I’m so gay (allegedly)

It’s not the first time i’ve been accused of homosexuality. I’ve never really been one for all those big bloke-ish macho things like football, rugby, snooker, cricket, in fact anything that involves having a ball speeding towards your head at high speed or getting kicked.

I was always drawn to to the girls table at school, their conversations were much more interesting and I learnt a great deal of useful stuff by listening to their complaints about the boys.

I seem to confuse even hardened homosexuals seasoned Gaydar – I’ve lost count of the times a good looking guy has interrogated “are you sure you're not Gay?”

My sexuality is complicated. I’ve always maintained I’m a lesbian fire fighter trapped in a gay Pâtissier’s body .

Despite the cliches about real men that don’t eat quiche, the fact that vegan men have been shown to be more ‘sexually robust’ and virile than meat eaters has left me never considering that my veganism was something that casted question marks on my sexuality. I think like that without any recognition of the irony, that in reality, the love of men results in homosexual men often being more virile and ‘sexualy robust’ than most straight, heterosexual men.

A professor of law at Cornell however also noticed that delusions of vegan robustness are clearly naive of me despite my general dislike of mankind, penises (apart from my own) and hairy, smelly testosterone scented bodies. The Professor says vegans are so gay.

She draws similarities between Gay Rights and Vegan Rights (as opposed to animal rights) and their right to choose a lifestyle that they feel comfortable with.

Estimations of numbers of gay people in the UK and USA is 3-10% depending on how you ask the question (have you ever? are you currently?)

That figure is similar to estimations of vegetarianism, although you can get the figure up to about 45% if you ask “have you ever?” or “do you occassionally?”

The highest estimations of pure vegans is only around 1% in France it’s much much lower, so then no surprise to discover that VeggiePride originated in France, which is exactly what Sherry F Colb the Law professor suggests.

Sherry says “Once we recognize that it is the vegan – rather than the nonhuman animal – who occupies the space parallel to that of the gay rights advocate, we immediately see some important commonalities. One is that, unlike race and sex, gay identity and vegan identity are, in part, chosen.”

Sherry argues that part of what makes the gay rights movement distinctive is that it is possible for a gay man or a lesbian to live, albeit unhappily, as though he or she is straight.

She continues “Like a gay man or a lesbian, a vegan can choose from a variety of ways of being a vegan. Some stay in the closet. One woman I know, for example, purchases only vegan foods for her home, but when she is out and about, she either eats what others are eating or claims that she is not hungry, so that people will not know her true identity. She explains that once she knows someone well, she will confide in him or her that she is a vegan.”

“By living as we do, we implicitly communicate to others a critique of the status quo and, necessarily, a critique of the behaviour of those who follow it.”

But Sherry doesn’t adequately answer her own opening question “What lessons might the struggle for gay rights have to teach those who seek to end the systematic torture and slaughter of animals?”