"Funny Like I'm A Clown?"

I guess this is kind of a follow-up to my earlier post about the school, but this week I keep noticing something in my classes. Like, in this week’s Isms Lab we shared our instances of confronting or not confronting isms in our everyday lives. I shared my non-story of non-confrontation, and I picked up on something that I’ve noticed before in other classes. Many times when I talk in front of my classmates or give presentations, I am met with a lot of…I guess, smiles and laughing and aww-ing? Which I always think is strange because I don’t consider myself to be all that charismatic or anything. But I will honestly say things in what I consider a normal tone for myself, and my classmates tend to respond in a humored way. I mean, not laughing at me, per se, but…I feel like they are kind of laughing at the way I talk and my gesticulations and all that. It all kind of makes me feel like a spectacle. Like is my mere presence really that funny?

Does that make any sense?

The point I’m getting to is that I feel like I’m treated differently because of the way I apparently present myself. It makes me think that if I acted in way that was less, say, stereotypically gay, then I wouldn’t be met with such humored reactions. The more I think about it the more it bothers me because I question how seriously I can really be taken. What if I was giving a sales pitch for my company or relaying some scientific findings; would I be taken as seriously as a heterosexual-looking man? I kind of doubt it.

There seems to be a notion of gay mannerisms = funny, which is certainly a less insidious form of homophobia than others, but I think it’s still a form nonetheless. The good social worker in me always wants to call out my classmates and say something like, “I can’t help but notice that you all look really amused by me right now? Are you reacting to something I’m saying?”

I experience this as a microaggression partly because I don’t think that people react consciously to me in this way. We’re certainly taught that it’s funny to see a man act like a woman because, well, what could be more zany and backwards than that? Not that I think I act like a woman, but I know it just takes a flick of my wrist to get a laugh out of people. I don’t know. I’m all over the place on this one.