Tyra Investigates Bigotry Within The LGBT Community

Today Tyra conducted a social “experiment” in which six people from the LGBT community — each identifies his/her sexuality differently — were asked how they see one another. Their answers were surprisingly judgmental.

The six people involved included: a lipstick lesbian, a butch lesbian, a “masculine” gay man, a “feminine” gay man, a drag queen, and bisexual man (their own self-identified labels, not mine). As with similar social experiments on Tyra, the participants were placed in a “kingdom” and were asked to assign roles within that kingdom (queen, king, pauper, jester, etc.), to create a sort of pecking order that would mirror that within the LGBT community. The purpose of all that was to facilitate a discourse about how some gay people feel that they’re above, or better than, other gay people, based solely on their individual sexualities (example: none of the participants thought too highly of the bisexual guy, because he hasn’t picked a side, or the drag queen, whom they viewed more as a clown than entertainer).

It was definitely interesting to hear their honest opinions, but I found it strange that — even in regular life, outside of this fictional kingdom — a group of people who don’t fit into societal norms, are prone to categorizing people, and using labels/assigning meanings to them. Even weirder was the lack of humor involved, and that the title of “queen” went to the lipstick lesbian, and not the drag queen.

 
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