Created: February 08, 2020
Modified: May 22, 2021
Modified: May 22, 2021
yaas is the inauthentic yes
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- status: a theory that feels true for my personal trajectory. Totally uncritiqued and unverified that anyone else shares this experience.
- Yaas has become the cool new gay way of expressing excitement---even straight people like NameRedacted use it. (less so straight guys, as far as I know).
- Why? Where did it come from?
- Many gay kids never really learn to express authentic emotion. They (we) spend mental effort trying to hide one of the most central parts of themselves---their sexuality---which pushes them into approaching life as a series of roles to play. being yourself takes practice; it's not easy even if you work at it. But many gay kids don't even try; in fact, they actively work the other way.
- At least in my friend group, 'yasss' is said almost sarcastically, wryly. It's something you can say when you don't know how to perform real excitement, but you want to express that you're down for whatever the social group is doing, or you want to support a friend, or…
- It's hard for there to be an uncomplicated 'yes' for guys that aren't totally in touch with who they are or haven't really figured out how to be themselves. 'Yassss' is a phrase that acknowledges this, but also that part of you is trying anyway.
- It could be more than just personal : when gay communities come together, they form from people who don't fit in elsewhere, or (in my case) whose lives have diverged so much from straight friends' lives that they now have less in common with their older friends and interests. ('interests' being a loaded term here: I mean the interests they managed to express, regardless of whether they are really 'authentic' (which is itself ill-defined)). They want to come together, to form social connection. But this is a bunch of people defined only by having in common the part of their selves that they've been suppressing. Their expressed interests and identities might be totally incompatible: nerds and jocks, prudes and vulgarians, cat people and dog people, people who like parties and straight-edge kids, different races or cultural backgrounds, etc. I don't want to push this point too hard because there is a lot of subdividing at least in the SF community, e.g., my gay friends aren't randos; they're more or less all science PhDs from a couple of schools. But optimizing one constraint generally trades off with optimizing other constraints; if you are optimizing for people with whom you share the gay experience, that may leave you less ability to optimize across other dimensions of interests.
- This would imply that a lot of gay people end up doing things that they aren't really into---I wasn't really into drag or drinking at bars, or stupid trivia, etc---but still want to assent to for the sake of having community. This is the flip side of my first explanation: 'yass' can indicate that you like something but have a hard time expressing it authentically, or (at least for me) it can indicate that you don't like something but want to go along with it for the sake of community anyway. And I'm not sure those states are really all that different.
- Endpoint though: now some gays almost certainly feel that the self that says yaas is their authentic self. The fact that it starts off as inauthentic doesn't mean that it can't become something said authentically, once it starts to acquire its own identity and connotations as a word.