The problem with you middle-class gay guys is, you pass for white. You move to the metropolitan gay centres, and you're more or less closeted--"private", you'd call it--when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you've got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That's how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that?. Ethan Mordden
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The problem with you middle-class gay guys is, you pass for white. When I first came out, I was living in a small town in the South, and I went to this gay bar that was full of big burly men. They didn't really like me because I was wearing tailored clothes and probably had money. They would tell me to take my shoes off before I walked through the door. Once inside, I would see men like me almost every night.

They were married with children, and they were the most well-dressed men there. They would act strange around me, speak to me in code, and never tell their friends how close they were to coming out. It wasn't until much later that I learned what "passing" meant.

It's when one person tries to be someone else so that society will treat them differently. For example, if I wanted to go to a nice restaurant with well-dressed black people, I wouldn't want to sit at a table with someone who looked like he didn't belong there because he looked poor or uneducated. The idea of passing is strange. It's strange because it's so much easier for us as gay people to act straight than it is for us as straight people to act gay.

Straight people don't have to try so hard so they can feel accepted by society. Society doesn't care if you're gay or straight--the only thing that matters is if you're doing your job properly and being productive. You could live your whole life as a flamboyant queen but society wouldn't care if you weren't working or being productive enough to earn your rent money each month. Once I realized this, it really changed how I viewed myself as a man and the way I interacted with other men during social situations at bars or parties where everyone was dressed up nicely and seemed quite happy with how things were going.

Before realizing this concept, I had always thought that everyone deserved equal rights regardless of their sexual orientation but now it seemed more obvious why some people might have more privileges than others just because their skin colour was light brown instead of dark black or because they were married with money in the bank. I found this quote by Audre Lorde during one of my first attempts at growing out my hair past my shoulders where I would comb it back flat on top of my head so that it would frame my face better when standing next to women with short hair who had more volume at the

Source: How Long Has This Been Going On?

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