Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a new trend: more and more boys are playing gay. By ‘playing gay,’ I mean that in the context of a playful joke, pairs of boys flirt with one another in front of their peers and/or pose as a gay couple in order to make people laugh.
I’ll give you an example from my practicum last week. We were in gym class and my mentor teacher asked everyone to find an opposite sex partner. Friendship groups in this class tend to be divided by gender (it’s a Grade 4/5 class), and the teacher wanted to encourage play between the boys and girls. Two boys resisted the instruction and paired up with each other. I asked them nonchalantly, “Are one of you identifying as female today?” Each boy pointed at the other and said, “He’s the girl.” But then one of the boys had a better idea. “We’re gay,” he declared. He put his arm over the other boy’s shoulder. His friend did the same and agreed, “Yeah, we’re gay.” They stood there proudly with grins on their faces. “It’s okay to be gay!” I said as I walked away. They made sure their classmates saw their display of gayness in what appeared to be a class-clown type gag.
When I taught teenagers a year ago, two boys did something similar, although they took it a bit further by taking on an effeminate manner and flirting with one another to make the rest of the class laugh. On the rare occasions that I have hung around with twenty-something straight men, I’ve seen them do the same thing.
The question for me is…what’s so funny? Could this be interpreted as a sort of drag show, where instead of performing an alternate gender, one performs an alternate sexuality? Are they playing with the possibilities of what could be? If so, is it transgressive humour? Or is it funny because being a gay man is considered an absurdity. Perhaps its supposed to be funny because the two players couldn’t possibly actually be gay, because gay couldn’t possibly exist in their immediate context; it only exists in the news or in popular culture…right? (A lot of people still seem to think this is true!).
I’m leaning toward this last explanation. I once overheard some preteen girls on the bus giggling because they ‘were lesbians’ in gym class since they had to dance together. Another friend who was with them wasn’t laughing. “I don’t find it that funny,” she said, “because some people actually are lesbians.”
If the laughter is for all the wrong reasons, how does one respond as a teacher without censoring a student’s sexuality? Sometimes people say what we want to say, but frame it as a joke, because its safer that way. We can test out people’s responses without having to seriously accept the consequences. In this sense, it is important to let students play gay. If they are gay or think they might be, it’s a way to gauge their peers’ acceptance. As teachers, we can’t assume what a student’s sexuality is or will be. So maybe what matters more than the act of playing gay is the act of laughing at/with people who play gay. Maybe when this happens, it’s worth a discussion with the observers of the scene: why is this funny? Isn’t it okay to be gay? If the people playing gay get defensive (“No, no, we’re not actually gay”) then invite them into the conversation: would you find it embarrassing if someone perceived you as gay? Why?
My point is that I think we need to talk about the trend of laughing at people who are ‘gay for play’ and get to the bottom of what’s really going on.
Filed under: Practicum Tagged: | gay for play, gay jokes, playing gay
I’m unfortunately not joking when I say that I overheard a professor engage in this kind of joking today. After an academic panel discussion he used the word gay in the conext of the song with the lyrics “I feel pretty. Oh so pretty. Oh so pretty and witty and gay.” Then he announced that he didn’t mean gay in “that way,” and laughed uproariously to himself for several minutes. I replied sarcastically “Oh, of course. You wouldn’t want to be gay in THAT WAY.” Then I left, feeling disgusted that an academic at a progressive institution would do such a stupid thing.
I’m a 20-something butch, and I’ve seen lots of this type of behaviour from my friends and whatnot. I’ve never felt particularly disparaged, and I’ve done the reverse! I think it’s partially transgressive, especially for boys and men who experience a lot more pressure to appear hetero than females and partially mocking of the cultural taboo against homosexuality and against the expression of male affection and revealing being gay or affectionate to be harmless.
On the other hand, I get big laughs as an obviously butch person for playing hetero. People seem to find it funny that I’m willing to ape traditionally feminine attraction because there’s a risk in it for me, too! My masculinity is just as much at riskas the guys playing gay. It can go both ways!
Thanks for the insights, yondergen – you make some really good points!
I think that whether or not they’re actually questioning their sexuality, it’s often a way of testing the waters. Either asking “Would it be okay if I were gay?” or “How am I supposed to respond to people who are?”
As a little girl who was always desperate to be a little boy, I often slipped into boy roles in childhood games, and sometimes it was treated as a joke and other times it was just accepted because we needed a boy in our game and didn’t have any. This sounds potentially similar.