Gay Students are not Predatory
By: Eden Yarrow
Tags: Queer, Sexual Harassment, LGBTQ, Transgender, Gay

Trigger warning: in this, I will briefly mention the topics of rape and sexual violence and will also discuss my own experiences with homophobia, transphobia, and sexual harassment.

It will always be laughable to me when someone says “gay people aren’t discriminated against anymore.” Looking past the numerous legal and economic challenges LGBTQ+ people face in today’s world, the number of social barriers to entry that exist for living a normal life in our world are numerous for gender and sexual minorities, especially our students.

I’ve been out as gay and nonbinary for several years beginning in elementary school (often not by choice). Currently, I’m a junior in high school. I’ve also been fully closeted at times, mainly with regards to my gender identity. I’ve seen how straight and cisgender students treat and talk about gay and trans students, and it’s not pretty.

Growing up queer, you generally internalize society’s messaging about people like you. Gender variant people are at best a punchline on TV, the woman with a penis who makes men throw up, or at worst rapists and depraved and immoral sexual predators, the gay man who tricks straight men into sex. As kids, we’re not immune to this either, even if the words gay and trans aren’t in our vocabulary. You see that the feminine man in the cartoon is the villain, and you recognize that being a feminine man is perhaps not ideal. Furthermore, this is often combined with cisnormative and heteronormative parenting and pedagogy. Even if you grow up with parents who support gay and trans people at the polling station, they likely raise you the way they were raised themselves — they expect you to be a boy who likes sports or a girl who likes dresses, and you’re expected to like the opposite gender before you’ve even started puberty. At school, you only learn about kings who married queens, or of great men and their many wives. What of the indigenous people across the world who had more than two genders? What of the men who loved men, women who loved women? They’re absent from our history textbooks, often considered too taboo or sexually explicit for children to handle.

And don’t get me started on religious teaching as a kid.

I’m (not) happy to say that I’ve been subject to this messaging growing up as well. Cisheteronormativity is a painful thing, and for a lot of kids, it makes understanding themselves difficult. If boys could know that they could like other boys, or if they knew they didn’t have to be boys, and that those didn’t make them gross or evil I think we’d all be happier and healthier.

But that’s utopian for our world right now. Growing up a boy who likes dresses and fairies, the only people like you on TV are the fairies or the pirates trying to capture and sell them. In our culture, we generally perceive anyone assigned male who feminizes themself as predatory. Captain Hook, HIM, Frank-N-Furter, and whatever the fuck was going on in Silence of the Lambs, removed from their narrative context, all exist as part of a larger social ideal of gay and feminine men being predatory.

This is messaging that kids are not oblivious to, and it becomes stuck in place when kids acquire the words gay, queer, and trans (and their not so affectionate spinoffs). These are words we learn earlier than many parents seem to think. Your son is not immune to being called gay or a faggot in 4th grade — it happened to me.

It seems beyond ironic that despite being treated as predatory for my sexuality and gender identity, I wasn’t the one trying to be invasive of the people around me. Basic questioning, some of it in good faith, like “why are you gay” and “how are you sure” is hardly the tip of the iceberg.

It is not lost on me that despite gay and feminine men in media like me being portrayed as being invasive of straight men’s space and asking for and saying inappropriate things, it was always the reverse of me. In middle school, when boys often start discovering pornography, I was often asked sexually explicit questions (again, as a middle schooler, maybe 11 or 12) by straight boys around me.

“Would you ever suck a dick?”

“Do you wanna fuck me?”

“Do you like big dicks?”

All of these were questions I was never enthusiastic about, especially as someone who had been outed and wasn’t exactly loud and proud about being gay. Looking back with the knowledge I acquired from waves of men (most of them straight and cisgender, interestingly) being outed as inappropriate and invasive by their colleagues tells me one thing: this wasn’t okay. I don’t care if the people asking didn’t realize, it was inappropriate.

I don’t seem to be alone either.

These are questions that seem to have continued out of middle school, nonetheless. I’ve been asked these questions in high school, not just by straight boys either. Reaching high school was an interesting experience concerning sexually invasive comments from other students and with time the gender of the people making those comments changed. Younger women are generally more socially accepting of LGBTQ+ people in my experience, but that acceptance can come with limitations at times. Being feminine and gay in a circle of high school girls can at times be far more liberating and comforting, but as well there are still comments that make you feel mildly uncomfortable to deeply disgusted.

“You look like a bottom.” That’s fine, I don’t really care.

“You got dick sucking lips.” Offhand, but okay.

“You look like you take it in the ass.” Fuck you.

It’s worth noting as well that in none of these situations were we talking about anything sexual, much less my sexual position or preferences.

I’m not ashamed of my sexuality — I’ve come to terms with myself and I think loving men can be beautiful and transformative. My discomfort from comments like these is not rooted in any internalized homophobia or femmephobia. I find these comments and questions discomforting and inappropriate because they are targeted at me because of my gender expression and sexuality. Being called a “bottom” or being told I look like I “take it in the ass”, especially when intended as an insult, is inappropriate, full stop.

All of this is not to mention sexual violence, which LGBTQ+ people face at a much higher rate than the allocisheterosexual population (but that I luckily have not experienced.)

It’s because of sexually explicit and invasive comments like this that I find the idea of gay and feminine men being predatory ridiculous. Despite the sexually invasive things that have been said about and to me, often straight men asking me if I would ever do something with them in a hypothetical scenario, I’m the one assumed to be the inappropriate one.

In a class of mine, a boy once said to his friend that he didn’t want to work with me. Leaning in, he whispered “he’s gay, he’ll fuckin’ rape me” and laughed. Maybe he meant it as a joke, but it nonetheless speaks to a larger culture that views gay men as people who want to have sex with straight men regardless of their protests. What he didn’t know, I assume because he had no experience being openly gay, is that I’ve had straight men talk about having sex with me under less than enthusiastically consensual pretenses.

As a society, more people seem to be coming around to the idea that talking sexually to women when unprovoked is inappropriate and often misogynistic in nature. Men who are totally not sexist and totally respect women can disagree with this idea, but I believe we’re making progress in addressing and fighting against sexual harassment and misconduct against women in our culture. But I think a discussion about sexual harassment and misconduct in schools and workplaces is incomplete without a queer perspective because I too, and many other LGBTQ+ people, have experienced sexual comments and questions that were unprovoked and invasive.

I’ve not even touched on how cisgender people often ask trans people about their genitals or body unprovoked because I prefer to stay closeted in my gender. I haven’t had these comments as frequently, I mostly keep my gender identity to myself and close friends, but I’m not blind to the invasive questions trans and nonbinary people get from cisgender people as well.

For as much as society wants to paint us as the predators, LGBTQ+ people are more often the victims, not the perpetrators, of sexual harassment and misconduct. Cisgender and heterosexual students need to learn to be less invasive of their LGBTQ+ classmates and their sex lives.

LGBTQ+ identities need to be removed from contexts that are hypersexual. Sex is a fulfilling and natural part of many peoples’ lives, but it is not the alpha nor the omega of LGBTQ+ identities. We are multifaceted people. Many of us have sex, but we are more than that. Reducing our identities to who we have sex with and how erases our experiences within a society that is constantly pushing us toward a cisheterosexual norm. Whatsmore, it leaves the door open for narratives about us that paint us as sexually depraved and predatory when that simply is not true. LGBTQ+ students shouldn’t be growing up being asking graphically sexual questions and being treated as an oddity, but that is the experience that I and many other LGBTQ+ people have had in our schools.

So no, I am not a sexual predator, and I do not want to have sex with your son. I would appreciate it if he would stop asking, though.