Labels are curious. We as Americans and as human beings prefer to have a label attached to everything. In ways, we tend to assume that everything needs a label.
When we shop, the stores all show us products that are as varied as the American melting pot and nearly as interesting, but they do something that America cannot: put clean, efficient, and accurate labels on everything. Step into a dress shop, and they have evening gowns, formal dresses, skirts, pantsuits, and so forth. Wal-Mart offers us all types of foods: Mexican, Asian, TV dinners, the ever-popular soups, and cold cuts, to name a few. It isn't often we can make these labels stick to real people.
When we take this philosophy and apply it to people, it is a disaster. Homosexual men are called gay, though more often than not we are not happy. We are called queer, though there are quite a few of us who really aren’t unusual. We’re even called faggots, though I don’t understand how we can be compared to a bundle of sticks, and lesbians are dykes (do they hold back water?), lipsticks, butches and so forth.
Labels don’t stick well to skin.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2010.