On a Piece of Advice to Canadian Gay Refugees: You May Want To Record that XXX Video After All
In which The Gay Recluse considers the reigning state of stupidity, even in nice countries like Canada.
Our friend Jeff Weinstein wrote earlier this week with this piece of news, which would be hilarious if it were in a movie, but instead must be viewed as sadly incredible. According to the article, by Tiffany Crawford of the Canwest News Service, “The Canadian Refugee Board needs to establish clearer guidelines on sexual orientation to help adjudicators avoid stereotyping gay and lesbian refugees who have little proof they are gay.” There are a growing number of such refugees — many of whom come from gay-hating countries such as The United StatesMalaysia and Nicaragua — whose claims have been denied because they can’t prove they are gay. Because these same countries do not offer their fleeing refugees much in the way of “gay-pride parades” and “online gay-chat rooms,” many of them show up to their hearing without any evidence, and so must resort to “stereotypical” gay behavior (i.e., acting like Tom Cruise Chris Crocker). Adding to the problem is that “witnesses and letters are dismissed as hearsay and claimants are accused of fabricating lies to stay in Canada.”
Although this is undoubtedly the stupidest thing ever, it does strike at the core of a tedious but underappreciated question: what exactly does it mean to be “gay”? Ultimately — and especially in the political arena — we prefer one definition that revolves around the sexual act: if you’re a man and you like (even in theory) to ____ or ___ or ____ with another man, you’re gay (sorry all you “straight” M2M Craigslisters!) and vice versa for women. (For the moment, we’ll leave aside questions of exactly what makes you a “man” or “woman,” although we obviously think the question is not without merit.) Although we appreciate all sorts of cultural notions of what or who is or isn’t gay, we think that 98 percent of these revolve around stereotypes (in short: gay men are “womanish” and gay women are “mannish”) that almost never reflect the reality of who is or isn’t “gay,” at least according to the proposed definition.
All of which is to say that we have one piece of advice to these kids: if you want to prove you’re gay, don’t take chances, take videos! We wish we were joking.
Filed under: Gay, Government, Law, Politicians, Stereotypes, The Gay Recluse | 3 Comments
Tags: Canada, Chris Crocker, Gay, Refugees, The Canadian Refugee Board, Tom Cruise
The Gay Recluse 
Grace and Peace,
Good evening Gay Recluse and friends,
There are two lines of thought about demonstrating one’s queerness:
A) What one prefers, all things being equal and in an ambience of freedom.
B) Specific acts one may perform.
Item ” A ” is simply impossible to demonstrate in an examination or test of any kind. Even a CAT-Scan can’t detect preferences.
And item ” B ” is pretty subjective, as those MSM ( men who have sex with men ) prove.
Why, offer me enough money and/or cocaine and I ( Gayer than pink ink ! ) can probably manage to have sex with a 5’8″, 350 lb. woman with terrible personal hygiene.
Which would prove nothing except that I was a greedy slut.
We danced around this mulberry bush back in the 1960’s when I was a draft counselor with CCCO ( Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors ) and applicants for exemptions from the draft would claim ” homosexual tendencies ” and would be asked for proof of some kind.
They’d ask me what would constitute proof, and I’d pour us both bourbon and sodas and say we could both go back to the draft board and give them a vastly more interesting “demonstration” than any picket lines they might ever have seen.
But, seriously, I would repeatedly say that there isn’t ANYTHING a Faggot can do that young Mr. Strait can’t do too, if he has the nerve and the motivation.
I wish asylum applicants justice and good fortune, and am myelf the spawn of refugees from Stalin’s Ukraine ( themselves Trotskyists: NTS – Narodny Trudoy Soyuz ) who entered the United States in an ” irregular manner ” and didn’t get legal until the Truman amnesty of 1946, when I was already a 2-year old.
Be well,
Michael B. Music, I.M.D.
66 Rondell Place
San Francisco, Ca., 94103, U.S.A.
01 (415) 431-1905 = Home
01 (415) 522-1198 = Fax
Porcupine1944@aol.com
Thanks for sharing, Michael Music!
My word is enough. (I wouldn’t relationship for money or cocaine.) We’re born as we are, then we develop thoughts about it and make choices, and by the time we’re grown up with adult filters, we’ve fought for who we are. I am me, G-rated or only within a relationship, and platonic to all others. I’ve known people who immigrated on student visas – they always knew who they were, but when they stand in the Castro and see everyone, they don’t recognize how much they missed of themselves. It’s like the world is new. We need to skip the XXX matter to prove identity for legal immigration purposes and go with a description of the struggle for identity and the repercussions in anti-gay cultures. There are always two sides to the struggle, the battle that’s obvious and all of the hidden human things, like a mobius loop in which we’ve hidden ourselves and mapped our real identities to the world of anti-gays and people ‘passing’ for straight. There’s a clear difference for legal immigration – those people can’t come home to laugh about having been obvious all along in their own countries. That requires substantial democracy. I hope the recent global gay rights declarations through the UN change things everywhere. Gay is global. Peace and pride.