Get Your Facts, Straight!

An SGBoy Article, Get Your Facts, Straight!, which I agree to a lot. I could add more to the list too.

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Get Your Facts, Straight! If I get a dollar every time I have to tell another straight acquaintance that my favourite colour is not pink...

Date : 24 Feb 2005
Writer : Fresnik Tan

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against pink. But the colour makes me feel too fluffy. But along with my sexual orientation comes a host of stereotypes which I must fend off - much like flies over an open wound. So, for the convenience of future encounters, I've decided to create a handy list of sorts, to re-educate the ill-informed straight folks out there.

Our favourite colour is NOT NECESSARILY PINK!
I'd thought I'd just get that out of the way first...

We do not wear make-up and sway our hips as we walk.
Well, not all of us anyway. Being gay has frequently been equated to being effeminate. The typical hand-swisher is the image du jour when it comes to imagining a gay individual. The truth is, yes there's a percentage of us who love their boas and sequins, but there's also a group of us who's into hiking, sports and roughing it out.

We have preferences too, ya know!
One of the most common fear of straight people when they find out about a friend being gay, is that they might get molested by the individual. Most of us might have experienced or seen the reaction of certain army guys when they find out one of their colleague is a homosexual. Quips like, 'Don't rape me in my sleep!' and 'Must shower with underwear now.' Are totally uncalled for. My point - we have preferences too! We are not doing a Desperate Housewives here, and we most certainly do not want to get it on with anything that has something in between their legs.

We do not all wear tight tees and go to the gym.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have our gym bunnies who dedicate the whole of their waking non-working hours to the art of beautifying the shrine that is their body. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but this image is fast replacing the other as this millennia's epitome of a gay man. From queer queen to brainless bunny, I'm not about to call it an advancement. Luckily, the truth is far from this 'branding' the media has helped in tagging to us. We have our bookworms and homebodies, our athletes and our artists, to flesh out the community, so please remember that. And this leads me to my next point...

We do not just go for hunks.
Yes, they're really nice. Hunks I mean. Those with chiseled features, buff bods and good grooming goes down well with most of us, but at the end of the day, we will usually have a preference for someone else to settle down with. We have those who are into chubs or skinnies, tall giants and rugged dwarfs, aristocratic scholars or sun-beaten sportsmen. You name it, we have someone who loves them.

Being gay doesn't necessarily mean we have taste.
Stop asking me for fashion advice. I for one can't differentiate a Hugo suit from a Domanchi one without looking at the label. Ask me what goes better with black, pinstripes or tartan and I'll just say, 'Whatever's comfortable'. The media has relegated gay people to being trendsetters and followers, heavily involved in the creative industries. But the truth is it doesn't gift everyone of us with a sense of taste. Too often I've seen many gay men wear the most ridiculous and distastefully loud garbs out on the streets and misconstrue some of the stares to be that of an appreciative one. If you want to be fashionable, do your homework.

It's not just about sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Some of my friends believe that I dance and drink my weekend away, hopping from one spot to another, maybe even from club to spa to finish my drunken ride with a sexual escapade. Imagine how they widen their eyes in disbelief when I tell them that I only club about once a month and they are usually at straight venues. And I've never stepped into a gay spa before. Not that I'm being an elitist and snubbing gay businesses but it's so much more convenient for me to go to a regular club, as opposed to making my way down to Tanjong Pagar just to see the same old crowd and faces. ONSs don't really work for me, as I admit I'm a stubborn romantic. Which brings me to...

Yes, long term relationships can and do happen.
If there's myth that has a bigger hold than any other, both in the straight faction as well as in ours, it's the fact that long term relationships (if not lifelong ones) do happen. And I have living examples around me. Though some will throw the statistics at me and say that the rate of failure is high, my gauntlet to them is this - if you let the statistics convince you, then you'll never try with all your heart. And if you never commit your whole being into a relationship believing it will work, how could it?

So I conclude my little (though definitely not exhaustive) list of common myths about gayhood with one resounding reiteration... I don't like PINK!

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