Another thing, if you go your seperate ways, it should be interesting to see what happens.
One of her friends:Hey, why don’t you hang out with Annie any more.
Her: She brought a gay person to my house for a fondue party.
Her Friend: Yeah, so what :rolleyes:
This.
There’s something to this, but it depends on the type of friendship and how close they are. In some circles, for certain kinds of get-togethers, tag-alongs might be a regular, accepted occurrence. And, certainly, I’ve got some friends who know me well enough to judge under what circumstances I might object to their inviting an extra person, as well as what kind of people I’d feel uncomfortable with.
If you’re not 100% comfortable asking to bring along another person, probably the best thing to do is just to call up and say that you’ve got a friend visiting whom you don’t want to abandon. The response will either be “bring him along” or “sorry you can’t make it,” giving the host the option to decline the invitation without being put on the spot.
There is a possibility that she is WAY more a germaphobe than a homophobe.
If she is going on some what dated information it would make it even worse. In the “old days” when AIDS was all the news, mostly gay men got it, a scary number of them did get it, and how easy/hard it was to spread wasnt exactly clear.
Fear of that kind of disease that is a death sentence, and in the past a fairly quick one, is at least somewhat rationale.
She may well not give a rat’s behind about the gay part of gayness, only her outdated info and overly cautious reaction to the aids part of gayness.
A little irony: If your ex-friend should ever be HIV-positive because she’s been having unprotected sex with every man in town . . . you know who will be blamed.
Clearly you did nothing wrong. No reasonable person would imagine that attending a fondue party required disclosure of prior sexual history, and there’s esentially zero chance of contracting HIV via fondue sharing (unless, as someone else hinted above, “fondue” is a euphemism for some sort of Hedonism-type public sex/swapping event, in which case she might have a point).
But it seems like the hosts didn’t give a “well…okay” type answer. From the OP, the answer was 'the more the marrier" The hostess didn’t care at all about the extra guest, didn’t care while the guest was there, but then was insulted when she found out the guest was gay.
Reminds of a comedian who does her whole skit and then towards the end mentions that she’s gay. She says she likes to see people squirm “because the only thing that changed…is you”
I think I agree, but I’m not sure. If she’s freaked out about catching AIDS, that’s one thing, what really bugs me is the automatic assumption that he HAS AIDS. If I were the OP, I might ask the how she knows he has it. If the response is ‘Well, he’s gay’ I think I’d quietly dissolve the friendship. Like I said before, assuming her friends are better educated then her, she’ll most likely get a lesson in all this every time someone asks why you two don’t talk anymore and she says “Because she brought a gay person to my house for fondue”
Sure, I was just talking about the general principle, not this case in particular.
Wow, the 80s called - they want their irrational fears back.
If the friend is willing to accept information about the real prevalence and transmission of HIV, then you might give her another chance. But I’m surprised that someone who’s either that germ- or homophobic isn’t already more aware after the past two decades or so.
People like that generally don’t WANT to be better informed. They have thier world, and they’re safe in it. They don’t venture out in search of any type of “knowledge” or “education.”
Yeah, that’s the reservation I have - if she in fact WAS open to such information, it’s hard to believe it wouldn’t have worked its way through her skull by now.
Annie-Xmas, I am posting this before reading a single response in this thread.
Assuming that every Gay man is HIV positive and every non-Gay is HIV negative; stupid enough to think the HIV virus can float around in a fondue pot; clueless enough about the disease to think it is that easy to spread to others and rude enough to call you on it - this person is a walking example of the ignorance this board is attempting to fight.
Your friend is an ignorant bigot.
Ignorant not equal bigot
And if so, then pretty much every poster here must be a bigot about something.
On a side note on don’t-ask-don’t-tell: A friend of mine who is gay once said he found telling people he was gay extremely awkward and just did not if he could help it*. He does have a car sticker, and a bit of rainbow ribbon on he book bag, and hopes people notice when relevant. He said that he expressly does not mind others mentioning that he is gay to those who do not know, because apparently it is not obvious, and it saves some potential awkwardness.
*And good on him for this. It is not typically something he is looking to have a conversation about and most of the time is irrelevant.
See, I hear this and I’m thinking, that must be some craaazy fondue
While your first statement is literally true, the ex-friend mentioned in the OP is pretty clearly a bigot. Can you argue otherwise?
A couple of years ago, two former friends and I went to Old Chicago. One of them ordered some appetizers with marinara sauce. Now this guy wasn’t the cleanest guy in the universe; I’d already had some conversation with him about using deodorant - and I think he just didn’t have much of a clue about doing proper laundry - and most importantly, his teeth were rotting in his head.
He gets the stuff, grabs a piece of bread, dips it in the sauce, takes a bite, dips the rest in the sauce, very rapid back and forth. Nomnomnom. He pushes it toward me and tells me to have some. I sit back and go “ewwww”. He pauses, stunned and asks “what?”. He’s sitting there, with a ring of marinara and saliva around his mouth, a ring of the same on his bread, and he’s dipping THAT back in the sauce that he expects me to share?? No Fucking Way.
Well, he was insulted, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t having any of that.
Frankly, I’d rather share fondue with an entire room full of gay men than share that dipping sauce with that one straight (probably virginal) man.
But as I’ve said in other threads, there are people (primarily women but I’ve run into the occasional married man) who think that there’s something wrong with single men and that we’re all harbringers of disease and evil. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of those people are even more afraid of GAY men because well, there’s no chance they’ll ever get married and therefore move into “safe” territory.
We would have to ask her.
Does she assume EVERY SINGLE gay person has AIDS?
Does she assume someone Gay/with Aids is somehow a “lesser” person because of it?
If she knew for a fact that the fondue dipper did NOT have Aids and had not had sex since the test would she throw such caution to the wind or still come up with some “excuse”?
Or is her concept of risk management/statistics/logic/math/info just not up to par in this case?
Should I get personally offended because someone is totally against nuclear power and I am totally for (and more educated than most regarding it) ?
In my mind should I call em nuclear bigots?
Or any other topic which I may or may not have thought out better or be more educated and experienced in?
Nothing wrong with calling a true bigot a bigot, byt why automatically attribute bigotry to something that may just be plain stupidity/ignorance?
Yeah, a good fraction, if not most bigots use ignorance as an excuse for their bigotry, but if you are going to claim all/most ignorants are bigots, you are not much better than the bigots assumming most gays have AIDS…IMO
Of course there is always the possibilty that we differ on what the word bigot means or implies.
I think that’s the crux of the matter.
When does somebody being offended overide someone else’s possibly irrational fear of bodily harm or death?
Or something along those lines…
Stipulating that Annie-Xmas’s account of the incident is accurate, she seems to. From the OP:
Look. As my best old ex-friend Ray used to say before we stopped being friends, “Knowledge has consequences.” Our knowledge of the last TWENTY YEARS makes it inconceivable that any American of average intelligence who’s lived through that time frame can be so ignorant unless it is willful, and such willfulness stems only from bigotry. Your argument is akin to saying that people who claim it’s wrong for me and my wife to be married because we’re an interracial couple aren’t racist. The argument you’re making is silly.