not a space for them. It is a space for us. Why is it so hard to comprehend the fact that you should respect those boundaries and stay out of spaces not meant for you? The level of entitlement is insane and beyond disgusting.
You’re not “unsafe” for being around random straights, weirdo.
Said by a person who has no idea what they are about and no frame of reference. Either you’re straight and just entitled and arrogant and doing exactly what I said (putting your personal feelings and opinions above those you’re actually impacting) or you’re someone who doesn’t know a single thing about your own communities history and culture. Either way, you’re an outsider looking in and your opinion is incredibly ignorant and utterly worthless.
We live our lives in fear and hesitation. Why? Because some straight people want us dead, some straight people don’t care and some straight people support us. The problem is we can’t tell who is who so we become immediately defensive and on guard around straight people until we know whether or not we can trust that they’re not going to kill us or attack us, something that happens with alarming frequency. With the rhetoric currently existing in the world that only heightens the nervousness for us. By you being there at all you are completely changing the atmosphere. What goes from “We are among each other and safe” becomes “We need to protect ourselves until we know whether or not they can be trusted.” And if you want to whine and say “Well, why would someone go to a gay space and just attack it” then might I suggest looking at the Pulse nightclub shooting or the Club Q attack or the shit that the entire present day movement was based off of, Stonewall.
Keep discounting everyones’ experience but your own. It really makes you appear sane.
You’re the one discounting here. You’ve offered zero reason or backup for your stance. You’re being dismissive. What’s making me appear insane is bothering to engage with a troll like you. I’ll rectify that.
I don’t think the us Vs them mentality is good for anyone.
@Riker:
I think I sort of understand where you are coming from and why you act like this, but I’d also like to offer some insight about how and why things work fairly well in other places of the world.
Yesterday I went to a pride parade with about 10k participants. I guess it could’ve been 12.5k, if the weather hadn’t been shite. Anyway. Where I went yesterday, I’ve been going to that particular pride parade for the past 18 years quite frequently as long as I was in the same country. Back when I first went there, it was about 5k participants and there’s two reasons why it grew in numbers, went back in numbers, and grew in numbers again.
The event has always been fairly inclusive towards all LGBTIQ people and their allies. The numbers skyrocketed over the years and as a consequence of this, many more smaller pride parades started in this and other states. My best estimate from yesterday is, that 1/5th of the participants were straight cis allies. We need them. Because by the end of the day, conservative / far right Nazis threaten everyone who’s not one of them. We can change a lot more things towards a positive outcome when we work together against those despicable gobshites.
In regards to safe spaces: As mentioned in my other comment, pretty much all queer bars / party events around here are very inclusive in terms of non-queer people attending. Sure, there are specific gay events, but they accept transgender men. There are lesbian events, but they accept transgender women. And the transgender community tends to be very open about attending family or friends, so they can ask questions and learn more about the whole shebang. If it’s a specific non-public event, it will be advertised as exactly that and no one’s got a problem with that.
I hope this helps you to steer your thoughts and views towards a more positive and productive direction rather than continuing to close yourself off and engage in trench warfare.
It’s interesting to hear that this is a thing/problem while there are dedicated women-only spots (e. g. gyms) where women expect the be only among themselves.
EXACTLY.
Some for me but not for thee.
Gay men are treated as an accessory by straight women constantly but god forbid we set some fucking boundaries.
So isn’t it possible to set up “gay-men-only” places as well? So you wouldn’t have to ask people to not go there. Basically a gay gentlemen’s club.
