Brody's Scribbles... The Pride Of The Community

By Joseph Couture (London, Ontario) FEB 21 | The “gay community” is a term I hear used a lot. People use it to describe our sense of unity, oneness, caring and pride in who we are. But I think its use is a sham.

A friend recently took me out for drinks at a new gay strip club. A mostly older clientele frequents it. After a few minutes, we joined a conversation in progress amongst some of the older gentlemen.

“That stripper is so ugly,” one man said in between beer burps. “And he has a saggy ass,” his friend chimed in. “Not to mention he isn’t very big, not big at all,” another added.

This kind of bitchy banter went on for a long time as stripper after stripper took the stage and was subjected to the degrading assessment of a bunch of decrepit old men who somehow seemed to have failed to have looked in the mirror in the last twenty years or so.

A man commented he would never pay such an “ugly little troll” as one young dancer was approaching him. But he somehow didn’t mind copping a feel as the man strolled by. It was creepy, insulting and demeaning.

I looked around the room and couldn’t help but think, “This is the gay community.” A bunch of angry, lonely old men who can only make themselves feel better by diminishing the humanity of a group of desperate younger men? And such young men who only have value as far their bodies can be commoditized for the pleasure of such embittered old men?

I told another friend of mine about what I saw and he responded by saying it was only the lowest of the low in the gay community who would go to such a place. But interestingly enough, it was only a few days or so after my visit that the famous local gay minister and his lover were spotted having drinks in the very same strip club.

The very same gay minister virtually canonized by the “gay community” for his fearless advocacy work in winning the right for gays to marry. He is considered not only a great pillar of the gay community, but God’s noble representative. And there he sat, amongst the whores and whoremongers, an example to us all of what it means to be a respectable homosexual.

How about we put a little respect in respectable? How about we show each other a little kindness, take a bit of pride in who we are and take care of one another. If it is respect we seek from the greater community at large, perhaps we can start by respecting ourselves.