No offense, no big deal...But it made me think about race and prejudice and how in some small way, I can relate to how it feels to feel perceived as an outsider. It's impossible to escape this. Even in writing this down, I thought about how some people will just turn off because it's just lesbian agenda stuff-
Oh, well. I write for me.
It's odd this, and perhaps other people (white, straight people) feel it to in a way that I don't understand because I don't walk in their shoes. A part of me wants to force the knowledge of being different than the norm, feeling different than the norm, down everybody's throat- screaming "don't you get it???". How could they though? We all live our lives. A man could no more perceive what it's like to live as a woman even if he behaved and dressed like a woman, because inside he is culturally, biologically, and socially a man.
Which makes me wonder about transsexuals. I have never known one well enough to observe or ask their partner if they acted like a bona fide stereotypical woman or man..hmmm. Maybe there is a study out there. I'll check into that as soon as I can figure out the right phrase to google.
A long time ago I read Black Like Me- a fabulous book about a man who took a pigment changing medication to become "black". I put that in quotes because inside he was all Caucasian. So while he conducted this social study and wrote a book about it- it was all from a white perspective. I am not criticizing the author. I am simply pointing out that he writes of his experiences traveling as a black man, but he isn't. As a side note, I should re-read this book .
Back to my point... Other lesbians get the lesbian jokes- they laugh, if they are funny. I don't know if I would laugh at a black joke told by a black person for fear of offending the person. What if it was not really meant to be funny and I laughed. Would I hurt their feelings? Would I be acting prejudicial?
I was raised by straight parents to be a straight woman. And I have lived as an out lesbian for the last twenty some odd years. Essentially half and half. I can go both ways. And mostly I behave myself in the ways of the straight world. When I am in a group of straight women who are talking about their sex lives, I rarely contribute- they don't want to hear about my sex life. It's uncomfortable for most of them- and straight men? please..let's not go there.
It's confining. Some days I yearn for lesbian company so I can drop the pretense, talk about sex, not have to explain everything, just for it to be easy. Mostly, it doesn't matter, much.
And while wildly different, I wonder if this is what it is like all day for a black person to walk in an environment where the others are all white?
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