I don’t think it was anything that my parents taught me, but as I was growing up, I grew to believe that homosexuality was gross. I guess a lot of that was peer pressure and the society I grew up in.
I remember the exact moment when I realized I was homophobic and vowed to do better. It was when I made a homophobic joke about Brad Garrett’s character on Everybody Loves Raymond, whom, according to my sister, wasn’t even gay. He just sounded off to me, so I joked about him, and she called me out on it BIG-TIME.
Prior to that, Ellen DeGeneres came out on her show, and the jokes flew fast and furious at my school. It was a different time. . I’m a better person now.
What, if anything, made you realize you were homophobic and caused you to vow to change? Or were you never homophobic?
Growing up, I was raised with the implication that being gay was some kind of perversion. While I was never the type who would approve of gay bashing or who harbored strong feelings of revulsion toward homosexuals, I always assumed that something was wrong with them. By my mid-20s, however, I had learned that animals engaged in homosexuality as well. I even saw with my own eyes a mother and daughter dachshund in the act of humping. Through the media, including Youtube in its early days, I learned that there was scientific evidence that homosexuality was an evolutionary and genetic reality and that it was not possible to reprogram a gay person to be straight (and that it was very unethical to try to do so). Long story short, I have long been completely tolerant of homosexuals and am happy that there are places where they can get married - and support the extention of the right to marry and the possibility for homosexual couples to adopt children everywhere.
Things can both gross you out AND be ok. I think scat play is gross, but it’s ok if consensual adults that like it do it. It’s the “not minding your own bid’ness about things that don’t affect anybody else unwillingly” thing that is the problem.
I’ve never been homophobic. I didn’t really understand the homosexuality existed. I’m so dense that when a high school friend told me she loved me i didn’t realize she meant it.
But when i finally understood that some people were gay – even real people, that i knew – i pretty much just accepted it.
I did, however, oppose same-sex marriage. Mostly, i was just afraid of change, i think. “We’ve done it this way for a long time, and we don’t know the implications of doing it another way.” That being said, when my state legalized same sex marriage, despite my quite recent intellectual opposition, i realized i felt joy and pride.
I think it was working for a huge commercial flower shop( I worked for the delivery division) with a bunch of gay people of various degrees(?) of overt gayness. Some were your classic 80s gay man with a mustache and nelly mannerisms, others were actually macho… both the men and the women. For example, one lady was a local professional wrestler on the weekends, and pretty much fit every butch lesbian stereotype you could imagine. But another guy was a rodeo rider on the weekends- he didn’t fit any of the stereotypes. Most were somewhere in between.
And the thing was, it was no big deal. Their sexuality was no more of an issue than mine was, and everyone was accepting- the big sin was not doing your job or pulling your weight, not who you chose to sleep with outside of work. And in a lot of cases, the very coolest and most caring people were the gay ones. I also learned about the recent (this was 1992) decimation of the gay male community from AIDS.
All this was something I’d never actually experienced as a suburban teenager or really as a college freshman. And it really turned a lot of my preconceived notions on their heads, and made me realize that it wasn’t a big deal who someone wants to sleep with, and that for the most part the real deviants I knew were my straight peers, not the gay people I knew.
I was pretty homophobic in my youth. Came from a bigoted family and a bigoted school and a bigoted church in a bigoted town. It didn’t help that I came of age during the AIDS crisis, where the sentiment was that Teh gays gave us teh AIDS and now we can’t even fuck!
Got over it when I got out of that godforsaken place and actually met some real-life gay people. In particular was a bar owner. I asked about “the regulars” who’ve been coming in there for years.
He said, “Boy, I’ve gone through three sets of regulars in the last ten years.”
I didn’t understand at first, then he explained. AIDS had wiped out most of his client-base several times. I grew up afraid of AIDS, sure, but the devastation it wrought on whole communities–gay communities–had been lost on me until then.
As a kid I remember that ‘gay’ was a pejorative (e.g. ‘That’s gay’ when describing something bad) but in my mind there was no connection between that word and sexuality. It was just another word for something bad.
By the time I even started becoming aware of my own sexuality, it wasn’t long before Matthew Shepard’s murder. News coverage of that informed me of what homosexuality was and that murdering someone over it wasn’t OK.
A year or two later I learned about sexual orientation and the idea that people don’t choose what they’re sexually attracted to. I was in high school at this point. It was right around then I came around to accepting there was nothing morally wrong with being gay and I was even a bit taken aback at the push against gay marriage during the 2000s. I remember the first time I could vote, I voted against Measure 36 in Oregon in 2004. It still passed and would later be ruled unconstitutional.
Well, the thing that made me homophobic was the combo of being accused of it pretty much nonstop from 4th grade onward (as if it were something to be accused of) and the raw fact that I did not like other boys in general and most certainly didn’t want to get all kissy and huggy with them fergodsakes, ewwww!
Mostly what turned me around was putting a higher and higher priority on realizing that I had stuff in common with them. I mean, I got beaten up and harassed for “being them”, even though I wasn’t. And once I realized that a lot of gay guys resent being typecast as effeminate sissies, that really clinched it. I’m an effeminate sissy who hates being altercast as a gay gay, so, like, we should get together on how sexual orientation isn’t the same thing as gender!
I was asked to produce and sponsor a Gay Lesbian Film Festival in 1987. I couldn’t come up with a reason to say no that felt ethical, so I said yes. And then suddenly, my name was associated with one of the first GLBT film festivals in the Midwest and I was getting hate mail and was being asked to justify my “acceptance” by people who really hated gay people. And, of course, it was the first time people assumed I was a lesbian (not the last). Trial by fire and I walked through and came out cleaner and better on the other side.
(I had little to do with the festival other than providing sponsorship through an organization I chaired. An incredible woman and GLBT film historian came to us and it was her work, her idea, and her choice of films)
I don’t know that I was ever homophobic. I doubt I really knew what it was until I was a young teen. At that point I figured something was wrong medically or mentally with gays and that they would want to be and should be fixed. In college I talked to some casual friends who were gay. One did wish he were not, but the others were fine with it – so that was fine with me.
My best friend all through high school came out of the closet when he was in college. We were best buds then, and still are. When he came out, it turns out that I was the one with some soul searching to do.
I grew up in a country (Pakistan) where homosexuality was never talked about publicly and in a Catholic family where it was never mentioned either. I had very little idea about (for example) what was going on in Brideshead Revisited or why Oscar Wilde was jailed. The only supposedly gay people I knew in real life were teachers who were supposed to have dangerous proclivities toward boys so we were to avoid being alone with them. The concept of male homosexuality that was not pederastic was completely unknown. Otherwise homosexuality was never mentioned. Even sports broadcasts where BBC announcers might mention Billie Jean King for example, would have the audio blanked out periodically.
In the 1980s there was an explosion of news about gays and AIDS. What we heard was that AIDS was spread by anal sex, which is something gays did. There were lots of bad jokes about Rock Hudson.
When I first landed in the US at my first job I had a boss who was (a) gay (b) had full blown AIDS and (c) was a drug user. After a few weeks he became too ill to work at all, and soon passed away. Unfortunately I interpreted that as further condemnation of the “gay lifestyle” by nature and god.
At some point in University in the US (late 1980s), I worked on a semester long research project with a gay classmate. I didn’t know he was gay when we started working together and when someone told me he was gay I was hesitant to be alone with him. That sort of worked itself out naturally. After that I stopped thinking of gays as deviants of some kind. By 1992 I had come around to supporting gays in the military. By the late 1990s gay marriage.
Ironically my “development” in this area was often pushed along by my younger brother, who was a much more compassionate, tolerant and broad minded person than I was (he had gone through high school in the US). But now he is a big Trumpist, champion of “bathroom bills” and purveyor of homophobic, sexist and racist tropes of every description. All because he’s made more than a few million and is terrified of the Tax Man, and feels like he must defend everything “his side” is doing. Also his wife has rediscovered Catholicism. Proving I suppose that progress is not irreversible.
When I was about 30, I found that my best friend at age 10-13 was gay and had been living in San Francisco after his family emigrated basically to move him to a safer place. I remember us (a lot of the bookish boys) getting a lot of flak about being “a sissy boy”, but never understood why it bothered him so much more than it bothered the rest of us. Apparently he confided in someone who spilled it to his neighborhood (block of flats which was 90% of your social life in that environment). Fortunately his family’s immigration papers came through right around that time and they exited the stage.
Before high school, I was definitely one of those making fun of kids who were “off”. In high school, there was one out gay boy, and that started to normalize it for me. But, my big change to acceptance was when I became very good friends and a workout buddy with a gay man in the early 90s, right around the same time that my (now) wife became a flight attendant and had lots of gay friends. Just getting to know a number of gay people really helped me get past my earlier attitudes.
Since we’re laying it all out, I’m still not completely comfortable with PDAs between gay men, but that’s my issue, not theirs.
I was probably in high school when I came to believe that I wasn’t attracted to other men, but it didn’t affect me in any way that others were. I think coming around was part of growing up.
I grew up in South Florida in the late ‘70s & early ‘80s; never had a problem with homophobia. People are just people, ya know? I had openly gay friends in high school; one even performed as a drag queen.
This; Like a lot of people I only knew gays as perverted villains or comic relief in movies and TV shows, until I actually met and got to know some gay people and realised they are just folks like the rest of us
To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never had any homophobic inclinations. However, I was bullied as a young child, and that experience changed me into someone who naturally empathized with those who were shunned and hated by the larger segments of society.
Had I had a more … normal childhood, it would be entirely possible that I could have picked up bigoted tendencies from my social groups without giving them a second thought. So in a twisted kind of way, I’m actually somewhat grateful for having endured the bullying when I was younger.
It also didn’t hurt that there were two gay people in my graduate school whom I got along well with.
I had absolutely no comprehension of what being gay was all about when I was growing up, so I didn’t really have an opinion about it one way or the other. Many of my friends were major nerds and a lot of them didn’t really date anyone at all. Then I went off to NYU in 1986 and got a crash course in gay culture.
The only time a gay person’s romantic/sexual inclinations or activities bothered me was when I learned that one of my good friends from high school was gay because he propositioned my boyfriend while I was away at college. Regardless of sexual orientation, if you know two people are in a monogamous relationship, and particularly if you are friends with one or both of them, that’s pretty rude. But I got over it, and all three of us are still friends to this day.
My attitude changed in my early 20s, when someone gave me a copy of the book The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp.
Quentin Crisp was a gay British guy who - in the 1930s and 1940s - was a flamboyant, over the top, camp, totally out, unapologetic gay. He later moved to America, had a successful career doing one-man shows, and lived to be 90 and a gay icon.
The book is his autobiography. It’s exceptionally readable and entertaining. Highly recommended.
From the dawn of my history I was so disfigured by the characteristics of a certain kind of homosexual person that, when I grew up, I realized that I could not ignore my predicament. The way in which I chose to deal with it would now be called existentialist. Perhaps Jean-Paul Sartre would be kind enough to say that I exercised the last vestiges of my free will by swimming with the tide—but faster. In the time of which I am writing I was merely thought of as brazening it out.
I became not merely a self-confessed homosexual but a self-evident one. That is to say I put my case not only before the people who knew me but also before strangers. This was not difficult to do. I wore make-up at a time when even on women eye-shadow was sinful. Many a young girl in those days had to leave home and go on the streets simply in order to wear nail varnish.
As soon as I put my uniform on, the rest of my life solidified round me like a plaster cast. From that moment on, my friends were anyone who could put up with the disgrace; my occupation, any job from which I was not given the sack; my playground, any café or restaurant from which I was not barred or any street corner from which the police did not move me on.
The book was made into a highly successful film, The Naked Civil Servant (1975), with a brilliant performance by John Hurt as Quentin Crip.
This scene from the movie is worth watching – his great speech in a magistrate’s court.
Anyway, it that book that changed my attitude towards gay people.
