How Much a Few Days Can Change...

So we spent the last few days in Mexico. And it was amazing. I don't really think I realized just quite how amazing at the time. But I have my pictures, and six handcrafted blown glass wine goblets, to remind me.

We were with two of B's best friends from high school, their girlfriends, and one of B's friend's (let's call him B2) from the gay bar he works at in BsHomeTown, R. I don't know if I'll ever be brave enough to tell him, but knowing him has changed my life in a small way.

Ever since I broke loose from the Fundamentalist Christian chains the defined my childhood (more on that another time) I've moved towards and eventually fully embraced the concept of LGBT rights, even before I could define them in those words. Regardless of whether you see gay people's sexual orientation as a product of nature, nurture, or both, is irrelevant to the principle that they should have full inclusion in society. They should be able to marry, have biological children or adopt, not be the target of hate speech or crime, etc. You know, all the things we straight people see as our inalienable rights, so much so that we hardly give them a second thought... and step off the soapbox.

But as much as I was intellectually on board with this, lingering negative experiences and residual attitudes kept it from being much more than that. I kind of embraced gay rights as being a necessary part of my larger progressive beliefs. But growing up I'd never heard anything but negativity towards homosexuality, from high-level religious discourse to bigoted anecdotes. And my Sophomore year at LargePrivateCaliforniaSchool, I had the only gay person even peripherally in my life go off on me in a drunk rage about, of all things, leaving my dishes in the sink of my shared apartment. It sounds silly, but his drunk rant fed into every stereotype of gay men and why we should fear them I'd heard growing up. And so why my intellectual support for gay rights stayed strong, my emotional support stayed, at best, neutral.

Until I spent this weekend with R. When confronted with gross homophobia, you often hear people say things along the lines of, "I wonder how he/she would feel if they had a gay/lesbian son or daughter." Now I know why. Having a person in your life, who you care about, even to a small degree, changes everything. From the beginning, R was smart, cool, funny, politically liberal (unlike B's two high school friends... and their girlfriends for that matter), and had recently graduated from a small, liberal arts college just a few minutes from mine. I immediately knew he was a person I would love to have as a friend. Which is why I felt a surprising stab of pain when, the first day in Mexico, as we walked along the pool side, R a good ten feet ahead of me, I heard two guys mutter something about, "that fag."

I felt like I'd gotten the wind knocked out of me. For the first time, what I felt wasn't righteous indignation, but actual hurt that someone would harbor that type of hatred towards a person who I'd come to consider my friend. And they'd never even met him.

Coming back to the real world, and seeing Sally Kern's hateful words flash across the screen elicited a different response than it might have before. Instead of rolling my eyes at the latest in fundie crazies and moving on, I actually felt profoundly sad. Sad for the hate and ignorance she lives in, sad for all the people influenced by her words who will carry on that hate, and sad for those victimized by their hate. Sad for R, that he lives in a world where people like that hold elected office. I can't even imagine how I'd feel if some elected official was on a campaign to show the country how straight Asian women were the primary cause of our nation's decrepitude. And people believed them.

P.S. On a lighter note, one thing that R and I agree on wholeheartedly is that B2's girlfriend is the most annoying individual on the planet Earth. Seriously. I'll leave it at that!