“Jackets like yours used to be a signal,” they said, “but now that’s just how all the girls your age dress.” Until that moment, I’d felt wonderfully, visibly, comfortably gay on my cute gay date. Even though I’ve been out for a while, people who want to accentuate age or experience will call me a “baby gay.” Once, literally while on a gay date, the person told me that they would never have clocked me as queer. I don’t consider myself femme, but partners who want to feel more masc than I am have called me femme anyway.
Even though I’m secure in my presentation and experience, I’ve ended up with partners who want me to know they’re somehow ahead of me. This has happened to me several times now, from people I’ve dated casually as well as those I’ve dated more seriously. Then they leverage that hierarchy against friends and partners to affirm something about themselves.
I think of the “gayer than thou” phenomenon as an inside-out version of the “oppression olympics.” Rather than the “race to the bottom” that happens when people try to position themselves as the Most Oppressed, here I see people inverting those same interpretations to create a hierarchy approaching an impossible pinnacle of queerness. Of course things try to sneak in around the edges.” It sounds silly - and it is - but this is the best way I can explain how remnants of homophobia sneak in against the grain of queer partnerships. “It’s horrible out there,” I tell myself, “and the inside of our little cell is so gay. Diffusion happens, as we know, against a gradient. I’ve always thought of relationships as being like cells: living organisms, self-contained by only by the thinnest membrane through which fragments of the larger culture can diffuse in strange, sometimes counterintuitive ways. In moments of generosity, I try to understand the impulse.
Sometimes it’s on the basis of their presentation other times it’s because of how long they’ve been out or how many other partners they’ve had or currently have. But sometimes, often in the context of dating and partnership, I’ve encountered folks who try to pull rank, to be “gayer than thou” however they can. It’s one thing to acknowledge and honor the vast variety of queer experiences and the different ways people have experienced marginalization and harm.