Quote:
Quote by: dilligras  My gay friends and I have an understanding: They don't hit on me and I don't hit them.
...
We occasionally argue about one thing or another relating to their lifestyle choices, (when we discuss it at all) but few will deny that it is neither safe nor healthy, when viewed under the klieg lights of stark reality. |
Whatever it is that dilligras' supposed "gay friends" do, is not a valid argument against anyone's "lifestyle choices" but their own, if even theirs. This vacuous discourse about (male) homosexuality as an unhealthy lifestyle is what I refer to as the framing of homosexuality. The indiscriminate reference to individual instances of homosexuality in terms of "lifestyle" enforces a conceptual marriage between two logically separable frames of reference: (1) individual homosexual acts and individual homosexual relationships and (2) some supposedly uniform "homosexual lifestyle." This kind of spin is designed to distort people's perception of what is actually referred to by words like "gay," "homosexual," etc, because these general-reference words are used as synonymous with spesific subcultural conditions like "gay culture."
"Gay culture" is logically other than "homosexuality" and only a fraction of homosexual practices ever occur in contexts which could reasonably be referred to as a standard lifestyle. Statements about gay culture (whatever that is) are never rationally acceptable as statements about homosexuality.
The confusion about frames of reference in anti-homosexual discourse is what allows people like dilligras to pretend that idle references to some unspecified "lifestyle choices" made by "gay friends" constitute a valid argument against homosexuality
as such regardless of the specific expression it assumes. However, saying that the "lifestyle choices" made by a certain group of homosexuals are "unhealthy" is not a rationally acceptable description of homosexuality in general. That sexually transmitted deseases are not transmitted from one healthy male to another healthy male in a monogamous relationship remains a biological fact unchallenged by dilligras' loose references to the choices made by his "gay friends."