Quick Note on Whininess

I'm here checking up on my Google Reader when I stumble across this lil gem from Towleroad.

Apparently, some guy wore a cut-off T-shirt to his gym in California with "I need a man or a date, serious inquiries only" on it and had his gym membership revoked. Naturally, I decided to go read the comments to see what the gays who read Towleroad had to say about it. True to form, it was mostly split between reasonable people who admitted that wearing that shirt was incredibly retarded and that the guy probably deserved it, and those who cried wolf at what they see as another instance of the supposed "double standard" that exists for gays, as though a similar shirt worn by a straight guy would not garner complaints from women who felt objectified when they are trying to work out.

As someone who goes to the gym fairly often, I can tell you that even without a t-shirt explicitly stating someone's intentions, it is not often that I can go without being confronted with at least one troll who leers at me all through my workout or flashes himself at me in the sauna. This guy said he did it as a gag, but come on. What do you expect the reaction will be when you basically wear a craigslist ad on your shirt advertising your desire to meet someone? That's gross and troll-like. Guys often (rightfully) feel uncomfortable in the locker rooms because there are always dirty old men hanging around longer than necessary; doing something like this does nothing to remove that feeling, and in fact, probably just makes even more people think gays are dirty trolls who come to the gym with the intention to find a date rather than just work out like everyone else.

And I can't stand these stupid people who post on everything on Towleroad crying about how we're so damn oppressed and how this guy should sue the gym and win a huge settlement (which would never happen, given that someone called the gym and found out that he threatened them). I wonder whether he did that after they asked him to remove the shirt. Just because gays have faced oppression and still do in a lot of cases, does not mean we are entitled to wear inappropriate t-shirts and expect that everyone just let us do whatever we want lest we cry prejudice. The real double standard is thinking that you can wear something like that while saying that we're just like everyone else. Obviously, this is not to say that all gays are dirty trolls. I don't go to the gym to pick people up (except maybe my abs instructor...;)

People like this give as bad a name to gays as the old straight men who leer at girls asses as they run on the treadmills or ellipticals. Leave the trolling to Craigslist and the working out to the gym.