For those not in the know, this week The Walking Dead featured a gay kiss (as oppose to one of those lesbian kisses that people somehow seem more OK with), and predictably a certain subset of the Twitterati has lost their goddamn minds.
I have gay friends who are utterly furious about this outpouring of bigotry, and I have no intention of contradicting their feelings on this, but I must confess to having a different reaction. I looked up each of the people who appeared on Bleeding Cool's list, and of those that still exist on Twitter (two of them have deleted their accounts), the average number of followers these witless arseholes can lay claim to is a mere 742 people.
This is what the out-and-out homophobes have left. Nine thousand idiots led by twelve prime idiots desperately and pathetically hanging on to an incoherent ideology that has been intellectually dead for a generation. I'm not saying these people aren't hideous. I'm not saying the gay community is wrong to view their existence as evidence of how much further society still has to go. That, quite clearly, isn't my call to make.
All I'm saying is that we're winning. And we're not winning by a small margin.
4 comments:
I think you are in one way right; a lot of overt homophobia has largely disappeared. But covert homophobia is definitely still a thing, for example, this interview, where the writer of Empire explains how, when they screen tested a gay kiss on their show the audience reaction plummeted. When asked why afterwards, they all just looked embarrassedly at their shoes.
FWIW this is not a problem unique to the LGBT+ communities, but also with regards to race and gender as well, where overt forms have become much less common but covert forms still definitely exist (and almost certainly for other minorities as well). It's frustrating, because people then easily fall into the trap of believing, e.g. that there is no sexism any more, rather than seeing that although very few people are actually advocating for all women to please get back into the kitchen, there are nonetheless serious cultural issues to deal with. /rant
Just to be clear, I do know that the covert bigot is still a major problem; that's why I said we're winning, not that we'd won. And like I say, I'm entirely down with anyone whose reaction here is to be royally pissed off that this kind of naked ignorant hostility still exists. But I see a positive here, and wanted to celebrate it.
Of course, if one wanted to argue that moving bigotry underground has actually made things worse, well, it's not my place to say.
Well, I'm not whose place it would be to say such things, but I will certainly take a position on it, and that position is that the current situation is uniformly better than, say, 30 years ago.
I also agree with your sentiment that we are winning but we haven't won. I guess I'm worried that the "rate of winning" is slowing down, because the problems are less in your face.
That sounds distressingly likely, actually.
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