You think, “I am trying to help. I did not cause this”.
And you think that, for an ongoing crime. Make no mistake. You are a friend.
When President Obama said that those who were trying to kill every single gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered person in Uganda “odious”, Barack Obama was being a friend to those people. Now, there was no threat attached to that. Of, you know, lack of American friendship and support to the people of homosexual people Uganda was, in its best effect, encapsulated in terms of their mass murder as being “odious”.
They could die. But they will die knowing Americans disapproved.
You are a friend, for thinking the wholesale slaughter and extermination of an entire people, every man, woman and child, of an entire country, who meets a certain criteria, is not-a-good-thing-to-do. That, in the standard of America, making you a Valient Ally™.
And it’s not as if those lesbian women and gay men are wholesome.
You ask and question, do they tuck their children into bed when you do? Do they even have any children?
My father had children. He had me. He had my brother. The fact that he had, and accepts, is enough for him. Shouldn’t it be enough for you?
It can be enough, I suppose, that you accept that those people who exist, exist. I have lived, with your collective acceptance of my existence™, my entire life.
It is, and should be, ok that I exist, and that a small part of my existence, my sexual existence, should be classified by you as an aberration with no real consequences. It is ok that a musician from Jamaica should make music calling for the mass murder of gay people because you don’t actually advocate for it yourself, ok?
Now, it might not occur to you that I might want to live in a nice, idyllic Tudor style house with a nice green yard with my intended, who might be a same sex as me. It might also not occur to you, or make you giggle, that the person I very much wanted to woo, was a kind of heavyweight guy in a bowling alley who lumbered, Frankenstein wise, from one lane to the next, making strikes 2 out of three times with brilliantly white teeth and glittering eyes and a beautiful smile and the kind of shirt I could have lived with, day after day, for eternity?.
And that, he might have killed me, or got very very nasty, if I had said, openly, I found him attractive?
Because, you all, you, society in general, and the world around this, made somehow me expressing this, a verboten thing, societally?
It’s not just about the laws, dude. Or madame.
It’s about your responsibility. About the kind of society we have.
Do we have the kind of society where your hate predominates? I’m not even asking the more advanced questions, and yet I do wonder about the advanced questions.
As a straight person, what will you do, when we start to get advanced enough to hunt down the actual criminals? I mean, the ones who killed us, or passed laws, killing us?
Will you hide?
Will you crawl down an ant mole, and talk about the socialistic aspects of people asking for a return on being treated like animals? Will you talk about how people like me wanted to steal from people like you, despite people like me objecting to, every step of the way, the rich taking from the people like you?
Or will you hide, metaphorical mole-like, in your little caves, denying your past participation in experiences of bigotry, because you weren’t actually responsible for gay men and women being beaten to death, you were somehow a postitive influence on society?
Just remember. You are a friend.
Because you disapprove.