August 2011

(I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to write a post on my personal experiences with homophobia.  And so…here it is.  Don’t expect too many of these kinds of posts, though.  I want to get back to books and science fiction and fantasy and other such things.) I’ve made fun of gay people in my life.  True, much of the fun-making was done when I was an ignorant, culturally-conditioned young person who didn’t understand that, well, gay people are just people.  But I don’t think that excuses me in full.  I contributed to homophobic bigotry in my youth.  I still sometimes say things like “that’s gay” or “you’re gay,” though I have thankfully removed the word “faggot” from my vocabulary (except when I jokingly call someone a “faggot” and then remind them that it means a “cigarette”).  Change didn’t really come for me until my mother came out to us (my sister, my brother, and myself).  I don’t really remember that moment, to be honest, but I recall kind of shrugging about it (internally more than externally).  My mother is gay.  So what? And then the gay rights movement got in full swing.  Maybe it had always been in full swing and we just hadn’t noticed it in the small town of Placerville, California (where we all eventually moved a year or so after my mother “came out”).  I don’t know.  But once I knew that my mother was gay, I also knew that a lot of the things I had done in my younger years (and was still doing at that time) were, at the very least, problematic (and, at the worst, offensive).  I never hurt any gay people physically, because I have never been one for violence, but I know I hurt many people, gay or otherwise, by calling them names (I say “gay or otherwise” because I don’t know if any of the people I called “faggot” or “gay” were gay — they were usually those on the lower end of the social scale from where I stood, which was pretty damn low on that scale in the first place).  And when my mother said she was gay and started bringing around other gay people, male and female, it brought home not only the need for personal reflection, which I was pretty poor at in my high school years, but also the bigotry and hatred so many gay people experience day in and day out. It started with a group whose name I have thankfully forgotten who used to park what they called “Truth Trucks” by the side of the highway (Placerville has three stoplights on H50, which is a fairly major highway in the Foothills above the Central Valley).  The group would sit out there on the side of the road waving their signs, which are variations on things like this: But standing on the side of the road wasn’t enough for these people.  They also stood outside elementary schools handing out pamphlets to little kids, inside of which were various explanations for why Jesus hates homosexuals, what will happen to people who support them (or are them), and so forth.  Shortly after, the city passed a non-binding resolution to make Placerville a “No Hate Zone.”  I say non-binding because they could not actually enforce the “zone” because that would be a violation of the 1st Amendment.  But it set a tone for the debate in El Dorado County and had an impact on California’s fight for equality, however small. That’s when things got nasty.  The “Truth Trucks” people didn’t like the “No Hate Zone” resolution, and they set out in full force to protest the passage.  And so did we — my mother and siblings and a good chunk of the gay people in the county.  We stood out there on the side of the road cheering for honks from cars.  And we tried to ignore when the “Truth Trucks” people yelled at us or people in cars screamed obscenities or threw half-empty cups of soda at friends and supporters.  When the skinheads showed up (no joke), things didn’t get much better.  There were debates, screams, condemnations, and violent rhetoric, along with large influx of police officers (who, thankfully, acted as one would expect them to act — like they deserved the badges on their belts). I learned some time later that my brother was told he would burn in hell because our mother was gay (at a protest I couldn’t attend).  Someone I worked with told me he didn’t want gay people teaching his kids because he didn’t want them to turn out queer (I got really upset and told him off; he apologized later for upsetting me, which was nice, but that didn’t really fix the issue).  I know worse things were said to my mother, who attended many Gay Pride events in her slightly younger years, and participated in a few protests. When the protests “ended,” the “Truth Trucks” people didn’t.  I had to drive past the “Truth Trucks” almost every single day for work.  On MLK Day, they would hold up signs saying he didn’t support gay rights (when in fact he did, to a certain degree, having retracted earlier comments he made about gay people in his life; but using his words is really unfair, considering they are nearly 50 years old).  Then I moved out of Placerville and things improved, in large part because Santa Cruz is where the Hippy Revolution went to be immortal.  There were protesters in town, but I never saw them.  Rather, I was surrounded, for the most part, by people who supported gay rights.  It was a town where marching for what was right occurred frequently. And it continued:  friends of mine were called names, and only by then did I understand the impact those words had on gay people (I had no gay friends when I was younger, but after my mother came out, I met more gay people and befriended