You want me to be friends with that duckbag?!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Recently a friend of mine - we’ll call him Steve - introduced me to a friend/acquaintance of his - we’ll call him Andrew. First impressions were, to say the least, lacking. While he initially seemed like a normal person, he quickly began to rant on about “those homosexuals” and “how unnatural and gross” they were. Ignoring the looks that Steve and I were giving each other, he continued to rant on … and on … and on. We quickly made our excuses and left, and Steve apologised, saying that apart from his intense homophobia, Andrew was generally a nice guy. I made it clear that I hadn’t been impressed, and certainly wasn’t interested in ever talking to Andrew again.

Flash forward a couple of days …

Steve has brought Andrew to where our friends sit at lunch. This time, he doesn’t embarrass himself and gets to know a couple of my friends better. However, he is a bit too cocky/rude considering his lack of any of the following:

[li]personality[/li][li]friends[/li][li]intelligence[/li]
In addition, he has a creepy habit of continually walking past our group, waiting for an invitation to sit down. (He never receives one and eventually gets tired of walking and sulkily plonks himself down without greeting anybody.) Having already gotten off on the wrong foot with Steve, this behaviour positively infuriates me. Aside from Steve, our group of friends has been together for over six years - if Andrew thinks that he is going to get special treatment after having known us for a week, then he’s got another think coming. But really, this stuff is all just peripheral. It’s his attitude towards homosexuality - this incredible hatred for people he doesn’t even know - that goes against everything I believe in.

I don’t want to be friends with him.

I don’t want him in our group.

I don’t want to see him, talk to him, or breathe the same air as him.

The reason I posted this in MPSIMS rather than the Pit is because I’ve been presented with a particular dilemma that I’m hoping you guys can help me with. If I let my friends know how I feel about Andrew, I’m almost certain that they would, at the very least, stop inviting him to sit with our group. The majority don’t know he’s homophobic, and if I told them, they’d be just as appalled as I am.

However, this sort of smear-campaign doesn’t sit very well with me. As much as he disgusts me, as much as I think he’s an uneducated, rude, conceited duckbag, the bleeding-heart within me would feel bad that I had deprived him of his only ‘friends’.

So Dopers, what should I do? :frowning:

2

Next time he joins your group, casually bring up homosexuality.

3

Me, I would let Andrew shoot himself in the foot. He almost certainly will, and soon. Somebody will say something about homosexuals, and he will go off, and when he realizes that all of you think that his beliefs–beliefs that he probably assumes every hertero shares–he will slink away, never to return. Problem solved.

The only other thing I would recomend is not to let his statements go unchallenged when hw makes them. If he says something like "Just thinking about it makes me sick . . " say something like “I don’t know, I mean, I am definitly straight, but gay porn can be exciting” or “Why are you thinking about it so much then?” (hopefully he is smart enough to get the implication). If you want to force the showdown a little sooner to get him out of your hair, make innocent comments that are likely to set him off–when the girls in your group are talking about some guy being hot, just profer an opinion and ask him what he thinks. A serious homophobe will swear up and down that they can’t tell the difference between the sex appeal of Tom Cruise and Herbert Cornfeld, and the suggestion that they might be able to assess another man’s sex appeal will send them off on a rant just so you know they are heterosexual. (I find this endlessly amusing.) It is possible that enough little comments like that will clue him in to the major difference in you all’s worldviews and he will just slink away.
Of course, if you really want to hurry it up, grab his ass.

4

May I offer a rather radical suggestion? Perhaps you could try some compassion for Andrew. It sounds to me as though this young man is probably shy and socially awkward, and uses bravado/cockyness as an attempt at faking self confidence. It’s entirely possible that his professed views on homosexuality are simply a way to look “tough” in front of people he desperately wants to impress.

I’m not suggesting you become his best friend, but it doesn’t sound as though inviting him to sit with you at lunch would entail any hardship on you or your group, and it would be a kind thing to do.

I know what it is like to be on the outside looking in, and it is an intensely lonely and painful experience. You may think that Andrew is bringing his outcast status on himself, and you may be right, but it may also be that when he is around people who are bright and confident, and who are willing to include him, that he may develop some better social skills, and may mature into a person you and others really do want to be around. And if you have been able to help in that process, you will have done a really wonderful thing for a fellow human.

5

It’s also quite possible his professed views are his views. Regardless of his reasons for spouting them (in Subjunctive Land, perhaps a male molested him as a child. Perhaps he was a somewhat effeminate little boy, and got viciously teased and called faggot, and grew into his current look as a defense mechanism. And perhaps–and this does happen–he’s just a jerk), it’s not your job to be “compassionate” by pretending to tolerate, much less like, someone you do not.

It sounds like he’ll do a fine job of shooting himself in the foot, sure enough. In the meantime, it’s up to you to decide whether or not to tolerate it in the meantime, take a more active role to hurry the process along, or as an alternative remove yourself from the group in the meantime.

Group of friends and I did some gaming fairly routinely. The problem was, one of them brought a friend of theirs that personally, I could not stand. Nothing quite so offensive, simply a combination of low intelligence and a personality that happened to grate on me in just the wrong way. My best friend in this town, who hosted most of them, more or less shared my opinions but at a lower level of aggravation–he’s got more tolerance than I do, I can readily admit. I stuck with it for a time, then simply dropped out of gaming nights for some time, letting him know that I wasn’t going to rant and rave about it, but I wasn’t going to be present when Annoying Dude was.

A few weeks later, Annoying Dude managed to shoot himself in the foot. All is well again.

6

Thanks for all your suggestions so far, guys. :slight_smile: I would go with the ‘shoot himself in the foot’ idea, but it doesn’t seem like it will happen soon. This guy says almost nothing; he sits with us, but doesn’t really talk or laugh or do anything.

Manda and Zyada, I’ve tried casually bringing up homosexuality before. (It’s quite easy since we have a very ‘blokey’ friend whom we all joke about as being secretly gay.) All Andrew does is roll his eyes a little, and I can’t really point that out to everybody without appearing as if I’m attacking him.

Lucretia, I can definitely see where you’re coming from - and believe me, those thoughts have crossed my mind as well. I guess that with this post, I’m hoping you guys can help me decide whether to go with my pity and compassion or my dislike. I would love it if somehow, we could make Andrew a better person (oh God, I sound like a missionary there, don’t I? :eek: ) - but what if Drastic is right and he just is a jerk? By accepting him into our group, we might be tacitly endorsing his views and not giving him any excuse to examine himself and ask: what is it about my personality that makes people not want to be with me?

Drastic, I’ve tried a variation on removing myself from the table when Andrew is there. Admittedly, it was involuntary - my aim hadn’t been to boycott him - but it was the end result. (The table had been too full, so my boyfriend, his friend and I sat a little bit away from everyone. Gradually, more and more of my friends migrated over until Andrew and a friend he’d brought over were by themselves.) Part of my reluctance to bring him out of the homophobe closet is that, even though I hadn’t intended to ostracize him, I felt bad. Not just a little guilty, but really, really mean-spirited.

So I guess the crux of the problem is which ‘bad’ feels worse? Being mean to a perhaps-insecure-perhaps-jerk person, or being forced to hang around him?

7

I really just came into this thread to find out what a duckbag is.

8

Ha! This one’s easy. Just get one of your guy friends to come on to him. You’ll never see him again!

9

Me too Chrome Spot.

Don’t hold me to this, but back when I was living in Seattle there was this open-air fish market, and sometimes they had these horrible uncircumsized phallus-looking mollusks that (how appropriate) squirted muddy water at the unwary. I seem to think they were called “Duckbags”.

10

Geoducks. Pronounced “gooey-duck”.

11

It never ceases to amaze me how gays judge other people solely on their attitudes towards gays. You know nothing about this guy except that he doesn’t like gays.

12
  1. We don;t know the OP is gay: in fact, I rather got the impression that he wasn’t.
    2)Bigotry is reason enought to dislikea person. In fact, the only way to irradicate bigotry is to have it be socially unacceptable. What if the guy had said:

“I just don’t like fucking niggers. I know you are supposed to, but I just can’t make myself do it. When I see a nigger and a white womana and a bunch of mixed-up kids, it just makes my skin crawl.”

Would that be basis enough to develop a severe dislike for the guy? How is this any different? Mind you, the high road may be to try to educate, not shun (and trying to educate is as likely to drive him off as anything), but even as I was trying to show such a person the error of thier ways I would find myself repulsed and amazed that they could hold such exremly bigoted views and that they could casually assume that everyone else shares them.

13

Oh, Chas E pull your head in! Read the OP, for one thing, and get the story right. Then just get it that “doesn’t like gays” is sufficient and adequate reason to cross someone off the list. Same as “doesn’t like americans” might be. Geddit?

I’ve never met Kayeby (too shy) but she’s a Melbourne lass, so she probably went to a good school and I’m sure she is from a good family and VERY respectable.

[mystifying reference to local traditions sails over the heads of all non-Melbourne Dopers, and probably of Kayeby too]

What I was going to suggest Kay was that I think you’re right that it’s undignified and unpleasant to try and influence other people against this bloke. However, I think it’s honourable and reasonable to tell your friends that you don’t like him, and why.

The difference is this: “Don’t talk to him, he’s got a thing about gays” versus “I don’t like Andrew.” Your friends will resist one, but respect the other. Your reasons may be sought and can be shared, and people will make up their own minds. And being such a nice Melbourne gel, they’ll think you’re right.

And you are.

Nice autumn, isn’t it?

Redboss

14

I withdraw my remark, I was mistaken. For all you know, the guy is actually a closeted gay and was overcompensating amongst a group of men. So you really don’t know ANYTHING about this guy.
I’ve discussed this P.C. thing with my gay friends many times. A lesbian friend once described this most eloquently, as “looking at the world through gay-colored glasses.” She said she’s sick of it too. Having lived in SF for several years, I am quite familiar with people who push their sexual preference to the fore, in the very first moment you meet them, and will not let the issue drop until they have categorized your attitudes. If heteros did that, gays would be the first to scream bigotry. You can’t fight bigotry with bigotry.

15

For the record, I am:
[li]Female[/li][li]Heterosexual[/li][li]A very nice Melbournian who likes the Autumn we’re having very much. (I get to wear boots! Boots! ::little squeal:: )[/li]
[stuck-up schoolgirl]
Well Redboss, I did go to the very best private all-female school in Victoria. Mummy and daddy associate with only the very best of people.
[/stuck-up schoolgirl]

Doubtful, as Steve and I were the only ones to hear his anti-gay rant. And Steve isn’t exactly the typical beefcake guy - very quiet, very studious - not someone most people feel the need to proclaim their heterosexuality to. :wink:

I’m bigoted against the homophobe/independently jerky. So sue me.

[stuck-up schoolgirl]
I’m sure daddy’s lawyers can take care of it. :wink:
[/stuck-up schoolgirl]