Gay Culture

I see that the Vatican is about to release its document that will explicitly bar gay men (women obviously can’t apply anyway) from entering the priesthood. Apparently it will also bar those who "support ‘the so-called gay culture’" as well. Um, what is this ‘gay culture’ of which they speak? It seems to me that it is one of those silly phrases that apparently has meaning, but which, when examined closely, disappears up its own rhetoric. It’s like that other fabulous beast: the ‘gay community’. Both phrases conjure up an image of a monolithic club to which all gay people are automatically members. Message to the Vatican: gay people come in all shapes and sizes, with all sorts of beliefs and behaviours. In short, we are indistinguishable from the rest of humanity because, shock, horror, we are humans too.

 

No-one in their right minds talks about "the left-handed culture" or the "redhead community" as though the group of people that are left-handed or the group of people that are redheads share anything other than the attribute that defines their group. A group is not the same as a community or a culture – but this is clearly a concept that has escaped the authors of the Vatican’s document.