From the section in chapter 4 about gay white racism.
Before I met Mike, one of the websites I used to find men to date was gayjews.net. In the end I didn’t have a great deal of luck; as I think about it, in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever actually dated a Jewish guy. Perhaps I was mirroring my father’s choice to marry a non-Jew? Perhaps the exotic became the erotic and I was attracted to the foreign? Whatever the reason, I’ve always tended to go for beefy midwestern blonds rather than Jews. (There is not a great overlap between the two populations.) Mike, on the other hand, who is essentially a beefy midwestern blond, has always had a thing for Jews—one might call him a matzah queen—and so the two of us go well together.
In any case, I believe I went on dates with three men I met on gayjewsnet. One I remember nothing about except that he was a lawyer and I spent the whole date making lawyer jokes, which had to endear me to him. Another used a word I didn’t know in an email to me, which had never happened to me before, and so I burned with passion for him, right up until the moment, ten minutes after we started making out, when he said, “Um, I’m not really into this,” and left my apartment. The third had as his profile photograph a picture of the American flag, which I thought was hilarious. Then I went on a date with him and it turned out he’d just been to his first Log Cabin Republicans meeting. The date went downhill from there; the next day I added to my online profiles the sentence, “You don’t have to be political, but if you are you should lean to the left.” A month or two later some guy emailed me and said, “I’m a Republican, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to stand up for my rights.” I wrote him back and wished him luck but said I thought we probably weren’t right for each other. What I wanted to say was, “I don’t give a fuck if you can stand up for your rights. I want to know whether you can stand up for other people’s rights.”
When I was a kid—forgive me but I’m about to have a what-I-learned-in-therapy moment; I promise it’ll be short—my mother was too busy writing a civil-rights book to pay much attention to me and my father was too busy flying around the country trying civil-rights cases to pay much attention to me. What I learned from this was that other people in trouble are more important than I am—why else would my parents give themselves to them instead of me? The problem is that I still think that. The further problem is that I fault other people for thinking differently.
So when I get angry at the gay community for being intensely self-involved, am I being fair? Or am I just projecting the worldview I developed to protect myself as a kid onto other people when really I can’t reasonably apply it to anybody but myself? Or both?
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