“Don’t shove your personal life in my face” seems to be the last refuge for bigots who know, that they don’t really get to decide if other people can be gay (or trans or maybe just punk or whatever seems to be over the line for them)
It seems reasonable right? They’re not telling people to stop being gay or anything. After all, it’s 2015 and we’re better than that now. All they are asking is please respect their right to live in a world where they don’t ever have to think about things they don’t really like. Totally reasonable.
Except that it makes your life and your feelings everyone else’s responsibility.
The reason I got to think about this is, that I saw a clip from last year, where Anderson Cooper calls out a TV host because she disliked seeing Michael Sam kiss his boyfriend on TV.
If you scrub to around 1:00 you’ll see host Amy Kushnir (the one in the white and black dress) make a face. It’s the kind of face you make when you are disgusted by something. And that disgust is obviously why she doesn’t want to have to deal with it by having it “shoved in her face”.
But the only way we make those disgust faces disappear whenever someone is confronted with a gay couple, either in reality or on TV is by making sure that people GET USED TO IT. So I’m afraid “in your face” is exactly where you need two men kissing. No one is arguing that anyone should be forced to watch anyone else have sex, but a reasonable amount of public display of affection is completely normal and accepted in most western cultures, and as such, it’s something you’re going to have to deal with, and it’s something that your children are going to have to deal with as well.
If it falls to others to censor your children’s world, then all of a sudden it’s not just on TV you ask people to please keep their relationship secret. Next its on the street because you’re walking there with your child, who is somehow afraid of gay people, and next its when the child of a gay couple attends your child’s school. I’m sorry, but those people in the street, and that child in your child’s school needs you to get used to people being gay, and having the same rights as anyone else. Not just legally, but in practice as well.
It’s cool that the right to live a regular life as a gay man or woman, is continuing to be more and more accepted politically. But it’s by normalizing it in the media, on the street and everywhere else, that it becomes universally accepted socially as well.
Just like I am free to kiss my wife anywhere I want, so is Michael Sam free to kiss his boyfriend. And honestly, it’s to the TV-stations credit, that they showed him celebrating the good news with his boyfriend, and that they didn’t make a huge deal out of it, which they very easily could have, given the amount of attention there were around Michael Sam coming out at the time.
Obviously, this is a long road. Social change is slow. There are still people that would rather not see mixed race couples, and obviously racism, though sometimes more covert than in the past, is still rampant. Luckily though, we’re already on this road going at a good clip. There are just a few more people, that need completely normal behaviour shoved in their faces.
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