Here is Rick Perry talking to New Hampshire voters. Draw your own conclusions. I like the part where he gets really gay, around 2:45.
Note from Wayne: If you are a man and you have slept with Rick Perry or you can prove that Rick Perry hit on you, please contact me immediately at wbesen@truthwinsout.org. That little gay part that Evan alludes to at the 2:45 mark was just too much. It seemed like an unintentional crack in the alleged closet door. I heard many rumors down in Texas when I was recently in Houston. If you can confirm them, we’d like to hear from you.
[h/t Blue Texan]
Wow — that point at 2:45 was probably too gay for even Glee. Seems there was a small crack in the closet?
Wayne – Get your camera ready and start hanging out at the local gay bars where Gov. Perry is campaigning. There is a very good chance that you might have another John Paulk moment.
Holy Gaydar Batman!!!!! Mine went off the hook!!!
I want to start by saying that I’m active in the LGBTQ civil rights movement and a gay man. When I saw the description that Perry revealed a “crack in the closet door” at 2:45, I assumed that meant he alluded to being attracted to other men. Honestly, I am pretty offended that all it takes is a few gestures deemed effeminate to assume that someone might be gay. You all should know better than to play into those stereotypes.
Thank you Mark!!!
Mark:
I’m sorry you are offended, but you can’t deny reality. Rick Perry looked stereotypically G-A-Y. And it was not simply “a few gestures” as you wrongly charge. It was a few shocking gestures combined with a whole lot of discussion online about Perry’s behavior in Texas.
Next time Google “Rick Perry and Gay” and see what comes up.
Sorry guys, I won’t play the game of burying my head in the sand and denying what my eyes and ears tell me. You may not have faith in my Gaydar — but I certainly do and it rarely fails me.
Alonzo, I always respect your opinion. I just disagree with you on this one.
@Mark: Thank you for all the help, Concerntroll McGee.
Why feed into stereotypes?
Alonzo:
Stereotypes are sometimes based on a grain of truth. A large percentage of gay and lesbian people do not fit into the stereotype. However, many do and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There are also many straight people who can be perceived as gay, when they are not at all. I get that.
However, when you have Perry who is heavily rumored to be gay and walks around like Rambo — suddenly slide into that stereotype ONLY when he is seemingly drunk off his a*s, it raises questions about whether he is really gay and the booze let the real Rick Perry come out — if only for a moment.
Personally I reject all stereotypes, cleary others don’t and if they’re comfortable with that, so be it.
I didn’t see anything to suggest he was gay, stereotypically or otherwise. Wtf? It doesn’t seem that he was drunk, either, as several people here have said, without pointing me to anything that would show me that yes, he was drunk. This is how Rick Perry acts all the time. I usually enjoy articles here, but this one was so pointless and such a waste of my time that I had to comment here in order to save the five minutes from absolute meaningless. :( And really… people gesture, you know.
Leila, most of the internet disagrees.
Leila:
I can understand if you disagree with the gay gestures. However, to say that is how he acts all the time isn’t credible. He looked wasted.
In fact I saw Perry speak live at the Values Voter Summit a few weeks ago. So, I can call you on your b******t and say that I know first hand that is not how he “acts all the time.”
So WTF Leila? Who are you kidding?
The camp moment looked like Perry’s idea of how to retail a risqué line. He’s talking about expansion in a sissy voice to trip a little double entendre into the speech and then to ram home the ribaldry, adds a lewd gesture. That’s his little joke about Cain. Cain’s 9% expansion is just a big ol’ cock tease, apparently.
I do have a problem with the Perry’s stereotype acting. His manner of camping it up seems to me a performance of self-deprecation. It’s like he’s saying, ‘look at me, I’m being a clown,’ to take the edge off the stiletto thrust.
I suspect he doesn’t have a high opinion of LGBT folk aside from a grudging appreciation of Paul Lynde.
I trust Wayne’s gaydar, because mine is pretty good too. Every time I tell my partner that ‘someone is gay’, he usually says something like, ‘oh how do you know that…’. I say, ‘trust me’ and 9 times out of 10, if we’re able to find out at all, I’m right.
Over the weekend, I was watching a show on Bio called I Survived: Beyond and Back; about people who had near death experiences. One case was a teenage boy who tried to die by suicide and 3 or 4 words into his first sentence, I thought to myself that he was gay. Sure enough, he revealed later that he was gay and after his first relationship ended very badly, he took an overdose of medication. During his NDE, he was told ‘on the other side’ that he was perfect the way he was and had to go back as his time on earth was not up. He was revived by medical personnel and his experience gave him a new lease on life-literally. I’m not here to argue with anyone about the existence or not of an ‘Afterlife’, but I wish ALL lgbt teens as well as adults could learn that they are perfect the way they are and don’t need to almost die to find that out.
I strongly disagree that there is a set of behaviors and gestures that indicate someone’s sexual orientation–also known as “Gaydar.” Sexual orientation is about who you’re attracted to, not how you shrug your shoulders or move your hands.
I understand that this is an unpopular position that usually earns me eye-rolls from my LGBT friends, or figurative eye-rolls from strangers on the internet. I only encourage you to consider that when people within the LGBT community perpetuate stereotypes that come from homophobes outside of our community, all we’re doing is taking people out of one box and making them crawl right back into another.
Stereotypes are usually based in a grain of truth. A significant portion of the gay male community is identifiable based on mannerisms and timbre, and it is cross-cultural. It is not a bad thing, except that many gay men are ashamed of these characteristics because they are culturally discouraged from demonstrating them (to put it mildly). I suspect we will find out that all of the traits that many of us pick up on our “gaydar”, even the subtle ones, will one day be found to be genetic or in vitro in origin.
Mark – the reality is that we are both right. There are many gay people that do not fit into the stereotype. However, it is undeniable that many people do. To prove my point, here are the results of a scientific study on the “gay voice”:
University of Toronto Magazine, June 2002
“Why do some gay men “sound” gay? After three years of research, linguistics professors Henry Rogers and Ron Smyth may be on the verge of answering that question. After identifying phonetic characteristics that seem to make a man’s voice sound gay, their best hunch is that some gay men may subconsciously adopt certain female speech patterns. They want to know how men acquire this manner of speaking, and why – especially when society so often stigmatizes those with gay-sounding voices. Rogers and Smyth are also exploring the stereotypes that gay men sound effeminate and are recognized by the way they speak. They asked people to listen to recordings of 25 men, 17 of them gay. In 62 per cent of the cases the listeners identified the sexual orientation of the speakers correctly. Perhaps fewer than half of gay men sound gay, says Rogers. “The straightest-sounding voice in the study was in fact a gay man, and the sixth gayest-sounding voice was a straight man.”
You’re incorrect Mark. Anyone who is gay or has spent a lot of time around us knows that there are certain physical cues that a significant portion (not all of course) of gay men have. There was also a recent study done that showed that *heterosexuals* were fairly good at picking out the gay men in a set of photographs of men-a mixture of both hetero and homo (not even any live interaction). Researchers think that unconsciously, the heterosexuals viewing the photographs may have been picking up on certain ‘stress’ lines in the facial muscles that are common in gays which come from the low grade stress of having to be on guard in your surroundings or to actually hide in fear if you live in a particularly hostile part of the country (or world).
This is a bit off topic, but shows how many aspects of our lives are manifested in our bodies.
I have a friend who is an acupuncturist and anyone who has ever had their pulses read by a master of Chinese medicine, is astounded at the things they can tell you about your life and health. My friend was going to an advanced pulse reading class and asked me if I would like to go as a guinea pig. The master would read our pulses, make his notes and then the students would take turns reading our pulses and try to find the same details that he did. (No he didn’t say that i was gay).
One of the ‘guinea pig’ people in the class was a light skinned black man with long ropey (Rastafarian?) hair. While reading his pulses the master asked him if he had Jewish ancestry. My first thought was, oh gimme a break. Sure enough, the guy said he had a Jewish grandfather. Of course everyone wanted to know how he knew that. The teacher discovered that at a certain pulse position and level (there are 3 levels that they read), he found a certain type of stress that was common to people of eastern European Jewish ancestry; he assumed that it was a biological inheritance from centuries of living in constant fear of pogroms and other forms of abuse and murder.
I don’t see why having something as deep and profound as our sexual and affectional orientation manifested in some way in our physical bodies is so hard to accept.
There are grains of truth to stereotypes of gay men – and that is absolutely fine. Alonzo is right, I’m ok with that and totally comfortable.
Simply put. I know people who are completely invisible if they want to be, many of them – but about a third of the gay men I’ve known through my life fit the stereotypes. It’s a fact, I have no problem with it – and I hardly see it as rejecting or accepting. What is, is. I’ve also known some very stereotypically gay guys who didn’t want to be gay and fought very hard for many years to suppress it — and in every case it came out if they drank – and it came out in behavior like Gov. Perry’s.
I only discovered that there were rumors recently, I talked to friends from TX after his campaign started, and they told me there were (and not only are they straight, they are heavily involved in an anti-gay church — cognitive dissonance being what it is on all sides, they are still my friends) yet they had heard it.
I don’t particularly have gaydar, never did — but in this case I’m very afraid that if he were elected by some fluke, we’d have a self-hating homosexual in the White House — and that would bode the worst for us that I can imagine.
Regards,
Reyn
Gaydar: the uncanny ability of a gay person to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that a mincing homosexual stereotype is indeed gay.
Watching this I lean more towards drunk than gay. I think what he is really doing is a Southern political style where they plaster a big smile on their face and deliver some folksy nonsense in a soft, silky, almost detached voice. This is a particularly tiresome version of it. At one point (:41) he seems like he is almost trying to channel George W. Bush.