I think we really need to reaffirm now that no amount of homophobia can be acceptable in our culture. There is no such this as harmless or victimless homophobia. All homophobia contributes to violence against us. You can not “disagree” with lgbt people’s “lifestyles” without supporting the rhetoric and legislation that puts us in very real danger.
Homophobia isn’t that black and white though. You can hate the sin and still love the sinner.
OK, as a queer person who grew up in a genuinely loving, caring, utterly wonderful, and still deeply homophobic Church, let me try to fill in what you’re not understanding about this whole “Love the sinner” deal.
When we refer to people like you as “Homophobic” I want to be clear what we’re saying here. This is not a judgment of your intent. We are not describing you as a hateful person, as an aggressive or violent person. But we are saying that your actions and your attitudes participate in and reinforce a system of rhetoric that encourages violence against LGBT people, and, far, far more importantly, that forces millions of LGBT people to live in shame.
That’s really what this comes down to. Not hate. Not violence. Shame.
Consider the point purely theologically. Jesus tells us that to desire a sinful thing is as bad as to act on that desire. My lusting after another mans wife is as bad as actually sleeping with her. My genuine desire to hurt someone is as bad as actually hurting them.
So when you tell me that loving another man is a sin, you’re not just talking about physical acts of intimacy. You don’t get to draw the line there. You don’t get to pretend that I can be bisexual so long as I never actually physically act on it (which is already a terrible burden to place on someone). You’re saying that every time I look at a guy and imagine how soft his lips would be, or think about how beautiful his eyes are, I am sinning. I am a sinner every time a dude walks past me with a tight sweater on that shows of his arms. Every time he has nice hair or a nice smile.
My love, according to you, is a sin. That is the burden you are forcing people to live under. That burden forced me so deep into the closet that I didn’t even know I was there. It forced me to repress every genuine feeling of sexual attraction for other men, and to live for years with those feelings straining to get out, whilst I struggled with the constant guilt and shame that came from having those thoughts.
And I am one of the lucky ones, because I’m alive to have this conversation. Because for many, many LGBT people that guilt and shame manifests as self-harm, substance abuse, low esteem that leads them into abusive relationships, and very often suicide.
You tell yourself that you’re one of the good ones because you don’t hate us. You only hate what we “do”. But what we “do” is living. It’s being alive and whole and a part of this world, and if you genuinely believe that we can’t have that then you might as well put the gun to our heads and pull the trigger. Because you’re already doing that, you just don’t have the guts to admit it.
You have three islands. Divide them into groups of one. The straight island, the gay island, and the lesbian island. The straight island is going to reproduce and keep going strong for millions of generations to come. The gay and lesbian islands will both wipe out in not even one century. This isn’t just about religion or morals, it’s just simple common sense. Being gay is unnatural, and not just because God said so, but because you yourself wouldn’t even be born without a REAL natural man and woman. And no, there is no such thing as a lesbian bone marrow “thing” to have children. That’s a biased fact that came from a lesbian scientist who has false opinions. If it’s not a real penis or vagina, then it’s fucking false and you’re just opinionated by dumb facts. I’m done here. Read over what I said and if you still think that being gay is normal and natural, then I hope you achieve some common sense one day. Bye
Where is this gay island located.. asking for a friend
Wait but.
Would all the gay and lesbian people born on straight island have to move to the gay and the lesbian island?
So wouldn’t the straight population continuously replenish the gay and lesbian population?
Like in real life?
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Lesbian mothers raising children in lesbian-headed households also had to worry about ex-husbands using their lesbianism to take custody of the children. In 1958, Vera Martin met and fell in love with Kay, a Japanese American woman who had come to the United States at the end of the Second World War after marrying an African American serviceman. Kay had two children, and Martin had a son and daughter. The families got along well and would spend time together on the weekends. R., Vera Martin’s teenage daughter, babysat for the other children when Kay and Martin wanted to go out together. Both women feared that the authorities or their ex-husbands would take custody of their children if they found out they were in a lesbian relationship. “We knew that we had to be careful,” Vera Martin remembers, “and keep the knowledge that we had kids very quiet … very quiet.” Kay worked as a prostitute to support her family, and the two women lived in fear that someone would report them to authorities, possibly even one of the other women with whom Kay worked, in order to remove competition. They also feared that their ex-husbands would simply take their children away directly if they found out they were lesbians. Martin was an African American woman and Kay was Japanese American, and as two lesbian mothers of color, they felt particularly threatened by the courts.
Lesbian mothers who had left previous heterosexual marriages during this era lived in constant fear of discovery and exposure. One night in 1959, when Vera Martin and Kay were at the If Club, a lesbian bar in Los Angeles, a heterosexually identified man who knew Martin’s ex-husband walked up, said hello to her, and left. Terrified, Martin turned to Kay and said, “That’s someone that knew me when my husband and I were together, and they are still in touch.” Kay understood the danger immediately and said, “I think we better get out of here.” Vera Martin thought the man would use the pay phone and that her ex- husband would show up at the club or later at one of their houses. She and Kay lived in terror afterwards and did not go out in public “for a long time.” When the two of them eventually went to a dance together, they asked two men to accompany them as cover.
As parents, lesbians and gay men had no legal protections or recognition of their co-parent relationships in the 1950s and 1960s. As it would in later decades, this jeopardized their ability to maintain communication with their partner’s children. After Kay died suddenly in the winter of 1959, Vera Martin wanted very badly to take Kay’s children into her home and raise them with her own, as Kay had told her children’s caretaker she wanted before she died. However, Kay’s ex-husband, who lived across the country and had been brutally abusive to Kay, came into town with his new wife and took the children. “Oh, I wanted those kids so bad. … I was crazy about them and they were crazy about me,” Martin recalled, but she had no chance of competing for custody of the two children against an intact heterosexual nuclear family. In the era before gay and lesbian liberation movements there was no chance of legal recognition for lesbian households with children. Martin despaired when Kay’s ex-husband held an auction to sell all of Kay’s belongings. She came up with one hundred dollars to buy Kay’s address book, a potentially dangerous item in the hands of her ex-husband. In 1963, Vera Martin then married a gay man and “slammed the closet door shut behind her,” because she heard rumors that her own ex-husband suspected that she was a lesbian, and she was afraid he might try to use that to obtain custody of T., her son and youngest child.
Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II (2013), Ch. 1. (via captainnipple)
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I always thought what Russell [T Davies] did in Doctor Who was extremely ground breaking in a slightly more subversive way than it looked like. It never occurred to me that it was too on the nose, what he did brilliantly was incidentally gay characters obviously as well as some more in your face ones. One of my favourite stories is Gridlock, there’s an elderly couple of ladies who are together and it just sort of passes by and that’s the way – softly, softly. That’s how the revolution happens as it were, you just become aware that people are incidentally gay. I think when the day comes that you have a big detective show where the first half hour was this man at work and he’s a maverick and all the usual things and then we went home and his boyfriend says, ‘Are you alright?’ it was just a thing, then something genuinely changed. I think the problem still is it becomes the issue. I think the thing with gay characters is that it has to be an issue as opposed to being part of everyday life, which of course as we all know is what it is.
Maybe this is why he gets worked up about people asking if they’ll kiss/come out/have a big dramatic revelation scene.
It’s because he wants it to be subtle, something that doesn’t need to be announced or revealed – and I agree. Why should we announce it? Or make a big deal about it?
I agree with him on this. What I don’t understand, though, is why the same person who says these things then goes to great lengths to DENY any gay implications (‘they are obviously not gay for each other’) and to ridicule who thinks such implications might be there.
Doesn’t he understand that by saying this he sets people up for exactly what he hates? The big revelation??
Instead of letting the audience quietly understand and accept that there is something between them, he vehemently denies it, implying that if they haven’t officially declared themselves gay then of course they are not.
What game is he playing??
This is the contradiction that drives me crazy and makes me really angry at him.
I agree with you, though I think it’s the writer in him wanting the big reveal, not the man. Every writer loves a big plot twist, to make the audiences mouths drop open. And you have to admit, if S4 ends with John and Sherlock kissing or something, most of the audience will be shocked as shit.
We won’t, lol. But most people will. And he will love that, as a writer.
This quote just gives me so much hope, I can’t describe it.
Imagine the power of that. Not only would they be openly gay, but *will have been gay* for the previous season. Forces a new perspective on gay people as real people nit defined exclusively by sexuality.
Anyone turning off the tv at that point to avoid The Gay will have already been embracing gay characters without being aware of it. That’s the way to make change in the world… because that’s how change happens in real life.
