Louise wrote:
No, definitely not! But it does say to me that if you're going to write about Muslims, you should learn a bit about what the different groups
are,
and make sure that the descriptions you've got for them are right for the group you're writing about. Or to make the decision to throw all that information to one side, if you feel the story justifies it. But you
should
have the information to begin with.
And this is where the problem occurs. I don't currently have any close gay friends, having lost track of the ones I knew at college. So how am I supposed to find out? Gay literature, even that written by gay men, is itself likely to be an unreliable source since it will presumably also be designed to titillate and/or be interesting and exciting rather than explain dull everyday life.
Um, not always, and I think not in most cases. Armistead Maupin, for instance, writes about gay men who don't live much like I do, being in California, but "Sure of You" isn't particularly titillating or thrilling, it's just about a man living with HIV-- his books are also pretty popular with other people than gay men, too. There are quite a few anthologies of sci-fi stories (whose titles I can't remember cause they're all along the lines of "The X Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction), which, while they contain some titillating stuff, also contain thought-provoking sci-fi. Yesterday night I taped "The Wedding Banquet," which is again not a terribly titillating or thrilling story, just about a Chinese man trying to reconcile his homosexuality with his parents' desire for grandchildren; there are documentaries about gay life in the Fifties which are also interesting. Anyway, what I'm saying is that if you go past the porn, there's a lot of writing and film about how different sorts of gay men live.
How are the majority of gay men going to react to being asked about the intricate details of their daily personal by those white middle class women that Neil was talking about?
Depends on the gay man :-). And the white middle class woman :-).
And on this subject I haven't enough knowledge to comment
But there are ways of finding out if you want to...
I think Tom might object :-)
Your partner, I assume :-)? Oh, fair enough then...
Shane
"The light that brings pain came from those rocks. I saw movement there. When night comes we will circle that place and destroy them that would harm us." --Chel
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Shane Little