Homophobia

The rampant homophobia I see everywere these days is seriously pissing me off. But I keep reacting in cowardly ways to all of it.

Yeah, OK, idiot 14-year-olds are over-represented on WoW, but “gay” gets thrown about as a negative epithet more than probably any other single term out there. And I want to call people on it EVERY time, but I tend to chicken out because I feel like calling attention to it isn’t likely to help matters.

And at work it’s just as bad. In Production, where I work, there is only one vaguely tolerant coworker, and he still routinely makes homophobic remarks and laughs at the idiotic anti-gay prank phone calls they sometimes force me to listen to on internet radio (there is nothing quite so much like hell as assembling Squeezeboxes accompanied by endless recordings of morons making prank phone calls). He also had nothing good to say about Brokeback Mountain, despite not having seen the movie (of course, I haven’t either, but MY excuse is that Westerns are boring). My Muslim coworkers are flat-out gay bashers, and cultural relativity be damned, it really isn’t acceptable in any way. It doesn’t help that the only openly gay coworker is the Marketing guy who is unfortunately pretty much an asshole. OK, so only a few of the people in the company have college degrees, but surely a college education is hardly a prerequisite for a basic respect of other people. But I feel like trying to stand up against all of this homophobic bullshit would just make things awkward.

Not that a college degree even makes that much of a difference; most of the people in the Last Laugh are just-out-of-college kids and most of them still think two guys kissing is automatically funny and weird. I suggested it in all seriousness as the ending for an ending-less serious sort of scene that someone had wrote, and everyone assumed I was trying to make a joke. They claim to be open and accepting and all that (most of them went to UCSC/Berkeley and almost all live in SF or the East Bay, so they could hardly do otherwise), but the common assumption seems to be that physical expressions of homosexuality can only be comic and not serious. I tried to press the issue a bit, but it didn’t really go anywhere…they just assumed I was making one of my peculiar fusses about nothing again, as I am wont to do when I haven’t had enough sleep, which these days is pretty much always.

I also witnessed a really ugly display of homophobia on Caltrain a couple of weeks ago. I got on the train at Millbrae, and boarding at the same time were four college-age women, two of whom were holding hands. The hand-holding couple sat in seats immediately behind a totally normal-looking middle aged guy, who looked like he was on his way home from work. After a couple of stations, he suddenly (I don’t know if anything was said that might have triggered his response, but I certainly didn’t notice anything, and I wasn’t sitting that far away) started spewing abuse at the couple behind him, calling them “dykes” and so on. One of the two women put him in his place, coming back at him so hard and so persistently that he eventually took her advice and left the carriage. She apologised to everyone around her for her forceful language, and we proceeded quietly to the next station. This took place on the Peninsula, supposedly a bastion of political progressiveness and tolerance and so on, and it shocked me. I mean, sure I know that people in this area are really quite as capable as anyone else of being homophobic, but I would think they would at least feel cultural pressure to keep their ignorant opinions to themeselves. For someone not obviously insane to feel that it was OK to launch an unwarranted verbal attack on someone just because they were openly gay took me completely off-guard.

Again, I wanted to show support or confront the dickhead myself, but opted for silent seething instead. Which just goes to show what a weenie I am at heart…though again, maybe it was wiser to stay out of a situation that the woman was handling quite adroitly on her own.

Still, the next time some punk on WoW says something is “gay” in a derogatory way, I am totally calling the little fucker on it.