Police surveillance of homosocial meeting spaces first uncovered the existence of glory holes for scandalized cis heterosexuals back in 18th-century England, long before the Oscar Wilde trial turned sodomy into a scandal and homosexuality into an identity.Īccording to my highly scientific research, meaning I asked a straight colleague what came to mind when she heard the term “glory hole,” she explained that a certain generation of straight white women first heard the phrase during coverage of the 2007 arrest of Sen.
The idea of a hole in a partition of a public men’s restroom - at waist level, to put a penis in or gesture for another person to do so - has been linked to queer men in the public imagination since before the notion of queer identity existed. Queer outlets quickly decoded the recommendation for straights: The department was encouraging the use of glory holes. It suggested, for instance, that New Yorkers try new sexual practices, including "physical barriers, like walls, that allow sexual contact while preventing close face to face contact.” Scroll down to watch the whole thing: 1.Last month, in the midst of coronavirus quarantining, the New York City Health Department encouraged residents to be sexually creative to stay safe. Here are just a few of the questions posed in BuzzFeed's video. It shows that "LGBTQA" isn't just one thing it's as varied and unique as each individual person in it is. One of the easiest ways to see this discussion at play is by listening to gay men and lesbian women be utterly confused by what goes on in the world of the other. If gay men and queer women deal with different forms of societal oppression, trans people and lesbians are granted different sets of rights, and asexual men and bisexual women have different safe spaces, how can we lump them all together under one umbrella and call it a community? For example, bisexual women have different struggles with mental health than lesbians and deal with a completely different set of stereotypes including being labeled as greedy, slutty, and commitment-phobes. The term "LGBTQA community" can be useful for discussing minorities as a whole, but it can also be wildly innacurate to assume that everyone who is considered a part of it is going through exactly the same thing. Although lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and asexual people are often lumped together under one umbrella and called "the LGBTQA community," it's important to remember that not all people that fall under that umbrella have the same experiences - which is exactly what BuzzFeed's video drives home.
In a new video, " Lesbian Women Have Questions For Gay Men," BuzzFeed sends out a group of lesbian women to ask gay men questions about certain stereotypes associated with the gay male community, facets of gay male culture, and the most important question of all: Why do people think gay men and lesbians can't get along? The video itself is pretty funny, but it also gives rise to a much deeper conversation about each one of the letters in LGBTQA.