I think that, while we are still a community, we often don't realize the journey we take as individuals, which isn't as homogeneous as people might want to believe. I remember in my day and my surroundings, my version of "not that kind of gay" meant that I wasn't that guy that was fondling children, or that guy that accosted any good looking straight twink in a bar and paid him twenty bucks for a blowjob. Of course, this was in surroundings where you knew of people going to parks and beating up the gays, because they then would come to school or around the neighborhood and brag about it. It was only after I started maturing on the subject and taking it seriously as something that just was, that I knew the difference between a pedophile and a gay man, or the acts of desperation all humans are subject to at one point or another.
When I finally came out and started searching for my truth, I went through so many phases it was ridiculous. Bouncing from straight acting to flamboyant, to politically active to hedonistically slutting it up. I picked and chose alot, acquired and let go in so many forms. But I most often felt like an outsider among outsiders because I would see how the factions within our community shaded each other, and basically lived out the same dynamic that is prevalent when we talk of gay/straight relations. Though, in an most ethnic households like my own, acting straight or not also determined how hard you would have it. It meant the difference between walking unharmed or getting beat up and bullied. I think when some young gay boys watch all that and then are confronted with being gay in this environment, it screws with your mind.
In the black community there is something we like to call Uncle Tom syndrome which, int he context of racial relations, usually is applied to someone who 'whitens' themselves up in order to appease the ruling white class. It's a another topic entirely, but I do see strands of that when we deal with each other.
Acting straight or acting gay, people who are uncomfortable with themselves usually reach out and influence their surroundings to mask their own insecurities about life and their role in it, rearranging it to fit their narrow view of what their world should be, or what it shouldn't.
Even in our world, among our kind, we'll always have to deal with people who haven't experienced our lives as we have. Being gay doesn't stop certain individuals from being narrow minded pricks.
I'm always laughing when people call other people bottoms, for instance, to their face even. Like the old argument that you're not really gay if you are the poker instead of the pokee. Really? But then I realize that most of the people who use this terminology are bottoms. Tops naturally don't mind a bottom for some odd reason.
I prefer people acting naturally: I propose this could be thing. Naturally Acting Gays. Gays who can at times act one way or the other way without having an existential crisis and making the rest of the community suffer for it....cuz those bitches are tired.
Edit: lol N.A.G. I just noticed that.
