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Are lesbians gay?

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  • 12-04-2014 12:25am
    #1
    Cyclonus
    Registered Users Posts: 17 ✭


    Yes, yes, I know its a stupid question, but let me explain. I'm a regular poster at another forum and I got into an argument with a guy who absolutely refuses to accept that lesbians are gay. (I think he doesn't want to admit that he's been **** over gay porn for most of his life) Finally, in exasperation, I told him I would post on a LGBT board and ask lesbian members if they consider themselves gay. I know this is a weird thread, but I really want to set the poor deluded idiot straight.


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    #2
    Goodshape
    Registered Users Posts: 8,488 ✭✭✭Goodshape


    Yes :)

    Gay women are also known as lesbians.


    Your friend has been **** over gay porn.


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    #3
    baby and crumble
    Registered Users Posts: 8,512 ✭✭✭baby and crumble


    That's like asking if cats are also animals.

    ???

    Tbh, I use the word gay to describe myself more than I use the word lesbian.

    I'm really, really, REALLY gay.

    Like, really.


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    #4
    poundapunnet
    Registered Users Posts: 1,119 ✭✭✭poundapunnet


    I consider myself gay to the same extent as I'd consider myself queer or lesbian, and it's not like I wake up in the morning thinking of any of those terms. I'm a woman and I'm romantically and sexually attracted to women rather than men. I'm gay, queer, lesbian, whatever. Your friend masturbating and having some fanny attack over the word 'gay' is his own problem


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    #5
    john the one
    Registered Users Posts: 1,750 ✭✭✭john the one


    Troll much?


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    #6
    Cyclonus
    Registered Users Posts: 17 ✭Cyclonus


    No, I'm not trolling, but the guy I was arguing with might have been, I guess. I haven't heard from him since I linked to this thread, so it's either that or he's off licking his wounds. Thanks everybody. I think we may have discovered a good way to combat heterosexual male homophobia.


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    #7
    Annasopra
    Registered Users Posts: 40,880 ✭✭✭✭Annasopra


    Cyclonus wrote: »
    I think we may have discovered a good way to combat heterosexual male homophobia.

    What?

    It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

    Terry Pratchet



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    #8
    Cyclonus
    Registered Users Posts: 17 ✭Cyclonus


    Ask them if they watch gay porn. When they say "No, that's revolting!" say "What, you don't like looking at two lesbians having sex? What are you, gay?" Worth it for the irony alone.


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    #9
    J_E
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,734 ✭✭✭J_E


    Cyclonus wrote: »
    Ask them if they watch gay porn. When they say "No, that's revolting!" say "What, you don't like looking at two lesbians having sex? What are you, gay?" Worth it for the irony alone.
    It's not gay to them though, they're watching the opposite sex. Bit pedantic to be honest.


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    #10
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,123 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    But if lesbians are gay, then why is this board called "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender"? If "gay" includes lesbians, then there's no need to specify lesbians separately. Whereas in fact lesbians very often are specified as well as gay people, and not just in the title of this board.

    I think the truth is that there are some circumstances in which "gay" is understood, or can be understood, to refer to gay men, and some circumstances where it definitely includes both men and women, and some circumstances where it's not entirely clear.


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    #11
    Ambersky
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,220 ✭✭✭Ambersky


    Perigrinus says
    Perigrinus says
    But if lesbians are gay, then why is this board called "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender"? If "gay" includes lesbians, then there's no need to specify lesbians separately. Whereas in fact lesbians very often are specified as well as gay people, and not just in the title of this board.

    I think the truth is that there are some circumstances in which "gay" is understood, or can be understood, to refer to gay men, and some circumstances where it definitely includes both men and women, and some circumstances where it's not entirely clear.

    Do you mean something like if "Irish" includes both travellers and settled people, there can be some circumstances where Irish is understood to be about the settled population, some circumstances where it definitely includes travellers and some circumstances where it is not entirely clear. Kind of like that is it?
    Cydoniac says (about some guys who look at two lesbians having sex)
    It's not gay to them though, they're watching the opposite sex. Bit pedantic to be honest.
    So what is a heterosexual woman watching, if she is watching porn that is comprised of two men having sex, is that still not gay porn because the viewer is straight?
    I know what kind of porn you watch does not change your sexuality but lesbian sex may be taken less seriously than gay male sex.
    I think porn with an all male cast would still retain its identity, it would still be gay porn and everyone would be aware of that. Porn with an all female cast I dont think always retains an identity of lesbian porn, often isnt made up of lesbians anyway and can be a kind of male heterosexual entertainment.


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    #12
    J_E
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,734 ✭✭✭J_E


    Ambersky wrote: »
    So what is a heterosexual woman watching, if she is watching porn that is comprised of two men having sex, is that still not gay porn because the viewer is straight?
    Read again.
    It's not gay to them though, they're watching the opposite sex. Bit pedantic to be honest.

    I'm talking about the perception of the person watching it, not the content itself. If a man watches lesbian porn, it doesn't make him gay. The word 'gay' being a general same-sex attraction.


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    #13
    floggg
    Registered Users Posts: 5,820 ✭✭✭floggg


    Cydoniac wrote: »
    Read again.



    I'm talking about the perception of the person watching it, not the content itself. If a man watches lesbian porn, it doesn't make him gay. The word 'gay' being a general same-sex attraction.

    If a straight guy watches lesbian porn then the girls he's watching are engaged in homosexual acts but he isn't.


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    #14
    Cyclonus
    Registered Users Posts: 17 ✭Cyclonus


    The point I was making is that it's a double standard. How many homophobic anti gay marriage men out there do you think jerk off to lesbian porn? If we point that out to them, it may lead to a moment of clarity.

    Oh BTW, the guy I was arguing with came out as a troll. I'm finding this debate interesting though, if you don't mind a straight guy joining in.


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    #15
    J_E
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,734 ✭✭✭J_E


    floggg wrote: »
    If a straight guy watches lesbian porn then the girls he's watching are engaged in homosexual acts but he isn't.

    That's pretty much what I said :)


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    #16
    floggg
    Registered Users Posts: 5,820 ✭✭✭floggg


    Cydoniac wrote: »
    That's pretty much what I said :)

    I was trying to clarify and confirm, not contradict.


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    #17
    J_E
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,734 ✭✭✭J_E


    floggg wrote: »
    I was trying to clarify and confirm, not contradict.

    Don't worry, I still love you bbz.


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    #18
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,123 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    Ambersky wrote: »
    Do you mean something like if "Irish" includes both travellers and settled people, there can be some circumstances where Irish is understood to be about the settled population, some circumstances where it definitely includes travellers and some circumstances where it is not entirely clear. Kind of like that is it.
    Well, I wouldn't accept the parallel, because I don't think there's any common usage of "Irish" which does not include Irish travellers.

    But I think there is such a usage of "gay". For example, GLEN is the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network. Why are lesbians specifically mentioned? Is it simply for the sake of a pleasing acronym? Or is it because, if it were just the Gay Equality Network, someone enountering it for the first time might be uncertain as to whether it concerned itself with issues particularly relevant to homosexual women? I think instances like that point to the fact that there can be uncertainty, in some contexts, as to whether "gay" embraces lesbians, or is the complement of "lesbian".

    There are many other instances - GLORIA is the gay and lesbian choir; Out and About announces itself as a gay and lesbian walking group; Marriage Equality tells us that they campaign for civil marriage for gay and lesbian people in Ireland. If "gay" refers to both men and women, why are lesbians mentioned each time? In 1991, the National Gay Federation changed its name to the National Lesbian and Gay Federation. Why do we think this was? (More recently, bisexual and transgender people were added to the name; was "lesbian" added for different reasons than "bisexual" and "transgender" were added?)

    On the other hand, I cheerfully agree, you have something like a gay/straight alliance, where lesbians aren't explicitly mentioned but I think everyone understands they are included. And the National Lesbian and Gay Federation publishes Gay Community News; I doubt that anybody imagines that lesbian issues are excluded from coverage.

    I suspect what's going on here was that activism in the homosexual community has been dominated by men, because (a) that's what men do, and (b) there are more self-identified homosexual men than self-identified gay women. And women felt - perhaps not without justification - that they were being marginalised and eclipsed, and they insisted on (1) their full participation in the gay community, plus (2) recognition of their particular identity as lesbians. Which means that sometimes "gay" includes everyone, and sometimes "lesbian" needs to be specified. Which makes for a somewhat inconsistent use of the word "gay". Which I think reflects the nuanced reality of what it is to be a homosexual women in a heteronormative male-dominated world.

    Going back to the OP, does lesbian porn count as "gay porn"? Since I don't think that porn has much relationship to real life, I don't think it matters greatly whether we categorise lesbian porn as gay; it has no implications for whether lesbian women are gay. I suspect that porn is categorised for marketing reasons, and since the people looking for male/male porn probably do not overlap hugely with the people looking for female/female porn, porn merchants probably use non-overlapping labels. Anything labelled as "gay porn" probably involves men.


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    #19
    Cyclonus
    Registered Users Posts: 17 ✭Cyclonus


    Here's real lesbians reacting to so called lesbian porn. They're not fans.



    Y'know, I kind of feel guilty for being a straight guy attracted to lesbians. I could understand why that would really creep you out. We call that the lesbian paradox: you're hot, but not hot for us.


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    #20
    floggg
    Registered Users Posts: 5,820 ✭✭✭floggg


    Cyclonus wrote: »
    Here's real lesbians reacting to so called lesbian porn. They're not fans.



    Y'know, I kind of feel guilty for being a straight guy attracted to lesbians. I could understand why that would really creep you out. We call that the lesbian paradox: you're hot, but not hot for us.

    While I'm not lesbian, I wouldn't feel too bad about it if I were you.

    It's not like many of the straight female porn stars would be hot for you either (no offence).

    Anyway, I doubt too many of the "lesbians" in "lesbian porn" are all that lesbian to begin with.

    And I'm sure you don't lose too much sleep over the fact that there's a fairly big market for "gay for pay porn" where straight (or in lots of cases "straight") guys have gay sex.


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    #21
    Cyclonus
    Registered Users Posts: 17 ✭Cyclonus


    Yeah, but it can lead to crap like this:



    That's a news story about two lesbians who protested a homophobic preacher by publicly kissing at his sermon and they got arrested for it. The Young Turks is supposed to be a progressive show, but Cenk Uygur perved all over this story. I found it annoying to watch, I can only imagine how gay women would feel.


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    #22
    Ambersky
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,220 ✭✭✭Ambersky


    Peregrinus as you say the homosexual community may have been dominated by gay men and I think another consideration is that lesbians not only live with some of that reality within the LGBT community but in the wider world as well. Things men do are sometimes taken more seriously, given more respect etc etc and coupled with this women are still used too often to sell things.

    Lesbians can get subsumed into gay culture in every area from politics to entertainment, partly because of the large difference in numbers and partly because that is a reflection of the position of women in the general world.
    Some women knowing full well that Gay does not always include them, call themselves lesbian and not gay women, in order to make the point that they are different and may have a different way of looking at things, different interests, different music, a different political approach, different sense of style etc.
    I personally dont like Gay being used as an umbrella term when whatever it is has one lesbian member acting as the groups secretary or something, or which has a small group of women who sit in the corner of an event and the vast majority of the crowd is composed of gay men.
    Some women dont want to call themselves lesbian and prefer to call themselves gay women, others are bisexual or prefer queer. Were a great big mixed bag and I dont think we are ever going to tidy it all up to everyones satisfaction but you could say thats what makes us interesting.

    I would say in relation to the OP that yes lesbians are Gay in that umbrella sense of the term but the women in the porn thats the source of this question probably arent gay or lesbian. I think this kind of "interest" in lesbians is problematic as it puts forward a fantasy about who and what lesbians are caring nothing about real lesbians and how this might lead those real lesbians to be treated.
    I would like some understanding on the difficulty lesbians face in having their relationships and their sexuality respected. I know and I have heard women on this board speaking about going out with a partner and having straight men hitting on them. I dont think gay guys experience this in the same way or nearly as regularly when they are out on a date. Women together can be looked on as being a bit of a challenge, as a joke or as an insult when refused. Straight men can be accustomed from porn to looking at two women together as entertainment , something they can buy, a situation that welcomes and is just waiting for a man to join and all this can cause and does cause real problems for lesbians. At the worst end of this scale is corrective rape a phrase that became popularised in Africa but something a lot of lesbians know is a possibility.
    I think gay men can relate to some of that, its kind of like a bad reaction to gay men is expressed as revulsion and a bad reaction to lesbians is expressed as a joke or an insult or a challenge, both reactions can have nasty consequences.
    Actually the understanding of this so far in this thread gives me hope, I kind of didnt expect it. I live an learn.


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    #23
    Cyclonus
    Registered Users Posts: 17 ✭Cyclonus


    Yaoi fangirls are becoming a significant presence on the web, and from what I've heard they can be disturbingly dedicated. I wonder if this will become a significant problem for gay men?


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    #24
    Ambersky
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,220 ✭✭✭Ambersky


    Whats Yaoi fangirls


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    #25
    baby and crumble
    Registered Users Posts: 8,512 ✭✭✭baby and crumble


    Some interesting point coming up here, which is very cool! There's a lot of intermingling of different issues in a seemingly innocuous question.

    Firstly, when I say "I'm gay" in my life, people can see that I'm female, so I don't need another qualifier. But, if I'm in a situation where that's not totally clear (online being a prime example), I'll use the word lesbian. They are different words conveying the same thing at it's core- someone attracted to members of their own gender.

    Now, there is a separate issue of why bother using the word lesbian at all, if 'gay' does the job? Well, as someone pointed out, there is some difference in the way gay men and women (and also bisexual people) are treated in the medi and in their everyday lives. As a woman, I know that I'll likely earn less than a man with he exact same education and expertise doing the same job. As a gay person, there are lots of jobs I can be fired from, or discriminated against in. Put those two together and it blows. But me being a lesbian (ie a gay woman) is what's known as double discrimination. It doesn't always exist of course, but it can. Even if you are a gay man, it's unlikely you'll face the same issues as me in that way.

    Gay men and lesbians also have differing health needs to each other and their straight counterpart in areas like mental health, cancer, sexual health, etc. so to lump all those in together ignores the fact that lesbians are less likely to get cervical cancer, but more likely to get breast cancer than the average woman.

    Lesbians are seen as less threatening to many people, and more threatening in lots of others. Nobody really bats much of an eye of a lesbian couple want to adopt or raise a child, but a gay male couple doing so send the elders screaming. But like someone said, if a lesbian couple are out and get hit on, the straight man can feel his masculinity is threatened and react accordingly.

    Oh, and whoever said that GCN don't cover lesbian issues... Tbh they don't. Maybe 2-3 articles out of every issue is based around the lesbian experience.


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    #26
    Cyclonus
    Registered Users Posts: 17 ✭Cyclonus


    Ambersky wrote: »
    Whats Yaoi fangirls

    I just posted an answer to this, but it contained weblinks and since I'm new here (this is the only thread I've posted on so far in this whole freakin forum) I have to wait for it to get approved. I'll just answer it now: it's a term in the anime fandom for straight women who think guy on guy is hot. You can get to the links I intended by googling "tv tropes yaoi fangirls" for the definition, and "tv tropes het is ew" for their alleged instability. It's going to be kind of weird when my original post shows up after I've posted this.


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    #27
    baby and crumble
    Registered Users Posts: 8,512 ✭✭✭baby and crumble


    Cyclonus wrote: »
    I just posted an answer to this, but it contained weblinks and since I'm new here (this is the only thread I've posted on so far in this whole freakin forum) I have to wait for it to get approved. I'll just answer it now: it's a term in the anime fandom for straight women who think guy on guy is hot. You can get to the links I intended by googling "tv tropes yaoi fangirls" for the definition, and "tv tropes het is ew" for their alleged instability. It's going to be kind of weird when my original post shows up after I've posted this.

    That's nothing new though. The whole phenomenon of fanfic writing and slash in particular (sexy stories, usually same gender) started in the 60's with straight housewives writing erotica based on Star Trek characters getting on in the depths of space. The net just makes more people aware of it and join in.


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    #28
    Cyclonus
    Registered Users Posts: 17 ✭Cyclonus


    Yeah, I've heard of that. The most popular pairing is Kirk and Spock apparently. This particular subset is called "Spirk" although I can't see why they didn't just call it Koc-oh wait. Not very realistic though, Spock is only half-vulcan but he still undergoes the pon farr, the vulcan mating drive, only once every seven years. Yes, Spock only has sex once every seven years. So, that's why his ears are pointy.


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    #29
    floggg
    Registered Users Posts: 5,820 ✭✭✭floggg


    Cyclonus wrote: »
    I just posted an answer to this, but it contained weblinks and since I'm new here (this is the only thread I've posted on so far in this whole freakin forum) I have to wait for it to get approved. I'll just answer it now: it's a term in the anime fandom for straight women who think guy on guy is hot. You can get to the links I intended by googling "tv tropes yaoi fangirls" for the definition, and "tv tropes het is ew" for their alleged instability. It's going to be kind of weird when my original post shows up after I've posted this.

    I think we'll be able to survive the online lustings of sci-fi and anime fans.

    We gay the bears and leather bikers after all.


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    #30
    Annasopra
    Registered Users Posts: 40,880 ✭✭✭✭Annasopra


    Peregrinus wrote: »
    And the National Lesbian and Gay Federation publishes Gay Community News; I doubt that anybody imagines that lesbian issues are excluded from coverage.
    GCN is very heavily dominated by male issues! In fact it is so heterogenous I sometimes wonder why it isnt called "young gay male news".

    It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

    Terry Pratchet



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    #31
    J_E
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,734 ✭✭✭J_E


    Joeytheparrot wrote: »
    GCN is very heavily dominated by male issues! In fact it is so heterogenous I sometimes wonder why it isnt called "young gay male news".
    That's partly why I don't like the term LGBT on a larger scale - it more and more commonly does not refer to 'lesbian, bisexual, transgender' at all, both within the community and from the outside.


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