When you’re young, being labelled as “gay” is the ultimate stigma, regardless of what your sexuality actually is. Anything bad is labelled “gay” and anyone who is not one of the cool kids is labelled “gay”, “gaylord”, “queer” or all manner of other things. This is not terribly sexually enlightened, of course, and is one of the things that leads to homosexual teens feeling stigmatised and terrified of their own sexual identity—to the extent that they’ll take their lives in some cases. This is, of course, a terrible thing, and we shouldn’t make light of this issue. Go support the It Gets Better project, and feel good about yourself. Then we can start taking the piss out of something else gay-related.
Done that? Good.
What I would like to make light of, though, is the inexplicable ability for Twitter, Facebook and indeed the whole Internet to turn the hairiest and burliest of men into gibbering, mincing queens. I’ve only really noticed it in the last couple of years or so. But something, somewhere, has snapped and deemed it okay for men to be outrageously flirtatious (and, at times, downright filthy) with one another, all in jest. Say some of the things which regularly grace my Twitter feed (occasionally from my own typing fingers) in high school and you’d have got a one-way ticket to Wedgie City, population: your head and a toilet bowl.
I won’t give examples, to spare the blushes of those who have made said comments in the past. But I actually find it pretty interesting that this sort of thing seems to be more and more common. It’s not done with any form of sexual intent in mind, though the content of the comments may well be sexual in nature. It’s more a form of light-hearted banter that is possibly an ironic response to those men with an overabundance of testosterone—the kind who barely disguise their erections in the street any time a vaguely attractive girl walks past, and the kind who like to shout outside pubs and anyone, everything and, often, nothing or no-one at all.
Perhaps it’s the long-distance, semi-anonymous nature of communication on the Internet that makes this sort of thing happen more often. After all, if someone misinterprets a flirtatious gay comment and either takes offence (or indeed becomes rather more amorous than you were expecting) you can always hide behind the “ah, well, you can’t tell tone of voice in text, can you… ahahahaha” defence.
Still. Perhaps this is a sign that the online world is, on the whole, more comfortable with a broad spectrum of sexual identities rather than simple “straights over there, gays over there, and then there are bisexuals, but some just say they’re kidding themselves” terms.
Or perhaps it’s just a sign that Spider-Man has, in fact, now made everyone on the Internet gay.
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