My Pride month explainer

Outsiders are confused by our cultural gaydar signaling.

I live in northern New York State, but I wasn’t born here. I was born and lived my formative years in a very different country, a different culture, which had very different social signals which became deeply ingrained in my young psyche. After we moved to this country we lived in the woods. We didn’t really have a neighborhood, or neighbors or kids nearby from whom I could pick up on the ways of moving through this culture effortlessly like a fish in a school swimming through the cultural ocean.

I’m the fish who turns left when the rest of the fish turn right and while I’m wondering where everybody went the shark is coming up behind me. Fortunately, I’ve managed every time to say “not today, shark, not today.”

Or maybe my childhood wasn’t exactly as dangerous as swimming with sharks, but I’m trying to make a point here so just go with it.

There are both spoken and unspoken signals in the world around us, in a society, in a culture. Signals about all kinds of things. Maybe I’m not the best explainer of this sort of thing because I’m not a native speaker, but because I’m not I am aware of the problems of understanding.

Which brings me to Pride Month. If you’re not from here you may find the concept of Pride Month as, well, as a little bit odd. I don’t know this from actual experience but what I’ve been taught in school is that the United States of America is a wonderful place full of acceptance for people of all kinds, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of teaming shores, people of all sizes, shapes, colors, and ways of being. America is the most wonderful of all nations because we are a caring and decent people accepting of difference. That’s why people around the world look up to us and want to be just like us.

In the spirit of being as helpful as possible to people not from here and who, therefore, are not familiar with our innate American acceptance of gay culture I’d like to provide some indicators as an aid for those who have not grown up in this particular culture and able to recognize the signs innately. For some of you this is information you know without me having to explain. If so you can stop reading here. For the rest of you still reading I hope this information will be very useful.

The basic thing that people need to understand is that the gay/straight question is not a dichotomy. It’s not a division. It’s simply a way of focusing our attention. Other cultures do this in their language by using gender associated pronouns which can be confounding if you aren’t born into the culture. For example, in Romance languages everything is defined by gender. That is no surprise because those are “hot blooded” people. You know, Italians, Spaniards, and the French. Those people are always thinking about sex, because sex is built into their language, their sensibility. Everything is either el or la, le or la. It’s like the words are getting naked on the page and exposing their genitals. English is not like that. Thank god! For that we need emojis of eggplant or peach. Why eggplant or peach I don’t know. It defies understanding; it’s just the way it is.

But our attention to gayness and straightness is much more subtle and with a spectrum, sort of like a rainbow. Things aren’t black and white, male or female. We appreciate the subtleness of reality, as in how the colors of the rainbow blend seamlessly from one color to the next. Gayness and straighteness is like that, and weirdly some of the gayest stuff is also the most straight.

That subtlety is what makes it so hard for people from other cultures, more homophobic cultures, to appreciate how accepting we are of gay culture, of how much we embrace it.

The problem for those other people (and honestly, count me as one who started out that way, not fully understanding our national appreciation of difference) is that they do not have the finely tuned Gaydar of America. For those of you who may be new to this, gaydar is like radar except for identifying gayness. And that is what this newsletter is about. Helping you to identify the underlying gay culture that pervades our society.

Sometimes we are lucky in that Americans will fairly often tell you straight up what is gay. They will say “that is gay!” You should keep a notebook and quickly write that stuff down for future reference. Recently on the Fox network (gay as fuck) in a panel discussion one host declared “fudge is gay.” Good information! I wrote that down in my little notebook. But then they went on to discuss pickles on cake. Pickles on cake is apparently not gay. Good to know.

Pectin is straight, tapioca is gay.

Cuisine is a pretty good indicator of gayness. Cuisine is, of course, gay, food is generic tending toward CIS gender or “straight” culture. Dinner is straight, supper is gay.

There are some pretty obvious general indicators.

A barbecue grill is straight while salad is gay. Some salads are more gay than others. Crudités is gay, veggie platter is straight. Meat salad, known as either antipasto or charcuterie, which sounds pretty gay, is in fact not.

Various meats are either more or less straight. Beef is straight, lamb is gay. Remember, it’s a continuum.

Tofu is gay.

Tofurkey is like the turducken of gayness; gay inside of gay wrapped inside gay. Hotdogs, while phallic, are neither straight nor gay. Bratwurst, kielbasa? Homoerotic. Gay. Natural casing sausages are not only gay, they’re uncircumcised.

While grilling is straight baking is gay. But as I’ve noted, there are degrees. Pie for instance is either gay or straight depending on the thickening agent. Pectin is straight; tapioca is gay.

Sports

NASCAR is straight; professional wrestling is gay. Mixed martial arts (MMA) is gay as fuck.

Hockey used to be straight, but due to a certain homoerotic TV series it is now gay. Or maybe it’s trans. (BTW, TV series are straight, Netflix/cable series are gay)

Football, straight; Soccer, gay.

Gymnastics, gay; ice skating, ice dancing, ballroom dancing, all gay. Hip hop dancing, straight.

Alpine skiing straight; Nordic skiing, gay - with the exception of biathlon which sounds gay but is totally straight. Bobsled straight; luge, gay.

Music

Taylor Swift, straight; Noah Kahan, gay.

Queen…do not make me finish the sentence.

Hair metal bands Def Leppard, Twisted Sister, Kiss, etc … gay.

Prog rock gay; David Bowie straight. (I know, I don’t get it either) Iggy Pop, straight. Alice Cooper, straight.

Bruce Springsteen, straight; Bon Jovi, gay.

k d Lang, (weirdly) straight; JD Vance, gay.

From that we can infer some things about:

The Alphabet

We see that the letter k is straight, while J is gay. In general consonants are straight while vowels are gay. But of course there are exceptions. Q is obviously the gayest letter while letters R, S, and especially Z are straight. X is so straight it’s gay. Y is, of course, the sometimes letter. Trans.

Colors

Obviously, pink is gay while black is straight. But pink clothing on a woman is straight while black clothing on a woman is either straight or gay depending on the clothing.

Clothing is a very complicated subject in terms of gay and straight and requires a subscription to Vogue (gay) to parse.

Countries

France, gay; Japan, straight. Germany straight by day; gay by night. Scotland straight, England gay. Ireland straight and gay depending on which one. South Korea, straight; North Korea, gay.

Misc

Submarines, gay; destroyers straight. Rockets and missiles, gay; land mines, straight.

Need I go on?

By this point I think you’re probably getting an intuitive feel for this gay/straight taxonomy and you can begin appreciating how pervasive but helpful it is in our day to day lives. I hope you can put all this information to good use moving forward (straight; moving backward, gay)

If you find any of this offensive do not blame me. It’s just the way things are in America based on observation and empirical evidence.

It’s not like I made it all up.