Quote:
Originally posted by notcasesensitive
I have not been put into the situation very often of having to say anything (IRL). I don't run up to random people on the street or anything. So, I guess I'd say that I generally know a person well enough to know what their orientation is before I start commenting on anything about what they say. It was pretty clear cut in Dallas. Here, I have one, not close friend who has made me uncomfortable with gay jokes, but I don't really know him well enough, or I've been too chicken to say anything. Yet. Maybe the issue with him will resolve itself soon enough, since his best friend met (and loved! not in that way.) my bestest friend from Dallas who happens to be gay last weekend. Seems like that might be a good segue.
I'm not militant about it or anything. But I do believe that refusing to speak up in certain circumstances can be considered tacit encouragement.
In Dallas, it was an educational tool as much as anything. I knew people who were born and raised in Texas who thought that everyone (in polite society) made gay jokes and was homophobic. So I'd tell them, rather matter-of-factly that their assumption simply was not true. And I'd introduce them to my gay friends if they wanted to meet them. Whether I changed any minds about gay people, who knows? But they, for the most part, stopped saying ignorant things around me.
Off my soapbox now.
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The day after my brother came out of the closet to my family, I flew to DC for a wedding in Annapolis a few days later. My best friend and her boyfriend were living in DC at the time, and I crashed at their place the few nights before the wedding.
I never liked her boyfriend, but that first night, when I was still processing that my brother wasn't the person I had thought he was for 22 years, was the night my best friend's boyfriend decided to tell his realy fucking offensive gay jokes.
I was sitting there, in this tiny efficiency apartment with a person that I'm closest to outside of my family who I thought I could unload some of my burden on, and this asshole was going off about fudge packers and the like. And boy did he love the word faggot. I wasn't sure what I was feeling about my brother, but I knew that I was feeling that for the rest of his life, I'd have to deal with assholes like this one.
I didn't do anything. I was just quiet with him for the rest of that trip. And I had a rather strained relationship with my best friend for a few years afterwards, because I never wanted anything to do with that guy again. But I didn't say anything.
I still feel immense shame that I never said anything in response to those gay jokes. I feel like a bad human being that I didn't stand up and tell that asshole off, even if it meant I would have had to find another place to sleep that night. I feel like I betrayed my brother at the time in his life that he needed his family to stand up for him the most, even though no one in that room but me knew that my brother was gay*.
I hate the word faggot. And I think less of the people that use it, even in apparent irony. And I still feel shame that I don't say anything about it on July 3, 1996.
*
It's not that I thought it was a bad thing that my brother was gay. It's that it was a fundamentally huge thing about his identity that was hidden from the people who were closest to him. He was absolutely terrified of coming out of the closet, and the rest of us, including me, had to process it before we could wholeheartedly embrace it. I was right at the beginning of that process stage when this asshole started hitting me with the gay jokes and demonstrating why my brother would be terrfied to hide such a fundamental part of his identity. No one cares now. No one even thinks of it now. It's just a part of who he is. It wasn't then, at least not to everyone else in the world.
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