Just Say You're A Bigot & Be Done With It

One of the things that the anti-Drag Queen crowd likes to say is that they're not ant-gay, but that they resent someone else's sexuality being "thrown in their face". They wonder aloud why someone has to define themselves publicly by who they have sex with, how their whole public identity centers around sex. Let's take a moment to debunk tat whole line of thinking. 

In the days when it was illegal to be gay, when it was perfectly acceptable to most of society to shun a gay person, gay people didn't have the option of publicly celebrating their sexuality. It was heterosexual society that defined them entirely in terms of who they had sex with. It was "straight" people who chose to focus on and demonize gay people for whom they had sex with. Even today, it's the heterosexual bigots who insist on making everything a gay person does about sex. Every gay person that I have ever met was a fully-formed, multi-faceted, complex person who never in my presence discussed their sex life. In my own experience I was much more likely to hear heterosexual men discuss, or even brag about, their sex lives (or lack of the same). 

These days, when there is (at least in most places) societal opprobrium at anti-gay bigotry, the homophobes have developed new ways to slip it in. Based on new laws that have passed, most notoriously in Florida, the legal assumption is that any mention or acknowledgement that someone is gay, or that gay people exist is equivalent to bringing up sex. The scolds on the right have justified this by claiming that since (in their minds) recognizing that gay people exist is discussing sex, and that it is inappropriate to discuss sex with young children, any mention of gay people, whether it's the school teacher mentioning in passing her wife, or reading a book with gay characters, is banned. Is a crime. They go further by claiming that by introducing what they call sexual topics to young children they are "grooming" them for sexual abuse by adults - pedophilia. The fact that a male teacher can casually refer to his wife, or that books can be read that include parents where one is male and one is female, or that "straight" characters (who, if adults, surely have sex lives) are assumed to not be promoting sex, pretty obviously shows how the problem is with the existence of gay people, not that anyone is really trying to sexualize or "groom" little kids. 

Reference to gay people is assumed by the bigots to be harmful, while similar references to heterosexuals is assumed to be innocuously "normal" - that says it all. Homophobia is still alive and well in the U.S.A., they're just covering it up with a thin veneer of care for the children.