Zhao

Vincent Zhao
Jennifer Rodrick
Queer Studies 115
19 October 2016
Project Space 1st Draft
Queer people should not feel the need to live up to a gay standard. In our society, there
are irrational ideas of how queers should act due to their sexual orientation. The space around us
has forced queers to conform to gay behavior due to how society portrays queers through
stereotypical images, queer notions, and the pressure that society puts on them.
A prime example of societal pressure is the idea of the stereotypical gay man that should
be found within every gay man. They are expected to be girly, flamboyant, gossipy men that
essentially act like a woman. There are many instances found in movies that portray gay men as
the girlish type such as Legally Blonde. In the movie, Legally Blonde, there is a scene where the
main character reveals that a man is gay, but he denies it to save his bosss behind. However,
when the man denied he was gay, his boyfriend stood up in front of the courtroom because he
was offended and walked out of the courtroom in a dramatic manner with a woman like walk.
This movie portrayal of a gay men is both stereotypical as well as offensive because it creates a
common idea of how all gay men should act, dramatic and woman like. The complexity of
labels and their meanings and mens interactions with gay community/ies makes the effective
addressing of health issues for gay men all the more of a challenge supports my point in which
gay men are given labels because of how society sees them. The main character came up with the
notion that the witness was gay because he knew what kind of shoes were in for the season and
what wasnt. The main character used this evidence to trick the witness into revealing his sexual

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orientation. This example is not very fair for all gay men because it assumes that each one knows
everything about fashion. This stereotyping is what creates false labels and shapes the queer
community, either negatively or positively.
A common example of queer conformity is the normalization of workers in a professional
work setting. In an International Development Workplace, everyone is expected to be a normal
worker, or in this case, straight. However, there are always exceptions to this when queers are
hired into a such a workplace. As a result, the queers are also expected to act straight because it
is part of the professionalism of working at large corporations. The heteroprofessionalism is a
tactic used to unify workers and create an equal space. However, this tactic undermines the queer
community because it hides the queer identity within a workplace. This essentially forces
workers, queer or not, to conform to the general workplace. The general workplace where
everyone must be the same to minimize distractions and amplify work productivity. I really had
to hide my sexuality is an excerpt from Laura Mamos article, Queer Intimacies and Structural
Inequalities, where a worker describes how he must hide his identity otherwise he will not
receive the same training benefits as his fellow coworkers. The lack of equal treatment in this
text resonates within me because I have been in similar positions before. As a I child, I was
bullied very often due to my ethnicity, size, and behavior. I was different from the majority of my
school because I was one out of the few asian boys that attended and because of that, I was
treated differently and excluded from many groups. However, I had found one group where I
could be myself and that is where the problem at hand lies. When queers are forced to conform in
a workplace, it is the same as singling them out and forcing them to find someone alike to them.
This creates a problem because the queers will only be able to find safety within a small group

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and it will cause an invisible divide between queer and straight community, unknowingly
blocking the minority out.
Since queers are attracted to the same sex, it is obvious to say that they are unable to
reproduce under normal circumstances. This truism forms another notion about the queer
community, that they must adopt if they have kids. However, having children as a queer couple
doesnt necessarily require adoption because as times advance, the amount of ways in conception
also expand. In this day and age, gay men can find surrogates for their offspring while the lesbian
women can be a recipient of a sperm to birth the baby to life. These options are just a few of the
ways queer couples can do to give new life to a baby. Another option is to simply live a life
without a child but society dictates that a gay couple adopts children. This pressure by society
also influences the choices queer couples make because what if one queer couple had a child and
another did not? The two couples are compared side by side even though they probably dont
have the same agenda, but that is the result of queer stereotyping and queer expectations.
Queer couples are not to be labeled to specific aspects of being gay because that
undermines the person and the very idea of being gay. Being gay isnt one specific thing where
everyone must be the same to identify as gay but simply a gender preference by choice, or not.
To this day, the queer community is constantly being shaped by our society and the expectations
we have of them. Whether we shape them positively or not, it is plain to see that queers are
constantly under a microscope, being observed and labeled, expected to act differently.