Ask the Flying Monkey! (June 1, 2009)

Have a question about gay male entertainment? Ask the Monkey! (Please include your city and state and/or country.)

Q: Did I miss a meeting? When was it decided to change the commonly used reference “GLBT” to “LGBT”?  Every time I hear LGBT used, it’s like the person slows down to deliberately not accidently say the long-used GLBT. -- Michael

Photo credit: Rainer Elstermann/Getty Images

A: It wasn’t a meeting; it was a memo. Check your inbox.

I’ve heard two theories on the acronym change: some say the change was deliberate, to give more prominence to lesbians who – let’s face it – are too often afforded second-class status in the GLBT community. Other people have told me that in certain parts of the country LGBT has always been the accepted moniker, and the rest of us are just … wrong.

The Monkey is torn. On one hand, I am very sympathetic to the idea that lesbians and lesbian concerns are too often ignored. On the other hand, I have developed an extremely low tolerance for political correctness within the GLBT community.

Years ago, I joined a GLBT social group, and one of the members argued with a straight face that since women only make 70 percent of what men make, the female members of the group should only have to pay 70 percent of the membership dues. When some of us argued that that was, quite simply, insane (especially since I was making $500 a month at the time), we were accused of sexism.

I quit the group shortly after that.

Q: I was raised a Trekkie, so I've shared other GLBTQI Trekster's pain at promises of representation followed by new frontiers of going where we'd all been before. I knew going into the new Star Trek movie that GLBTQI characters had once again been left out, but then in a bar fight in Iowa, Kirk calls another guy a “cupcake”; the same guy later uses the term against Kirk.  Both are insinuating less then manhood in the other by calling them gay by a different name.  Am I reading too much into this? – Chelsea, Texas

A: Probably. I agree there’s a vague whiff of the usual macho male bullcrap here, and it’s sad that they portray that as still existing even in the 22^nd century. But hey, we gotta pick our battles, right?

Then again, I do find myself getting increasingly annoyed with how often American movies make their male hero a cocky, arrogant ***hole. In the new movie, the new Kirk crossed that line too often for my taste.

Chris Pine as Captain Kirk: "Cupcake" or "arrogant a**hole?"

But the larger issue is about Star Trek’s general progressiveness, which has been slowly leaching out of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision for decades now. Star Trek can still be very entertaining – although I guess I liked the latest movie a lot less than most people – but it hasn’t been cutting edge, or even particularly socially relevant, for a long time. Why? Well, because it became a massive movie and TV “franchise” for Paramount. Duh!

Oh, and Chelsea, did you not get the memo either? It’s “LGBT” now!