the gay capitalist

Over on Queercents, Marc posted about how he feels ostracized by the gay community for his beliefs. Actually he says LGBT community, but I’m going to distill that down to ‘gay’ to simplify my argument. I commented there, but I wanted to address a particular point at greater length.

Defining the gay community

“Gay community” is just a simple way to refer to all gay people. It doesn’t tell you anything about those people except that they’re gay. It doesn’t tell you whether the individuals are flaming queens, misogynist dykes, struggling waiters, or rich businesswomen. It defines a group of people by one attribute – sexual orientation.

Now this may come as a shock to some of you, but not all gay people hold the same ideals. You can not legitimately ascribe an idea or value to “gays” or the “gay community”, because we are individuals with different ideas and values. When you attempt to do so, what you really mean to do is narrow the group based on ideological criteria. When people say “gays want so-and-so”, what they usually mean is gay liberals want so-and-so.

The package deals of American politics

It’s true that most gays are liberals. This is not surprising, considering that a large and powerful base of conservatives vocally disapprove of gays, while liberals tend to be accepting of gays.

Unfortunately, American liberalism is a package deal of both good and bad ideas, and many gays accept the whole package deal just because it includes a “gays are ok” element. This means that many gays become liberals to support equal rights for gays and freedom from government in the personal sphere (speech, religion), but support socialist economic policies as a result.

American conservatism is another unfortunate package deal of both good and bad ideas. In this case you get freedom in the economic sphere, but it comes with government intervention in the personal sphere in an attempt to enforce “traditional social norms and values”.

Those of us who want freedom in both spheres become politically libertarian (I’m including all gays who reject socialist economics in this definition for simplicity). This requires significant effort, though. If you’ve even considered the economic sphere/personal sphere dichotomy and you know what libertarianism is, you’ve already thought more about politics than most people do. Figuring out whether you agree with a lesser-known political philosophy requires reading about philosophy, economics, the history of government policies around the world, and the effects of these policies. Most people would rather see the latest Britney Spears or Paris Hilton scandal than worry about difficult topics like this.

Values and relationships

I’ve written before about how love is based on values. The same applies to friendships, though. My political views are more than just a hodgepodge of different issues – they are the fourth branch of a philosophy that is based on a particular set of ideas regarding metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. They reflect fundamental values – and a fundamental difference of values with most of the gay community. You can’t build a friendship without shared values, and the depth of that friendship will be proportional to the degree of shared values. It’s easy for any gay person to build a friendship with another gay person on the basis of sexual orientation. It’s a shallow, superficial attribute, but it gives you certain shared values. For the friendship to go deeper, though, there has to be something more.

Gays who reject socialist economics are a minority within a minority. For those of us in this camp, social opportunities are limited due to a difference of values, which leads to feelings of ostracism. I think this is where Marc is coming from in his post. I felt the same way for a long time.

Tribalism

I later decided that my desire to fit into a group of people with whom I had nothing in common except sexual orientation was just an example of tribalism. People tend to form themselves into groups which have little to do with ideology and everything to do with attributes they have no control over, typically race or nationality. These are the people who define themselves by their white heritage, or black heritage, or hispanic heritage, despite the fact that they had no control over it and can’t claim credit for it – the achievements of their ancestors are not theirs, and they didn’t choose what race they were born into. These are the people who define themselves by their American nationality, and then tell you how they want to keep everyone else from immigrating here like their own ancestors did. Tribalists define themselves by superficial physical attributes, because they lack either the desire or the capacity to dig deeper.

If you’ve read this far, then this is my appeal to you, whether you’re gay, straight, black, white, whatever – dig deeper! You are more than your race and your sexual orientation and your nationality – those aren’t even important because you had no control over them. Define yourself by your ideas, find people with similar ideas, and turn those ideas into actions. If we define ourselves by external attributes, we shouldn’t be surprised when people don’t look past them.