Gays-Only Village Outed

Since I've been eating a vegan diet lately, I can't lick the egg off my face.  I have to remove it by other means.  Maybe Max and Marley will lick it off.

How did it get there? Well, yesterday I wrote a post about a proposed gays-only village in the Dutch city of Tilburg.

Turns out, the thing was a hoax.

But the fact that so many people--including yours truly--believed it shows us the degree of homo- and trans-phobia, even in a supposedly liberal country like the Netherlands.

The joke's perpetrators created it for that very reason. Who's responsible for the news that wasn't?  The Roze Maandag foundation, which, among other things, organizes Pink Monday, held in Tilburg every summer.  ("Roze Maandag" is Dutch for "Pink Monday".)  Not surprisingly, they orchestrated the hoax for the very reasons I said it worked.

Dorothy Parker once said that in this country, we elect our practical jokes.  I hope that the Dutch--or, for that matter, any other nation--don't erect physical structures based on hoaxes.

A Gays-Only Village?

I have always had mixed feelings about high schools specifically for LGBT people.  On one hand, such schools might shield students from bullying they might experience in other schools.  On the other, segregation always turns the ones segregated into second-class citizens.

Now a developer wants to build a gays-only neighborhood in the Dutch city of Tilburg.  Mayor Peter Noordanus has endorsed the idea.

I'd be curious to know how much support there is for this idea in the Dutch LGBT community--or across the Netherlands generally.

Proponents of the project point out that recently, there has been an increase in the amount of violence and oppression against LGBT people.  That, in the first nation to legalize same-sex marriage and reputed to have some of the most gay-friendly laws and policies in the world.

Moreover, more than one-fifth of all gay people report that they don't feel safe in their own neighborhoods.

How can that be in the Netherlands?

Well, as in much of Europe, "Skinheads" and other hate groups have increased their membership.  These home-grown terrorists blame gays, immigrants and others who are simply different from themselves for their society's ills--including their own inability to get a job.

Sound familiar?

Still, I don't see how any good can come of such a program.  If anything, segregation sends the message to haters that it's OK to harass and brutalize those who already exprience oppression.   That is what happened in this country between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement.

And, if such a colony is constructed in a country like the Netherlands, what does it portend for LGBT people in other parts of the world?