and i know you were playing DA, but i'm playing PC for a minute <gak! i may need a brainwash after this...>
okay... i tried and i can't be PC.
so here it is as plain as I can say it... there's nothing unnatural about homosexuality. 'Conventional sensibilities' wouldn't find it so distasteful if they weren't shaped in the pulpits of modern Christianity. Modern Christianity wouldn't find it so distasteful if it hadn't been shaped by the "infallible" teachings of one Catholic pope waaaaay back in history. Now, I don't personally like anal sex, so I'd make a very bad fag, and it's a good thing I'm lesbian. But I know plenty of people who don't have the same aversion (my last boyfriend, for one!). My distaste probably arises from a very badly executed experiment with said boyfriend. (Like people who say they don't like wine because they got drunk on Boone's Farm in high school and puked their guts up...)
But homophobia is different from thinking anal sex is icky. Homophobia is violent, aggressive, bullying, unreasoning hatred of gays. Homophobia is jumping out of your car at an intersection and beating someone up because they're wearing a rainbow patch on their backpack. (Yeah, it happened to my friend.) That's much more likely to be a result of self-hatred over "shameful" homosexual fantasies/thoughts/impulses/feelings than it is to be the result of normal social mores.
The entire purpose of the coming-out movement is to let people know that REAL people that they know, love, and are related to are gay. Gayness is not some radical disease of the mind or something to be hated. It's just another way of being, and it has a face you recognize. Hating or fearing that is as invalid as hating or fearing someone whose skin is different, or whose gender is different.
Disgust over homosexual acts is different from homophobia, and it's ingrained in people the same way disgust over mixed-race couples used to be. If you're raised being told over and over that it's filthy, you grow up to think it's filthy. |
