THE OTHER COLOURS OF THE RAINBOW

Curled up on the couch on Saturday night with the hubby watching daggy TV – yes, that’s just as “gay” as the sex, drugs and disco hi-jinx we see in the gay media.

The rainbow f lag and its many derivatives are meant to represent the wide variety within the GLBT population. Having been discriminated against and oppressed for our sexual orientation, we long for acceptance along the whole spectrum of “us”. We are many kinds but we are one, says the rainbow philosophy. But are we really? The gay media portrayal of the “gay community” is often specific to some subgroups of the whole gay population. The “gay community” protests against drug searches at gay events. Monogamy is a rare exception and those who profess it are likely to be hiding their f lings. Promiscuity is the accepted norm since gay men cannot be expected to control their sexual urges. Gay men need drugs to have fun, and they have fun on the dance f loor, in rest rooms or in back alleys. Gay men have sexual shenanigans wherever they go, including when they are on holidays with their partners, as one particular DNA writer constantly self-- confesses. It is acceptable to pick up sexual tricks in locations such as in a queue, and to f launt it in a magazine article.

While it is intuitively known that there are extremes in any community, a constant portrayal of certain colours of the rainbow overshadows other colours and leads to a notion that the rainbow only consists of those oft-portrayed colours.

My personal experiences exemplified how detrimental this false impression can be. Coming from a tightly controlled Asian closet in my home country, I tried to embrace the freedoms of Sydney’s Oxford Street when I first arrived in 1998. I tried going to gay bars, but couldn’t stand the smell of beer and cigarette smoke. I couldn’t enjoy the deafening doof-doof of the music. The hot guys only arrived late in the night when I was ready to go home to bed – to sleep. Some very hot guys were clearly on drugs and that was a big turn-off for me. I went to gay saunas, but even when I was aroused and approached by highly desirable guys I couldn’t bring myself to have sex with anybody because it just wasn’t “me”. I went to several beats only to run away at the first sign of an approach, again, despite mutual attraction. I frequented The Wall and sheepishly declined an attractive young guy who offered to blow me for free. I lingered at Town Hall urinals, f lopped it out and witnessed a lot of action but just zipped up and left. I even went to a couple of gay brothels and politely walked out again after the cheery, “Hi, how’re you going?” Could I be the only gay man in Sydney to go through all that and still come out on the other side a virgin?

All these “failures” made me question whether I was really gay. My porn collection and the stir in my loins in the gym change room clearly say so. But why couldn’t I do any of the things that the gays are supposed to do? I thought I was defective, and it crushed me. I had struggled accepting myself as gay and having to live in the closet back home, only to realise that I didn’t belong to “the gay community” either. Everybody else was doing what I was dying to do but just couldn’t. At the same time, no gays seemed to be like me. Like the main character in the animated movie The Last Unicorn I desperately asked, “Are there truly no others like me? Am I the only one?” The gay media seemed to say so.

My frustration quickly turned to depression. In my home country I had come to accept that I would be forever single and would have to rely on myself for sexual gratification. But to face the same possibility in Sydney, one of the gay capitals of the world, was utterly depressing. How can I ever find a mate when I couldn’t do anything the gays do?

I went for counselling and found an angel. She encouraged me to join gay social groups and I did, and I made some friends. Being located around t he Oxford Street ghetto, my group members were mainly t he types that t he gay media portray, but at least t here were glimpses of t he other colours of t he rainbow. I t hen ventured online to Gaydar, chat rooms and f inally personals websites. This is when I started seeing a much wider variety of colours, and I started going out on a series of f irst dates.

I bless the day I met my current partner on a personals website. The first time we spoke on the phone we compared notes for two hours. I was almost in tears afterward: I knew my

journey was over because I’d finally found someone like me. It was nothing like the last scene in The Last Unicorn when hundreds of unicorns emerge from the sea, but it wasn’t any less thrilling either. Fast forward to the present and we’ve recently celebrated our 8th anniversary – that’s 56 in straight years!

We are a forty-something gay couple on Sydney’s North Shore. We are in a faithful, monogamous de facto relationship. I am a university academic and my partner runs a small business. We spend evenings watching TV – comedy shows and British real estate programs mostly. We have dinner with my partner’s dad twice a week. We spend our weekends at f lea markets and junk shops. We love ABBA, Celtic Thunder and IKEA. We are big dags and we are so not into fashion or labels. We’re both a bit soft around the edges (more of a keg than a six-pack) and need more physical exercise. We love to perve on our hunky, married neighbour. I am actively involved in a gay social group, routinely read the gay papers, go to Mardi Gras Fair Day and have marched a few times in Mardi Gras Parade. We do not go to bars, nightclubs or parties (gay or otherwise) and we never do drugs. Our sex live is pretty vanilla – nothing kinky, nothing risky, no third parties, and between the two of us we have only ever had four sexual partners apart from each other.

Every year at Mardi Gras Fair Day I participate in the Gay Community Periodic Survey. [The survey asks about sexual practices and behaviours.] I have a personal agenda: to ensure that my story counts. It is my way to demonstrate that I am a gay man because “the gay community” – or at least the way the gay media portrays it – seems to have excluded and ignored my partner and me because we do not fit their stereotype.

While my personal journey led to a happy ending, I often wonder what it might be like for others. I was at a relative advantage because I didn’t arrive in Australia until a bit later in my life. By the time I went through the struggle I was more mature and had been relatively established in my career, and this has been instrumental in my resilience. I am also quite religious and it helped me to avoid self-harm even when I was at the depths of my depression. But I wonder how many guys – particularly younger ones – end up feeling very unhappy with who they really are. Do they change their behaviour just to f it in? Or admit defeat and no longer cope? Both end points

“We have dinner with my partner’s dad twice a week, spend our weekends at flea markets. We love ABBA, Celtic Thunder and IKEA. We are big dags, not into fashion labels. We’re both a bit soft around the edges… more of a keg than a six-pack.”

could be equally deleterious. Suddenly the slogan “Be proud of being who you are” and the rainbow f lag philosophy seems downright hypocritical.

The imbalance of the gay media portrayal of the “homosexual lifestyle” also contradicts some of the current social demands we’re making. How can we ask the mainstream population to accept that we have the “same love” as any other human being, while in the same breath insisting that promiscuity is an inevitable nature of being gay? How can we make a strong case for being able to make good gay parents, while admitting that we depend on drugs just to have fun at parties?

The worst thing about these stereotypes is, of course, that they are not accurate. Not all gays depend on party drugs to have fun – many would be content to have a quiet night cuddling in front of the TV. Being monogamous is not impossible despite all the media glorification of gay promiscuity. Did I hear somebody say, “But all of my gay friends are like that”? Or, “But the recent DNA magazine poll said so”? I have two words for you: selection bias.

If you conduct a survey among drug-using partygoers, or recruit respondents from sexon-premises venues, then your survey will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even the Gay Community Periodic Survey at Fair Day will never capture the likes of my partner, a ’ burbs boy who is averse to crowds. No survey will ever capture any representative sample of all gay men: the easiest to recruit as survey respondents are those at gay events and venues. However, it is misleading to call this sub-group the gay community, and even more wrong to generalise their opinions, attitude and practices as those of all gay men – or even the majority of gay men for that matter.

The gays in the suburbs, those living quiet, ordinary lives away from the inner-city ghettos are as gay as everybody else and they deserve to be counted, too. I believe the whole population of homosexual men is likely to be spread along a bell-shaped continuum. The party-drug users and the sex pigs would make the small proportion at the extreme end of that distribution; hence, the dangerously misleading portrayal of the so-called “gay community”.

The gay media, as any other media, have the moral obligation to give at least an approximation of the truth. Reports on party-drug users and sexually adventurous gays is certainly easier to sell than stories about vanilla gays in the ’ burbs. However, an imbalance in the portrayal of the whole spectrum of being gay leads to misconceptions among gays and straights alike, and could be detrimental for young gays in the process of building and confirming their identity.

While we have conveniently removed one colour from the rainbow f lag (there are seven colours in the actual rainbow but only six in the f lag), we need to make more effort to portray a truly representative view of all colours in the whole gay population. Then, perhaps I can write gay community without using quotation marks.