Curbed Line

Curbed Line

When I was preparing to write another blog entry, I wanted to call my friends and ask them about any recent mishaps of living a single gay life. It could be dating boohoos or snapping out of personal financial management or just about dealing with the effervescent question of ‘when are you going to get married?’ I did, but then I wanted more. I wanted to hear rich and textured accounts and not limited on paying bills and sitting by lonesome in some obnoxious cafes or pubs. My friends can talk for hours about their lives (and of other people’s lives), sometimes over the course of many years. I reckon that in as much as success contributes to the single people’s happiness, failures of varying types of other people actually contribute about a meager 20% of my friends’ happiness.

Trying to find similar anecdotes of the lives of single gay people, though, was a whole different story. There just wasn't much out there.

The same thing happened when I tried to find scholarly writings about single people. Single straight people are of interest to academics, and for the single gay people - not so much.

Just say the word "single" and your listeners will probably make a quick mental leap to "single men and women." These are career and style obsessed individuals that leave much whole to gape at for the smug world that one day and someday, they will settle down and perpetuate the same smug world. When I told my BFF Jackie about my blog entry, she said that I was trying to write an article that was trying to appeal to a market of single gay people who are a diverse population of individuals. But I just love her, she knows that there’s not much written on gay people and that definitely it would be a breeze to read through.

Before I started typing non-stop on my laptop, I asked my friends who they thought had it harder when it came to living single in a society so preoccupied with couples. In chorus, everyone said it was the gay people. Their reasoning made a lot of sense. The single straight people, were always appreciated at social events, whereas the single gay people were as seen as entertainers or as incriminating well of self-loathing jokes on why single gay people are single. Minus the fun, they meant as nuisance. The single straight people would point to all the wedding fantasies peddled to them from their babyhoods (filled with stories about smugness) to their adulthoods (dotted with sparkly bridal magazines and syrupy "reality" TV shows such as The Bachelor and again – with all its smugness!).

I now think that there are differences in the particular ways that single straight people and single gay people are derogated, but the different myths translate into roughly disparate doses of condescension and dismissiveness.

Perceptions of single gay people (the stereotypes) aren't everything. What about evidence of discrimination? There's plenty of that, too (though singlism is vicious as it is already, you add the viciousness of homosexuality to that). In one important domain, there are clear indications of greater discrimination against single gay people than single straight people: Single gay people are almost always excluded to the chances of getting mainstream in the smug world, even when their financial and emotional capacities are the same.

Now here's what's truly remarkable: Despite all the stereotyping and discrimination, most single gay people are doing just fine. Take happiness, for example. The fun and excitement level that single gay people could be an indication that they are loving life. Although, beneath this might cover an intense feeling of loneliness, and yet, are gifted with the enormous capacity to find joy in the middle of a gaping hole of dealing with singlism and homosexuality. I still think that the average happiness level of single gay people is solidly on the happy end of the scale. And my stark realization is that, single gay people, would not become even happier, in any lasting way, if only they were straight and married.

Of course, I'm not saying that every last single gay person is happy. There are a big lot of single gay people, so some of them are going to be unhappy. But again, I reiterate that they would not become any happier if they did marry or were straight.

So here's the puzzle: Why is there such a disconnection between the negative perceptions of single gay men (in particular) and the actual life experiences of those men? I'll take that on in a future post.

Francis