You may or may not have heard about Camp Boomerang, it’s a campsite that’s based in Michigan that at the time of writing hasn’t even opened this year and has already caused controversy. Co-owner Bryan Quinn posted the following on the site’s Facebook:
“Camp Boomerang is a private, membership-only RV park/campground that allows only ‘guys’.
“A ‘guy’, in terms of this discussion, is defined as a person with a penis, [who] presents himself as male and has a state-issued ID that says ‘male’.
“We understand this statement, unfortunately, may not make everyone happy, but feel it needs to be clarified.”
The various LGBTQIA++ news outlets reported on it as though they had committed the worst incidence of hate to have ever been inflicted on a group of people, all of them agreeing that a gay run business specifically aimed at gay men is transphobic. It is curious because I struggle to see how a gay run business specifically aimed at gay men is anything other than a gay run business specifically aimed at gay men, and no, that does not include transmen. Get over it.
Transmen, as we know, are female and they do not have the same commonality of experiences as gay men do. They will never know what is it’s like to be a man who is exclusively attracted to members of the same sex. Heterosexual or bisexual females, which is the category that transmen themselves fall into, do not have the same experiences as us. Our sexual orientation and our experience as gay men is not a costume you can put on or take off at will, and while my heart genuinely goes out to transmen and their personal struggles, as gay men we have absolutely no reason to give up our spaces and nor does anyone have the right to pressurise, harass, gaslight, or guilt trip us into doing so.
In the case of Camp Boomerang the legacy LGBT press wasted no time getting in on the action by sticking the boot in; why are we even surprised? We have seen the social media posts where those that work for the legacy LGBT media push this modern homophobia. But make no mistake, they are calling us disgusting and hateful specifically because we are gay men, just like they’ve spent the last 10 years telling the lesbians they’re disgusting specifically because they’re gay women. And of course the half-truths, the spin, the sensationalist headlines whips up a baying mob – hate sells you see.
Lesbians have been complaining about the decline of their spaces for years, but it is now increasingly impacting upon gay men and our spaces and Camp Boomerang is just one of a growing number of examples.
Progressive homophobia says that we should include the opposite sex in everything we do, and that we have no right to object. Lesbians have been complaining about the decline of their spaces for years, but it is now increasingly impacting upon gay men and our spaces and Camp Boomerang is just one of a growing number of examples.
The evangelists of the new religion of gender identity set out to ruin the business and mercilessly target the reputations of those that dare to take a stand against this, seeking to break their targets and humiliate them into walking back on perfectly reasonable positions. All this is done without a thought on how it impacts those that are targeted, or how these actions will impact the wider community.
Meanwhile magazines, camp sites, beauty pageants, nightclubs, bars and saunas aimed at gay men are all being destroyed. Our common spaces are being taken away from us in the service of heterosexual females. Heaven forbid that you point out that those heterosexual females can’t ever be gay men. If you do, someone will take to Twitter to boast about how they’ve reported you to the police for hate crimes.
Did you just suggest listening to two sides of a debate and forming your own view? I’m sorry but we’re now going to ruin your livelihood and threaten to doxx you, and even when you’re forced into apologising we’re still going to twist the knife – because apologising is never ever enough.
This self-erasure is in service to an ideological position that hates the idea that people are attracted to other people based on biological sex, and not based on someone else’s internalised sense of self identity that we can never really be sure of. Only the very narcissist could come up with a model of sexuality that locates your sexual orientation inside another’s mind.
Where will younger gay men go when we have successfully killed off the last single sex space for gay men? Why are we pulling up the ladder behind us and who the hell do we think we’re impressing when we do this? This self-erasure is in service to an ideological position that hates the idea that people are attracted to other people based on biological sex, and not based on someone else’s internalised sense of self identity that we can never really be sure of. Only the very narcissist could come up with a model of sexuality that locates your sexual orientation inside another’s mind.
As our millennia-old oppression plays itself out in the modern era, I am reminded of the following passage from The Gay Liberation Front manifesto of 1971, “Self-oppression is achieved when the gay person has adopted and internalised straight people’s definition of what is good and bad.” What could illustrate this more than the spectacle of gay men berating other gay men for not including the opposite sex? How about reporting gay men to the police for saying on social media what we know to be true, that heterosexual females cannot be gay men? Perhaps the legacy LGBT press and other LGBT organisations harassing and setting out to destroy multiple gay businesses and lives simply because they are clear about what gay men are, and also what gay men are not?
More and more gay men are waking up to what is happening and are liberating themselves and casting off the heteronormative idea that it is hateful to not want to include the opposite sex in our spaces. We do not owe anyone an explanation for that, and nor should we. We want our spaces and that is enough.
Do not be afraid, join us.
We welcome contributors – of any viewpoint – who prefer insight to invective, who want to test ideas rather than dismiss them, and who’d rather build bridges than blow them up. If you want to write for us email editor@staging.lesbianandgaynews.com
leoclapping.gif Another home-run, Judy.