Is LGTBTQI a 'community’?


More we. Often LGBTQI people are said to be a ‘community’. Think I’ve asked here before - are they really a community? Does sexuality define a community? Or is this just another way to marginalise people who are a bit different, by saying they’re ‘all the same’? Patrick White first made me wonder about this, when he criticised the Mardi Gras as not representative of him, as a gay person. Hanna Gadsby makes the same point ironically, calling the LGBTQI community ‘her people’.

There are however groups of people in all walks of life with overlapping desires and interests. That’s something a bit different I think. Similarly as a straight white male, I think it’s important to understand the ways in which that category is real, without necessarily believing that it's a community too. That’s what I suspect irks people most, to be linked to categories or communities to which they don’t feel they belong. But at the same time we need to understand in what ways categories like that are also real, although not communities in the way we normally use that word. It’s more about minorities and majorities I think, not about communities.

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