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The example of San Francisco is instructive for another reason: The “gay parade” has participants from all of the city’s ethnic minorities - Chinese, Irish, Japanese, Mexican, Filipino, Italian, and many more. This shows that a person can be a member of several minorities at the same time.
For example, a member of the Chinese American minority can also be a Buddhist and therefore belong to religious minority. In addition, he may speak and read only Chinese and thus be part of a linguistic minority. Moreover, he may be confined to a wheelchair and thus belong to the minority of the physically disabled. Finally, as a “gay” person, he may belong to a sexual minority.
Actually, an individual may belong to several sexual minorities simultaneously, and some of these may have gained more social acceptance than others. There are, for instance, “gay” transsexuals, bisexual “swingers”, and lesbian sadomasochistic fetishists. If these also happen to belong to some ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority, the picture becomes even more complicated. Not all minorities suffer the same kinds and degrees of discrimination, and this raises the question: Which minority membership will have which consequences for which individual in which sitiation? Obviously, different occasions will bring different memberships into focus: A wheelchair-bound lesbian Chinese American may join not only the Chinese New Year’s parade in February, but also the “gay” parade in June and, at some other time, may participate in a political demonstration demanding more rights for the disabled.
As this example illustrates, no minority status can ever define the whole person. Attaching a minority label to someone may sometimes be helpful and even unavoidable, but it can also be quite misleading. This is equally true when individuals label themselves. Human life is too complex for easy categorizations. Especially in the sphere of human sexuality, we are always is a danger of stereotyping people and becoming blind to the other, more important aspects of their character. However, failing to see them as unique, complete personalities in their own right is both unfair and unrealistic: In reality, there are no “gays”, “fetishists”, or “sadomasochists”. There are only concrete individuals who show their own specific sexual behaviors under specific conditions, but this tells us little or nothing about the rest of their lives. Such labels have a very limited use and are never adequate or even appropriate for the description of a human being. Every woman and every man is always more than a member of a minority.
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