An Open Letter the Garden Variety Homophobe

Dear homophobes,

Yes, I mean you. 

You who believe that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people should not have the same rights as you, a straight cisgender person (Housekeeping: cisgender means "not trans". I'll also be referring to LGBT+ people as "queer" because it's an umbrella term and less clunky to type). 

What's that you say? You're not a homophobe? But you don't think queer couples should be allowed to get married? That... makes you a homophobe. I don't care if you don't like the word, I don't care if you are offended, I'm merely calling a spade a spade. This particular spade wants to dig a hole, put queer people into it and leave the rights they ought to have as adult human beings outside that hole and out of reach. You, my friend (and I use the word "friend" as loosely as possible) are a homophobic spade. 

Level of dedication to this blog entry:
MS Painting a homophobic spade
You're welcome

There's been a lot of talk about protecting children. That you don't have anything against queer people, you just don't want them influencing your kids. Well, my naive summer child, what if I told you that your kids have been and will continue to be, for the rest of their lives, influenced by queer people? 

What if I told you that, at least once every couple of weeks, we queers emerge from our underground glitter orgy caves, don our "normal person" masks and stroll around, undetected. We talk to you. We might serve you coffee or wait your table. We might offer you financial advice or sell you your tv. Maybe we're in government, or the school system, or the police force. We might, god forbid, be babysitting your kids, at your own request.

Sure, some of us have the traditional marks of the flaming queer: fashion sense and hand flailing for the men, "edgy" haircuts and tattoos/piercings for the women. But at the end of the day, how can you be sure we're not just hipsters? How can you be sure we're not bisexual, hiding our queerness behind genuine attraction to members of the opposite sex? How well do you know your best friend? Can you spot a bisexual who sticks to straightness to avoid the stigma, or a bisexual who happens to be in a monogamous opposite sex relationship? Can you ever really know another person's latent desires?

Statistically speaking, two or three people in this photo are queer, if not more
We just lurk in our "normal person" costumes ready to strike.

You can never know for sure.

We are everywhere and that always has been and always will be the case. We've just stopped pretending quite so much. You were, as a child, unwittingly influenced by probable hundreds of queers and look at how aggressively, defensively straight you turned out. 

"But if the children know that queer people are a thing, they'll want to try it. You're pushing the homosexual agenda!" you say?

I ask you, when you learned about the existence of queer people, did you want to try it? If, in the unlikely event that you did, did you like it? No? Congratulations, you are a heterosexual! If you don't want to have romantic and/or sexual relationships with members of the same sex you can't really do much about it. The same goes for homosexuals. The "gay agenda" wants people to love who they are naturally inclined to love in a safe, consentual environment. 

I mean, sure, we could try to convert as many straight people as possible to our cause by insisting that they date same sex partner after same sex partner until they find one who they can kinda sorta tolerate and bear to sleep with on a semi-regular basis until they settle down and stop having regular sex altogether... but you guys already do that so well in reverse, we wouldn't want to steal your thunder.

On the subject of kids thinking it's okay, though, I do have a few, more serious words. Ten percent of children are queer. Not "will grow up to be queer", not "will choose a queer lifestyle when they're old enough". No, ten percent of children are queer. Statistics say that they will first realise this somewhere between the ages of nine and twelve years old. They'll keep it bottled up for the next five to eight years, on average coming out around the ages of seventeen and eighteen. Many queer children suffer lasting mental health issues thanks to having to keep this secret for so long. Feeling like a freak. Feeling unwanted and doomed to a life of pain and suffering. Many of them would rather take their own lives than grow up and have to face themselves as they are. 

Why, you ask? Why do these children feel like this? Because of you, my homophobic friend (again, take that word loosely). I'm going to google "10 year old child" and bring up some pictures. These could be queer kids, they could not. I don't know. But I don't want to cause any children unnecessary pain.

I even searched for some specifically Irish kids because I thought I'd bring it closer to home 

(though interestingly, this is the search result for "Irish 10 year old" versus just "10 year old")

Would you personally bully any of these kids? Call them names? Hurt them physically? Tell them they don't deserve happiness? No, of course not, you're not a fucking monster. 

But, by perpetuating the idea that openly queer people are somehow detrimental to the upbringing of children, or that children should not learn about queer relationships until they're at least eighteen is harming children. I don't know if any of the children depicted above are queer. I pulled them straight from google. But they could be. And at ten years old they're just starting to figure it out. They're seeing pictures of straight people everywhere. Every book they read, every film they watch, every open couple in their life experience is a flashing neon sign saying "You are not normal. You are different and you don't know why". "Sheltering" children from the reality, that queer people exist, is not stopping them from becoming queer, it's just adding unnecessary obstacles to the road to figuring out who they are.

I grew up like this. I'm a nineteen year old, bisexual transgender guy. I went to a catholic primary school followed by a protestant all girls secondary school (for 3 years) then a "technically Presbyterian but fairly secular" mixed school for the remainder of my secondary education. I was never taught about queer people. I knew I liked both boys and girls from the age of maybe five or six (romantically speaking). I avoided girls where I could because I was scared. This was easy enough for the first three years because we had boys in our class. I played with them. I had schoolyard crushes. It was all fine and dandy because it seemed straight. It wasn't, but it seemed it. Then the boys left. And so began a long period in my life where I knew I liked girls but didn't want to admit it to myself and kept myself from forming substantial friendships because, god forbid, I might fall in love. I had friends in the younger stages, sure, but age twelve to sixteen, the peak time for teenage sexual and romantic feel feeling, I was friendless and hopeless and scared all the time. Things got better when I moved to a mixed school because I could make male friends and pretend to be exclusively straight (which was actually gay because I'm trans but I didn't know that at the time so we'll ignore it). 

Regardless, the Irish education system's lack of queer acknowledgement put me and countless others like me in a position of fear and distress which lasted years and had an effect that can still be felt in my life today. I was never explicitly bullied as much as ostracised and beaten down by my own insecurities and feelings of "you're a freak and everyone will hate you forever". Many are not so lucky. 

It is homophobic attitudes that keep this the norm. Remember those kids from a couple paragraphs ago? The state is bullying them. Or teaching them to beat themselves down. Not to mention that kids, queer and straight are constantly subject to homophobic bullying from other kids. Which is fun because it means straight kids then associate childhood bullying with an oppressed group to which they don't actually belong, meaning they resent queer people for something they never actually did to them. A homophobic system is effectively a homophobe-creating machine. And you accuse us of recruiting the youthes. Worst part? In many schools teachers can't intervene and stop homophobic bullying thanks to religious school policies forbidding mention of queer issues.

This is likely coming as a shock to you, homophobe. You are usually the one thinking of the children. One of the common responses given by parents when asked about the possibility of their child being queer is "I wouldn't want them to be queer because their lives would be harder because of it."  

What if you could change that? You could make that less the case by supporting queer children. By abandoning archaic notions of "the gays trying to convert your babies" or "teachers becing forced to teach about gay sex in schools". Sex ed is lacking in general in this country, you really think we're going to jump straight from "let's pretend sex isn't a thing until they're sixteen" to "Okay, first years, here's how gay sex works"? Homophobia hurts everyone. Your children, be they queer or not, will suffer from the atmosphere created by homophobic attitudes.

And you can maintain that you're not homophobic all you want, it doesn't make a shred of difference. If you treat queer people as some kind of threat or corrupting force in this world you are hating a group that is already hate by so many so simply being themselves. We queers have heard it all before. It hurts but we're used to it. We just hope that we can slowly open peoples' eyes to who the real enemy is. The enemy is not you, homophobe. You were made this way by other homophobes before you, and they homophobes before them. The enemy is fear and hatred. The enemy is believing that queer people are some inhuman things, existing only to make your life complicated. The enemy is believing we can't change this system of prejudice for the better. 

It isn't easy, changing long held views. I don't know if this will reach anyone who needs to hear it. In all likelihood it'll be read by people who already believe in equality and they've only read things they already agree with. If it gets around maybe it will reach someone, who knows? Share if you think this might be useful. 

Baby don't hurt me. Don't hurt me
No more

And I know this is the second post in a row on this blog about queer stuff. I just haven't written on here in a while and with the Marriage Equality referendum coming up I'm getting into a lot of online debates over this anyway, thought I might assemble my thoughts in a somewhat articulate fashion. This may have been the first blog entry where I've mentioned that I'm transgender. That's fun. For those of you who didn't know, I'm a boy. Took me 18 years but I finally figured it out. I go by Felix now. I'll update the main description eventually. 

Stay strong, friends. We've made it this far.

Embrace the Madness