Or sometimes not.
My sister came out 34 years ago, but our bitter (allegedly) “Christian” Fox News watching mother still says stupid and offensive things about “the gays” and my sister’s lifestyle. Oh, not to her face, of course.
I grew up not realizing that Elton John and the Village People were gay. In retrospect it’s “obvious”, but I didn’t think about such things back then.
This is me as well. I wonder how much we’ve screwed up the statistics.
This is rather embarrassing to admit, but just after Lawrence v Texas, when one of my (gay) coworkers said, “Wow, this is going to really change things! Now we have a much better chance of getting gay marriage!” I was all, “huh? Why would gay people want to…OH!”
A week before that, if you had asked me if I was a supporter of gay marriage, I’d probably have said No or Other. Not because I had negative opinions of homosexuality, but just because I was clueless about the entire issue. I had (and have) plenty of gay and lesbian friends, I’ve had sex with women and men, no homophobia here. I never intended harm and wouldn’t have supported anti-marriage amendments or anything. I wasn’t anti gay-marriage, I was just unaware that it was A Thing.
So some of the “increasing acceptance of homosexuality” we see on surveys may be simply due to more awareness of the issues and language involved, not because people’s actual homophobia or lack of it have changed.
(I had a similar embarrassing epiphany just a couple of months ago here on the Dope, when someone pointed out that ANY lovemaking other than penis in vagina sex is indistinguishable from “gay sex”. Duh. Of course it is. I love “gay sex” with my opposite gendered SO! Hating “gay sex” is like hating a blow job from your wife! I just had never thought of it that way.)
This describes me, too. I’ve never disliked gay people - as a kid I never gave the issue any thought at all. I do remember asking my mother what the word “homosexual” meant when I was maybe 5 or 6. She told me in perfectly neutral terms and I kinda shrugged and said “Oh.” Then I got on with whatever I was doing.
But in general, I didn’t give any thought at all to the issue. Then, of course, I got older and actually met gay folks. Now I do have strong opinions in favour of gay marriage, but the only “change” is that I started thinking about something that was never on my radar before.
Usually, it changes as you get to know homosexuals in your everyday life. It’s changing far too fast to be because older people are dying off; approval for gay marriage is increasing at about 5% a year.
In my case, I’ve written about it: SFF Net
When I was first told what a gay person was, my reaction was ew. I was about five or so. I have no idea why that memory sticks out in my head. But I still instinctively knew it wasn’t OK to pick on people for it, nor was it OK to say that those who got AIDs deserved it (thank you, asshole 6th grade teacher) or whatever.
My son knows what being gay means (and his first reactions were ew and how do they have babies?) but he’d never pick on anyone for it. It’s not his thing. So I think people can have discomforts about homosexuality without being jerks. Anyway, to answer your question, it was just exposure and common sense. Now that my son has met gay people, it has less of an ew factor. (Keep in mind that at the age of seven, hetero relationships are still icky to him.) He thinks gay people should be able to marry.
My favorite student happens to be a girl I think he harbors a minor crush on. And she’s -yup- gay. I think after he saw her and her girlfriend together, he stopped caring about sexual orientation. (“What? She has a girlfriend?”) Her redeeming qualities as a person shine much more than who she’s dating. He adores her for her and that’s how it should be. (“Can she babysit me? When I can see her again?”)
I wish I had more exposure to transgendered people, though. It’s a hard thing to wrap my head around. While I still think that trans people should be treated fairly, there’s still that five year old “wtf?” factor in my head. It’s not fair, and it’s probably not right, but at least I’m aware of it. The best thing for me has just been to look at my kid and say, “Well, if he told me he were actually a girl, I’d just want him to be happy.” We’ve all seen Boys Don’t Cry and read Middlesex, but as evidenced in this thread, I still don’t know what I think about some issues.
Well, in my case, I was somewhat homophobic in my early teens in reaction to the fact that I was having feelings about other girls that I wasn’t exactly dealing with gracefully.
After I came out, most of my friends and family adjusted their views, because all of the sudden ‘gay people’ became ‘Andy’, and there is nothing like knowing a gay person- or, as it’s been shown, seeing them on TV often enough that you feel like you ‘know’ them, which is why Ellen has changed the world- for making people be less homophobic.
Since more people are out these days, this is only going to continue to snowball. At least I hope so.
Do not tempt the ClockworkMelon.
As I understand it, only one or maybe 2 of the VP were actually gay. Their personas were deliberately chosen to conform to (then-current) gay stereotypes, it’s true, but the actual performers were just that.
Mind you, a lot of people of my parents’ generation didn’t realise **Liberace **was gay. Just “flamboyant”. So, as you say, they just didn’t think about such things back then.
Askance-Add Rock Hudson to the list of celebs fans were ignorant of.
All stories told before.
Not how it “changed” but how it came into being.
When I was 12, SWAT was on TV. We were all supposed to like TJ, the sniper, because he was blonde and blue-eyed and he was always getting swatted down for wearing his cap backwards (not a sign of rebelliousness at all, although that’s how teen mags sold it: he’d wear it like that so it wouldn’t bother him with the scope, and then forget to wear it properly again), but I didn’t find him particularly pretty and he wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb on the tree. OK, so the Italian Lothario. Ugh, NO, I like the other one! The serious one!
At this point in the conversation, my classmates told me “you are weird, girl!” in the tone of voice one would use to describe the smell of squished bedbugs, and I was left thinking “and this is just because I don’t like the guys they think I ought’a… man, there is no way a girl would choose to not like guys, or a guy to like guys!”
Apparently my mother’s main problem wasn’t with homosexuality per se, it was with anal sex. She said something to that respect and I pointed out that, according to a couple of recent conversations in the Dope, apparently there are as many gay men who are not into anal as straights… and viceversa, as many straights (of both sexes) who are into it as gay folk.
Mom: “
So what do they do?”
Me: “the same things your parents did before they got married” (in Grandma’s words: “we’d done everything you can do with your clothes on and a few you need to take your clothes off for, but I refused to let him go there because I wanted to get married and I knew if I let him then we wouldn’t”)
Mom: “oh! So, hands and mouth and so forth?”
Me: “yup”
Mom: “oooh… OK then”
Later we had another conversation where she asked “why do some people say ‘orientation’ and some say ‘choice’ and some say ‘lifestyle’”, I explained the difference between “orientation” and “lifestyle” and that gay people don’t choose to be gay any more than she chose to like dudes who look like James Stewart. That was another big step.
And then there was the bit about SSM. She was saying “it’s not right!”; I pointed out that it’s a civil matter, that the requirements Spanish civil law places on marriage are actually pretty low, and asked why shouldn’t two people who love each other (not a requirement), live together (not a requirement), have helped raise each other’s children or have/want to have children (not a requirement), are faithful to each other (not a requirement), well, why shouldn’t those people be able to get a contract which makes it easier for them to take care of each other (not a requirement), share expenses (not a requirement), file jointly if it’s cheaper for them, go to PTA meetings (definitely not a requirement) or leave property to each other or to the kids more easily than without the contract?
She said “you have a point. Actually, a big fat point. OK!”
It’s how it works in many countries, the civil contract (call it union, marriage or X) is separate from any religious one. It’s no more unworkable than single-payer healthcare.
Well sure, but he was not obviously, flamboyantly (one might say stereotypically) gay like Liberace. My point was more that someone so obviously gay could have an entire showbiz career without being demonised as a homosexual, or even really being perceived as such. And yet his contemporary Alan Turing could be hounded to death, despite not being “out” in any way. Weird weird times.
It’s unworkable as a practical matter here in our country (USA) at this time. It may come eventually, but if/when you try to bring it up now, it simply gives the “gay people are destroying marriage!!!” people more ammunition.
We’re, as a society, incredibly attached to the word “marriage”, as evidenced by not only those people who think that gays are destroying marriage, but by those gay people (and straight people) who are dissatisfied with being granted the legal right to Civil Unions instead of marriages. It’s not logical, it’s emotional/social/political and it’s very very real.
I never had much of a problem with gays, myself. I “belonged” to a fundamentalist church – Church of Christ – but from a pretty early age, did not really believe that way at all. (When your church is in denial about dinosaurs ever existing, it is hard to take anything they say very seriously).
As I hit puberty, I realized that, while I was extremely attracted to women, I didn’t want to do what most people want to do – I am a paraphiliac, no need for details or specifics right now – so, I figured, gay people were like that, as well. Not everyone wants to do the same thing as far as sex goes. There is no sense calling people “evil” just because they don’t conform to the sexual norm. It isn’t a choice, people are just wired differently!
Later on, I met a few homosexuals of both genders, and they seemed fairly well-adjusted; they were pretty much more “normal” than I was!
I have noticed a lot of my conservative christian friends softening their stance towards homosexuality in recent years. Going from “They will burn in hell, we need to suppress them, shout at them, they are ruining civilization” to “well, what can you do, they are just sinners like everyone else, and Jesus died for all of us” mentality. Bowing to the inevitable sea change in societal attitudes, I guess,
Alot of different factors come into play that might change one’s actual opinion. You might even have the same opinion for years but not really care enough about it and then things change … like tyrying to win an election.
Obama has always been in favor of civil unions… I love how right-wingers criticize him for this stamp of approval on gay marriage when they support neither.
I firmly believe that all men and women are created equal and who you choose to love and/or marry is your business. I simply do not see how ‘moral’ people such as hardcore Christians/Muslims/etc. are against simple love no matter what form.
And they don’t understand how something so plainly disgusting and unnatural as homosexuality can be tolerated by anyone, so I guess it balances out.
I think the answer that a lot of people have given is the right one - knowing gay people. The hard core bible bashers who decry homosexuality as a sin and all gays as vile lepers living a deplorable lifestyle also go at great pains to say how they don’t know any and would never want to. How many religious families have changed their tunes when a member of it comes out? Dan Savage, the gay advice columnist and activist, is a great example of this - when he came out to his very catholic mother she was extremely anti gay, but having a gay son and coming to terms with it eventually made her able to talk to other religious parents about re-evaluating their views on sexuality when they find out they have gay children.
Really? This was a non-political discussion and so you felt no choice but to introduce politics into it. Do you ever post anything except to be critical of the president?
I grew up as an extremely straight laced Mormon, and was taught that gays were sinners, but never really accepted that. Still, I sort of felt that gays were different until my sister came out.
My extremely straight laced Mormon mother grudging accepts my sister’s partner, but had less problems with both my other sister and I getting divorces and remarrying. Her opinion will never change, but I am encouraged by other friends and relatives who are more accepting.