Seawitch, I had nothing to do with that. 
And Esprix, if you are going to pack sand, could you come to Iowa? You see, we are having a big flood and we could use some help sandbagging around here.
You know, I guess I think of myself as an open-minded person, but I have no delusions of being 100% enlightened about every single subject. I thought what Rich said was ignorant, but I’m sure I say some ignorant things too sometimes.
That having been said, didn’t you people waste an opportunity to elevate this guy’s consciousness when you immediately ripped into him? I know this is the forum for chewing people up and spitting them out, but this is an important subject and all I can think is “Here’s one more straight white male who’s still convinced of the worldwide conspiracy against him, and nobody did anything about it.” By going on the defensive, you just reinforce his homophobia, and then there’s no learning, just people defending themselves against one another.
Most of you people claim to be fighting the battle against ignorance, but this time you lost. Rich is still ignorant. You might have still lost if you engaged him in sincere debate, rather than dismissing him as hopeless, but at least you would have tried.
Although I admit it was way funnier to flame the shit out of him.
Actually, there was some attempt to make the point that GLB folks are, indeed, interested in other subjects than simply sex, showtunes, and softball. But the aforementioned points simply kept flying about six inches over Rich’s head, and he steadfastly continued to ignore them and harp on his original point.
At that point, the flaming began. Appropriately, in my opinion, as three tries to hit the target with a squarely thrown ignorance-buster were dodged.
Now if, as Rich tried to state after the fire got a little warmer, he didn’t mean the OP in the tone that people took it, then maybe, maybe, it was inappropriate to continue mauling the carcass, but that particular “out” is much too commonly used to weasel out of an OP that turns out not to be as smart an idea as the poster originally thought.
Just my opinion, of course.
Really ? I’ll have to try that sometime. . .
[picturing person with foot in mouth and head in ass]
My God, Esprix – you’ve just invented the human Klein bottle… 
And some people are so stupid, I hang my head and cry. . . .
[sub](see, someone caught it, Mr Hec)[/sub]
By creating this thread, and in all his subsequent posts, Rich has made it very clear that he does not acknowledge our humanity. Apparently he sees us as stock characters in the morality play of his life, or something: object lessons for his children. Whatever. But not as living, breathing, dreaming, hurting, crying, angry, curious, argumentative, intelligent, happy, unhappy, carpooling, bill-paying, coupon-clipping, brothers to our sisters and children to our parents and yes, even parents to our children.
Rich, sweetie-darling, each of us–me as much as you; Esprix as much as the Reverend Fred Phelps–has been given only so much time to spend on this planet. You don’t seem to be aware of this, but I’m as aware as you are that someday, someday possibly very soon, this will all be over for me, and I won’t get another chance (at least, in most belief systems, as me) to do what I want to do and be who I want to be.
Every time I have to divert some of my own limited energy to assist someone like you in a radical craniorectal extraction, I’m understandably a bit peeved. Especially since I know that the waiting room is full of people just as bad off as you are and I’ve already worked a thirty-eight-year shift and the anesthesiologists are striking!
Hence (speaking for myself) the, um, flaming you’ve received.
See, here’s the thing: as is so often the case in such situations, you start out from the position that the burden of proof is on me to prove I’m just as human as you, and just as worthy of living a happy life (which may or may not include spending less or more time in a particular thread on a message board than you do), when in fact the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that I’m not.
The world is thus and so, and anything that is not should remain outside of your awareness. Do you not see that this is a problem that involves no one in the entire universe but you? And that to ask everyone else to modify their behavior so that you can remain blissfully ignorant of the great big world that revolves around you, like you’re Truman Burbank or something, is just, well I’m sorry but that’s just too complicated an undertaking. Not to mention expensive.
So if you want to keep the world small enough and simple enough so that you can orchestrate and choreograph the lives of everyone who shares it with you, you’ll have to scale back a bit; retreat to that basement apartment under your mother’s house in the woods.
Let us know how it goes.
Yes, but at least Truman wanted, once he’d intuited that there was a wider world out there, to go out and see what it was like. And did, through great personal discomfort, do so. And actually directly defied his “God”, who deigned to directly dissuade him, in the process.
(after rambling on below, I realized that the rest of this isn’t directed at lissener but at Rich, so take the viewpoint shift as you will…)
Rich doesn’t show any of that, and actually seemed somewhat shocked that his OP was taken badly by some of us whom he tried to stuff into that Classic Queen (no, not that classic Queen…they were good) pigeonhole.
I, for one, am about as far outside the gay pigeonhole as possible. I know many other folks that wouldn’t recognize themselves in the stereotype. Parts of it, maybe. But not all of it. And Rich seems to think we should fit all of it. “No gay man should be interested in breasts!” Um…sorry. There are an awful lot of gay men doing fashion photography work whose job is to be concerned with breasts. There are an awful lot of gay men working in periodicals whose main focus is breasts. There are an awful lot of gay men whose attention to breasts indicates study for the purposes of more realistic emulation of the female form. There are a lot of gay men who study women’s bodies in order to draw, paint, animate, or enhance them. What about lesbians? Would Rich have cared if, say, andygirl had come in and started to talk about breasts?
Sorry…I rambled, and tangented. My point is that I was mostly offended originally by the OP. Then I was more offended by the clarification of the OP which seemed to bring up an attitude that we gay folk should really just stick to cocksucking and showtunes.
So you can understand, Rich, why we’re a little hot under our black leather spiked collars…
jayjay
Dude, I hope you’ve learned a lesson from this: If you have to preface a comment with “I’m not homophobic/racist/sexist BUT…” then, chances are, people WILL take it as a homophobic/sexist/racist comment.
I only have ~25 posts. YOU have almost 400. I could just as easily say that it’s obvious that you have a lot of free time on your hands. 
I didn’t see the Breasts thread, but it sounds like the gay guy who posted in it was trying to be funny by putting a different spin on men’s breast fixations.
I don’t see anything wrong with that. Even in the serious topics some people will crack jokes that sometimes take the convo in a different direction. And, no, not just gays either.
“I’m NOT a homphobe, but…”
and want to complete it.
“I play one on TV!”
I think it would have been a better thread my way.
Other great thread titles in the same vein:
“I’m NOT a moron, but…”
“I’m NOT dangerous with heavy equiptment, but…”
“I’m NOT a drunkard, but…”
“I’m NOT a wife beater, but…”
**Scylla wrote:
I keep looking at the title of this thread
“I’m NOT a homphobe, but…”
and want to complete it.**
How about… but I certainly post like it on SDMB? 
Or how about… I still lap dance for them and love their rough trade.
**
You forgot golf, jarbaby. And figure skating.
And why simply sex when there is really INTERESTING sex?
Actually, that would have been me who said that.
And they were skipped for the sake of the sibilant sounds of the serpentine alliteration…
[sub]oops[/sub]
all those "J"s get me all flustered
Not a problem. Besides, if people mistake me for jarbaby, they might get the mistaken impression that I’m as brilliant a poster as she is, and that can’t be anything but good for me.
jayjay (who can’t come up with the swearword like her, though)
Freyr said:
Okay! I take back everything I said.
You’re definitely damned for that one!
And they’ll start flirting with you, which is definitely not a bad thing;)
Erm, yes I am here to represent the people who have no life™
They are suing you for slander and defamation of their good name.
That is all.