GAY WITH A CAPITAL G 26 May 2005 Volume 2 Issue 11

I Am Gay With a Capital ‘G’

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was Gay. Okay I admit I am an anachronistic Gay Libber. There are still a few of us left. Damn few. I still love to see rainbow flags fly from houses. I still remember Harvey Milk and what he stood for.

  

Drag Queens being arrested in NYC

Sadly I recently heard that Drag Queens would not be allowed to perform at Gay Pride Day, I mean Pride Day!, this year. T’is a pity because with out some angry cross dressers in 1969 there would be no need to have a party every June at all. I hope this is just vicious gossip.

  

I get so annoyed when I hear “Why do we even need Gay Pride Day anymore?” For Duh! It’s like saying, "why do we need to celebrate the 4th of July?"  Gay Pride Day, not Pride Day, has its historic roots tied to commemorating the rebellion on Christopher Street in New York City.  You know at Stonewall Inn! “We are the Stonewall girls..We wear our hair in Curls…We don’t wear underwear ... We show our pubic hair.”  I digress.

  

Although I am more mellow in my Senior Discount Years, I still play this game with my editor which none of you readers ever get to see.  I capitalize the word Gay and my editor or proof reader lower cases it.  For over a year I have been upper casing Gay while you dear readers see only the ineffectual lower casing that appears in print. Perhaps my editor doesn’t even know I have a political motive to my syntax madness.

  

As any good editor would do, my column is scrutinize to make sure that it adheres to the style adopted by the Associated Press handbook and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, (notice how I carefully capitalized their name).  The latest guidelines by the NLGJA has LGBT preferable to GLBT which was used through much of the 1990's and 2000's.A past editor once told me, “It helps make our publication stand out by giving it a professional and consistent editorial style”.

But every time I write a column for this paper,  I say, “ the hell with the Associated Press”,  and for that matter the hell with the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. What a bunch of assimilation-holes!

  

I proudly, as a Gay person, remain steadfast in adhering to a resolution which was voted on by the “Committee for Homosexual Freedom” in November 1969!  It was decided way back then to “request all publications to hereafter capitalize the word Gay”. Advocates of Gay Rights argued that Gay is a proper noun and a proper adjective when describing a people. Libbers were reclaiming the lexicon used to define us as a people, rather adhering slavishly to how the straight world wants to define us. At this historic meeting it was strongly felt that heterosexual writers and lexicographers were, by lower casing the word, aiding and abetting in the psychological oppression of homosexuals.” Now do you see where I am going with this? Are you going to take that crap from heteroes? Well I'm not! Gay! Gay! Gay!

  

 I just can’t understand why any self respecting Gay newspaper, or journalist for that matter, can accept this political decision to lower case the word Gay. True it took years for the heterosexual media establishment to even use the word in the first place and only then after finally feeling comfortable to print the word homosexual. Why do we allow outsiders or heterosexual lackeys to choose how we define ourselves?  Notice no one uses Negro anymore. I would like to introduce you to my Negro friend. Huh?

  

As an elementary school teacher, the font of all wisdom, even my 6th grade grammar books state emphatically that all proper nouns and proper adjectives are capitalized! Am I missing something here? The adjective and adverb gay, as in the state of being "happy and gay", I can understand being lower cased. But if we are a people---if we have redefined ourselves as a distinct community or folk or  tribe then we are indeed proper nouns and adjectives and damn it- Gay!

  

Too bad we don't do as the Germans do and capitalize all our nouns. Then I wouldn’t bitch so much. But then, as long as Mormons and Baptists get to be capitalized then so do Gays! 

  

Therefore I will continue to capitalize Gay, as much as anything, to say “fuck you” if you don’t like me being Gay. Then again all my Gays may be lower cased by my formidable proof reader and this column will appear as if I've been on one too many acid trips from 1969. I see rainbow flags everywhere!