A self-organizing system is one that is too complex for any one person to have created. In suitable conditions required for its growth, these systems work like bottom-up phenomena, responding to how individuals interact and cooperate with one another. The LGBT community is much like a self-organizing system. Just like the formation of a mesmerizing crystal, or the altruistic behaviors of different people and institutions during a crisis, the LGBT community has coalesced to become it's own "special" category amongst the many other human societies around the globe.
Why is this important? The interactions queer-individuals share are vital for their future. With any historically marginalized or oppressed group in human societies, those individuals usually band together to declare their basic human rights and strive together to ensure their equality. Members of the LGBT were not bound to their gender or sexual identities, and therefore were, and still are, subjected to hate and prejudice that comes from simply existing.
Just like nations enter the markets and let consumers decide the supply and demand of certain products, every country needs to accept the existence of the LGBT community. We're not a force working to defy the sanctions of the church or other religious teachings. We're not threatening to convert anyone who identifies as heterosexual. We're not looking for your approval. We're merely carrying on and trying to achieve the same success everyone else strives for.
Now, these self-organizing systems have some cardinal traits that make them so unique in human societies. Take traffic laws for example. The left-most lane on a highway is usually designated as a passing lane. You whip over and speed on past the stragglers until you've made it in the clear and can whip back into the slower lanes ahead of the rest who were slowing you down. There are no laws regarding passing lanes. They were created by people's driving habits. The same applies to language. Our brain's capacity for us to understand syntax, grammar, and vocabulary is not only rooted in biology but also the ways we have adapted to communicate with one another. No one person created any of these systems. They formed from being around others.
In the LGBT community, we have organized ourselves to communicate in certain ways that make life more beneficial for us. Whether that means sub-typing certain people into gender or sexual categories, or falling in love with the camp genre, we have adapted a certain set of values that are unique to our community. Using animals, such as "bear" or "cub", to describe and categorize the physical attributes of certain gay men, seems to be an exclusively homosexual way of cruising and meeting different sexual or romantic partners.
In the trans community, there have been certain terms that help determine the gender identity of individuals who don't conform to a gender binary or individuals who don't prescribe to the traditional gender roles of their biological sex. These terms that we've incorporated into our language and rhetoric prove that the LGBT community works a lot like a self-organizing system, in that we share certain ideas that progress the knowledge of inner-selves and help educate the out-group.
Gay bars came about from having all types of gender fluid men coming together in certain lounge settings. Drag balls were formed from gay men's desires to embrace their feminine sides in the name of genderfucking. So many foundations of our community stem from our processes of self-discovery. We organize ourselves around certain cultural foundations, like musicals and theater or our love for the fashion world, in ways that further solidify our unique social identities.
We're complex. Just like self-organizing systems, we need to be understood through interactions with the out-group, educational courses on our culture, and through mere exposure. We're not sexual deviants who want to take over the world. We, just like anyone else, didn't ask to be here. But we are, and our place here can't be questioned. We don't question to markets that dictate the economic structure of the world. We don't question morality, which guides us toward acknowledging what's right and wrong in the world. We don't drive below the speed limit in the passing lane. Well, some us do, and for those of you that do – PLEASE GET BACK IN THE SLOW LANE!
Point is, we're here to stay. We've organized ourselves in ways that make us more comfortable in a society that makes us feel inadequate, strange, and inept in many ways. Our systems of communication within our in-groups are very complex. Their codes to help us navigate through the world. There isn't a Gay God who created our world and set out blueprints for us to behave. It's abstract but we can help you to understand! Accept that some institutions come naturally to the world, and they can be quite beneficial.
An article for the Huffington Post detailed the characteristics that are found between cities that are the most innovative and have the fastest-growing companies. Guess what one of the portions of those cities' populations was? Gay people.
We're useful. Don't be so quick to turn us away.
