I find this fascinating. When people fake being gay, for whatever reason, I can’t seem to get enough information about what motivates this kind of behavior.

Very few gay people can get a movie deal…or book deal for that matter…into the mainstream, and yet stupid movies like I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, sail through without a problem. I see wonderful gay books being either turned down or shunned, and garbage with no real gay authenticity makes headlines and gains tons of praise. The irony of all this, the fact that people who aren’t gay can exploit and capitalize on gay people, absolutely amazes me. You would be amazed at how many times I’ve had to fight straight women editors for trying to change something that is gay and authentic in one of my books because the editor thought she knew better than I did about being gay.

I’ve even read where younger people fake being gay in order to be accepted or be cool in certain social circles. Personally, I think the gay community at large needs to pull together and find one good strong spokesperson. Someone who is there to speak up whenever something offensive happens. Because when you are a gay person, there is absolutely nothing more offensive or insulting or hurtful, than having a straight person tell you what you are suppose to be like or what you are supposed to be.

I read about this in the recent article below in Think Progress. So I can’t be the only one who feels this way. I’m copying and pasting, verbatim, so you can see what I’m talking about in case you can’t click or don’t feel like clicking the link.

You can read the entire piece here if you choose to do so.

I find this quote particularly interesting, and true:

And they push actual gay people out of the frame.

Dear Pop Culture, Enough With the Faux-Gays
By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 6, 2011 at 1:37 pm

The CW, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that its next comedy will be about a young woman who marries her best friend to get around rules about roommates that would forbid said friend from moving into the main character’s “swanky New York co-op.” And I’ve had enough of fake pop culture gay people.

It as one thing to give us I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which managed to be about the unfairness of two sets of laws, one that made it difficult for widowers to preserve pension benefits and another that denied gay couples the same rights available to straight ones, while also putting its two somewhat boorish male characters in a position that forced them to sympathize more deeply with gay people and to understand their own gender roles better. This, by contrast, is about maintaining access to a nice apartment, a kind of fraud that doesn’t exactly help the cause of law-abiding real gay people. The characters get a domestic partnership even though New York is a marriage equality state. And it’s a fake lesbian fantasy, written and acted, in this case, by Sarah Rue, who is in real life married to a man.

It’s a lot worse than that still not-great storyline on Community where Britta fancies herself sophisticated for having a lesbian friend without ever actually ascertaining if said friend is gay (which says volumes about how deep that friendship actually is)—only to find out said friend is doing the exact same thing. But they have some things in common. They’re stories that treat gay people and gay rights struggles like commodities, cool and credibility to be appropriated when necessary for wacky storytelling. Fake gay people let straight people try on tolerance without ever actually having it tested. And they push actual gay people out of the frame. Networks and studios can do better. It’s easy to engage with real gay people than to make up eccentric fake ones.