Straight Acting

LEVEL 3 -- MOSTLY STRAIGHT ACTING

You lead a normal everyday life and it's 'no questions asked' as people just assume you are straight. Every once and awhile a very aware person might notice something that causes them to think 'fem' but it's a fleeting thought because you turn around and surprise them with more masculine traits before they even have time to fully analyze the last one.

EDIT: I JUST GOT SENIOR MEMBER STATUS! Yay! Party time!

 

level 2

forget what the actual meaning was, but it was basicly "nobody but fellow level 2s would realize you are gay"

ps. forgot about this, but just for fun at the end of my aim profile i put in "level 2". I figured that nobody would figure it out other than those who have taken the test.

 

That fine sir is Ryan Reynolds... hottie extraordinaire (but so is my own hottie! ) But yeah, Ryan's hott! He was in "Two Guys and a Girl," "Blade: Trinity" (best part of the movie, IMO), and "Van Wilder" but he's done some other stuff too...

Greatest line from Blade Trinity:

Wesley Snipes: "How do you all fund this operation?"
Ryan Reynolds: "I have a lot of older boyfriends." :icon_razz :icon_razz :icon_razz

Find more of him here. I'm not obsessed. I swear.

 

Actually, I also thought it was you, CK. Yeah, doesn't look much like Ryan Reynolds to me. Hmm...

I scored LEVEL 3, but I think most people can tell that I'm gay. So, shocking as this may be, I don't think the test is completely accurate. !!!

 

So I'm a level 5:

LEVEL 5 -- SOMEWHAT FEMININE

Your Mom already knows. Smart girls in the office already know that you like to sleep with men. Your straight acting traits are few and far between as your feminine traits start to surface. You tend to be a real sensitive guy that gets along great with the female posse at work.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My mom doesn't know, she's never even hinted that maybe something's different with me, just that I'm really sensitive. Yes - I'm femme, I love singing and dancing, and am high maintenance, and definitely have been stereotyped by many people as being gay, so what! My close friends don't think so at all because they know me way better than that, or do they? haha

 

You forgot to mention he's Canadian... from Vancouver, even.

He was definitely the best part of Blade: Trinity.

 

As a somewhat aside, I hate the whole notion of "straight-acting." Just hate it. Blech. People are who they are. If they are acting, they should be shot. Unless they're actors, of course. *grin*

 

Well, but there is people who do not act at all. I act 95% normally with my friends (the other 5% being when I am directly asked about girls), and none of them could guess I was gay. It's just I am not femenine (sp?) at all.

There are other people, however, you could tell they are gay just by seeing them walk. I'm just not that way, and I do not act.

 

Level 2:
Hardly anyone would be able to pick you as a homo boy. All your actions are carefully crafted in a way that they never appear to be considered too fem. Only a fellow level 2 -- buddy might suspect you with the proper gaydar and it's just the way you like it.
--------------------------------------------

In regards to Joey's Comment, 'straight acting' doesn't necessarily mean you are acting out of character. Rather, it's used to describe a gay person's actions, in comparison to the stereotypical views of the homosexual community.

So it doesn't mean that someone pretends to be something that they're not, just how they are.

 

I WISH!

 

Feminine.

You hit on what I was getting at: people are how they are (or they should be who they are, at least). Yeah, some people are non-stereotypical as a regular state of being (i.e. without TRYING to be some specific way) and that's great. The thing is the term "straight-acting" implies that a) it's an act and b) it's done specifically because it's more desirable to be that way (masculine) than the other (flamey). So the term "straight-acting" denotes a completely rigid interpretation of gender roles which happens to piss me off.

And yeah, I know it's a convenient term but it really smacks of homophobia to me because generally the people using it are like, "I don't like fems, dude." But the thing is, the whole masculine-to-feminine way of "acting" is a continuum, not two seperate, never-touching points. And it can shift depending on the situation you find yourself in--I'm sure I seem much more fem when I go see The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants than when I'm watching Terminator 2 but that really narrow way of looking at things doesn't make much room for the fact that I really do like both movies for completely different reasons.

Basically, the whole notion behind "straight-acting" is one of the harshest stereotypes out there, and if people get sick of being stereotyped as being a certain way just because they're queer, they should be just as wary of falling into the whole fake butch/femme dichotomy.

 

I got "LEVEL 3 -- MOSTLY STRAIGHT ACTING" which seems about right.

Incidently you don't need to enter a valid email address to get the results. Anything with an "@" and a "." will do - such as "[email protected]". The results are displayed in the browser.

 

I think this is such a tricky subject b/c it all depends on how you define personality: is it something that develops early and sticks or something that's constantly evolving?

I had this one roommate in college who was watching Alanis Morissette perform on some late-night show, and he remarked that she looked like a plain girl who was trying to look like a superstar but couldn't pull it off. Which prompted one of the ladies in the room to say, "Well, what's she supposed to do? Dress all ugly b/c that's just what she is?!" I think it's a good point. Are men who are effeminate and want to be more masculine supposed to just accept their effeminacy as who they are, or should they acknowledge that their desire to be more masculine is part of who they are as well?

Our desires to improve ourselves - and what we consider to be improvements - can have both external and internal motivations. To complicate things even further, I think it's possible for what was once an external motivation to become an internal one. Take a kid, for instance, who shows no natural talent at playing baseball but insists on continuing to take lessons and practice b/c all his friends play. When he grows up, maybe he's still not any good at it, but he genuinely loves the game. Is he still trying to be what he's not? Is his love for the game still externally motivated?

I feel like some aspects of my person today are manufactured by some of the hurtful things that people said to me when I was younger. My voice, for example, was really, really high and mocked by lots of people. At some point, I started trying to talk in a deeper voice, even though it didn't come to me naturally. But now it's just the way I talk, and if I tried to talk in that high-pitched voice again, it wouldn't come to me naturally. So am I still acting now? Is my lower voice externally motivated?

I mean, maybe it is. I don't know.

Once again, I think it all comes down to the individual. If men who have effeminate tendencies want to try to act more masculine b/c it makes them feel more secure about themselves, then fine. If men who act effeminate want to be more masculine but embrace their effeminacy as who they are, then fine. It's all good. There is no objective truth.

 

I meant it more as an admonition to people who are living their own lives after having left/finished high school. I agree that there are definitely mitigating circumstances when your life is not really your own to direct. The people who are acting who I think should be shot are like, for example, the supposedly-straight former president of my university's student society, who would come to our queer group's beer gardens with a posse of "friends" who were all guys and pretend like he was just there as a professional "support diversity on campus" kind of thing... and who I then found out was gay immediately after he left office.

That being said, as someone who paid the price for marching to the beat of my own drummer during high school and who lost friends because they decided being accepted by the herd was more important than honouring our friendship, I don't have very much sympathy or respect for people who deny their true selves because they live in fear of being tossed out of the popular group. I really, really understand the desire to belong and to be accepted (I mean, hey, I'm gay) but I have to say I don't understand the lengths some people will go to buy that acceptance. Obviously this isn't a black and white issue, and I would never insist, for instance, that everyone who knows they're gay must come out as soon as they realise it, but there are degrees of being your own person and I think it's a pretty sorry statement about our society that a lot of people err on the side of "what would other people think" rather than the side of "what is best-suited for me personally."

Life is full of compromises we have to make each day; I'd rather not add to the pile by giving other people's perceived opinions that much weight.

 

I think the important issue is WHY being more masculine should be viewed as an improvement and something to be desired.

I don't think that simply because someone ends up internalising motivation that that makes it more valid or less worthy of critical scrutiny.

I think it's similar to bigotry: just because it ends up feeling/seeming second-nature doesn't mean it's a) good or b) "natural." A behaviour might become quite normalised but that doesn't mean the motivation for it switched from external to internal.

But notice in no part of that discussion is there talk about masculine guys who want to act more feminine--because it's just accepted without thought that being feminine is bad if you're a guy.

And I disagree with you about the effeminate men wanting to be more masculine because it makes them feel more secure being fine. That's a false sense of security based on false pretences. And it implicitly validates the notion that being effeminate is a bad thing, which is bunk. Being effeminate is not intrinsically bad: it doesn't harm anyone and it doesn't have a negative impact on the person's surroundings. It's just that we've constructed it as bad because women are considered inferior to men so a man who seems "womanly" is weak, soft, "emotional," and all those other "feminine qualities" which are considered bad.

I think the most important thing to consider in these situations is the motivation behind the actions: are people making choices based on what they think other people will or do think about them or are they making their choices based on what they truly feel affinity for. And yeah, that can be difficult to sort out at times, given how much of our personalities are a result of complex and often subtle social forces, but there are some really obvious cases where people have simply bought into a prevailing mindset without much examination and self-examination and the whole butch/femme feminine/masculine polarisation is definitely one of those cases.

 

Level 5

Okay, I earned a level five, the somewhat fimmine thing. But I dont like the term straight acting, I prefer masculine, or butch, straight acting is stupid, and I find it derogitory. The breeders dont like to be called gay, why should we rejoice when we get a score saying we act straigt? Its bull shit! I cant belive I even took this stupid, gay demeaning quiz.