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Murdered for a feeling
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Video with Ellen Degeneres
This is a story from the USA, but there have been homophobic murders in the UK too. Let us not forget Jody Dobrowski for example, who was murdered on Clapham Common. Why? Because of how he feels.
People joke about homosexuality all the time... I know my friends do. They call each other gay, if they interpret an action to resemble a two dimensional and shallow stereotype of what a gay man actually is. This joke being centred around the fact that it is weak, or absurd to be homosexual.
I am not attempting to silence anybody, or accusing them of hating gay people, but I feel the fact it is mocked so often implies that there is an 'us' and 'them' vibe with 'them' being a little bit more crazy/daft/filthy than 'us'...
Anybody get what I mean?
People talk about policy change, about how same sex couples can now get married (oh sorry, I meant 'civil partnerships'... Can't have any implication that the love between two women is the same as the love between a woman and a man), or about how there are laws to protect people in the LGBT community (quite a few I know only stick to gay clubs because they're scared of other places)... But these laws are only legislation FFS... Homophobia will prevail UNTIL we start looking at the root causes and tackling them, so our children are brought up in to a world where they are not ashamed of who they love and are able to be open to express themselves.
I know this is completely unplanned and random (hence this will be edited later)... But what I'm getting at is that the kid was killed for something that he felt... For compassion, for desire... Yet that desire was so repulsive that obviously the other kid thought that he deserved to be murdered.
So... I guess what I'm asking is where do you think homophobia comes from? And how do you think we can tackle it?
I am f*cking fuming. :mad:
This is a story from the USA, but there have been homophobic murders in the UK too. Let us not forget Jody Dobrowski for example, who was murdered on Clapham Common. Why? Because of how he feels.
People joke about homosexuality all the time... I know my friends do. They call each other gay, if they interpret an action to resemble a two dimensional and shallow stereotype of what a gay man actually is. This joke being centred around the fact that it is weak, or absurd to be homosexual.
I am not attempting to silence anybody, or accusing them of hating gay people, but I feel the fact it is mocked so often implies that there is an 'us' and 'them' vibe with 'them' being a little bit more crazy/daft/filthy than 'us'...
Anybody get what I mean?
People talk about policy change, about how same sex couples can now get married (oh sorry, I meant 'civil partnerships'... Can't have any implication that the love between two women is the same as the love between a woman and a man), or about how there are laws to protect people in the LGBT community (quite a few I know only stick to gay clubs because they're scared of other places)... But these laws are only legislation FFS... Homophobia will prevail UNTIL we start looking at the root causes and tackling them, so our children are brought up in to a world where they are not ashamed of who they love and are able to be open to express themselves.
I know this is completely unplanned and random (hence this will be edited later)... But what I'm getting at is that the kid was killed for something that he felt... For compassion, for desire... Yet that desire was so repulsive that obviously the other kid thought that he deserved to be murdered.
So... I guess what I'm asking is where do you think homophobia comes from? And how do you think we can tackle it?
I am f*cking fuming. :mad:
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The problem is though, we can't all change the world, or take everyone's issues on ourself - at the end of the day really each person just has to sort out their own life and get by. Yes, if you can do a good turn to someone else it's great - but I think the people who have time and motivation to champion the issues of others are unfortunately few and far between.
This week around 50 people in the UK will die in traffic related accidents. This kind of thing is happening all the time. Although in an ideal society nobody would die prematurely, it is and will always be beyond the realms of humanity to elimnate all hate, all ignorance and so on.
I think you just got to do all you can.
As for them and us mentality, it does exist but i think it is carried out on both sides. My gay friends are just that, gay. Other than that they're no different. Except one, who since coming out has taken on every stereotype that people expect of gay people. Power to him if it makes him feel more comfortable, but I can't help he's doing it to label himself as different, as gay, even if this is subconcious. There's nothing wrong with being gay and being proud of it, but why should it change who you are?
I guess it's a circular argument, what came first the chicken or the egg. Did he act and dress like this because it's what he wanted to do always, but couldn't because of heteronormative expectations, or was it because he came out and wanted to distinguish himself because that's what other gay people act and dress like?
I think all we can do is hope we move towards a tolerant society.
It stems from ignorance, and we can combat it by informing people that being gay doesn't change who you are, anymore than the colour of your skin, or the bits between your legs. Looking around me though, at a LAN gaming party, I'm surrounded exclusively by upper middle class white guys. So I guess we've got some way to come. We have 1 girl out of 60 people.
Some heterosexual people find the idea of sexual intercourse between those of the same sex repellant - now I am choosing my words very carefully because I wish to make a clear distinction between base reactions; feelings of attraction and desire, or disgust and repellence; with thoughts and conscious actions.
I didn't choose to be heterosexual, it just so happens that I am unable to form romantic attachments to other men - if i had the choice I might well choose to be bisexual, in order that I might be expand my ability to experience these feelings.
I know people who cannot watch homoerotic scenes because it causes them to feel unfamiliar and strange feelings of repulsion - this does not mean that they hate or discriminate against gay people. I don't like sprouts (neither is this a choice - I didn't choose not to like them) but I would not say that sprouts are abhorrent, unnatural, morally wrong or ungodly.
Not being able to separate these feelings from some higher relevance or natural order is, I believe, one source of homophobic responses. An ability to not recognise innate difference without judgement.
I find it hard to get why people care enough what others do in the privacy of their bedroom? I am sure that every person, whatever their orientation can think of sex acts that they would not be willing to perform (I wonder how many people would get beaten up for a foot fetish, or for a love of harnesses).
I am more tempted to say that maybe there are institutional forms of homophobia?
It is good that Section 28 was repealed however. Hopefully now children can be educated to not be ashamed for how they feel.
"duuude, today was totally disabled..."
No we can't... But one would hope that people could be educated on how important it is to stand up against prejudice.
This is different though.
The thread is about people being murdered because they fancy a certain type of person, they are persecuted for feeling love. It is different to your breaks failing.
I think its important to challenge it when people do use offensive derogatory language even jokingly against minority groups such as gay people, especially when its kids using it.
Its not so bad anymore, but the first time I realised i wasn't gay was when I felt these feelings of strangeness and discomfort while watching 'Queer as Folk'. My way around this was to try and empathise my own heterosexual experiences onto what I was seeing, in order to connect with the characters. There was a homoerotic scene in Shameless last week in which the older of the two men involved slowed down the encounter to enhance the connection between them in the whole ritual.
I didn't get this feeling of revulsion, because of the empathic understanding I came up with to interpret this; suddenly it became a positive and touching scene (literally and figuratively)
I did mention in that thread that some disabled people could take offence
Yea I agree to an extent. We should fight prejudice where we encounter it, in our workplaces and our Universit and our homes. But personally for me I don't feel that I need to go out and seek out prejudice to tell people it's wrong. Maybe that's apathy... I just justify it as I'm just trying to get along and live my own life.
Yea completely I agree. I guess I was just trying to put things in perspective, that we can't win every battle, or save every person. However, my headteacher at primary school once read out a story (I can't remember what they were called, they were pseudo-Christian, so not straight from the bible but all had links lol).
Basically there was a little girl on a beach, and all these thousands of starfish all along had been beached on the sand, and she was picking them up and putting them back in the water. A woman comes over to her and says 'Why are you throwing them back in, there are too many to save' and the little girl replied simply, 'You're right - but it will make a different to that starfish, and that one.'.
Stupid story, lol. But I guess it makes sense. Fight injustice where you can, but then at the end of the day I guess real life priorities need to come first. We can look back at the injustices of history but the average joe was only ever trying to get food on the table. I think we're headed towards a more tolerant society, and it is all about re-education 100% - I don't think it's a natural reaction that we see gay sex and feel repulsed because we're straight, I think it's completely socially engineered. Not in a deliberate sense, it's just been the status quo for longer than people can remember.
We're fortunate to live in a time where the information is available to us, that gay people wont give us AIDs by shaking hands (which some people still don't understand :no: ), that it's just another random fact about a random person, no different to whether someone has blue eyes or green eyes. So we can make better informed decisions, and opinions, and form our ideas based on fact and not ignorance and bigotry. It's better now than it ever has been. We're still not there completely - I'm sure the Romans and the Greeks thought they were pretty pukka too, but with each generation a markable increase in living standards for all, in tolerance for all, in happiness for all is happening.
Except in Italy apparently, but that was mid 20th century weird thing.
Us and them syndrome has existed as long as humans themselves, and for very good survival reasons. Language, and later writing and wide-scale communication on the other hand, has only existed for a relatively short period of time. And this grouping of people based on fairly insignificant factors, I think comes as a result of a combination between the two. It can apply to anything, such as race, whether you choose to live in a caravan, whether you [don't] eat meat, what language you speak, which football team you support, etc. Homophobia has had a bit of a helping hand from 2000 years of religious persecution, is all (as racism had a helping hand from years of political persecution). I don't think in and of itself, it would merit any more prejudice than any of the other things I've mentioned.
I absolutely certainly don't think that homophobia (or racism) is ingrained in people in the same way that sexism or classism is, for example (both of which have been distorted by the same things, but I think are far more innate). I think the idea of homosexual activity being "disgusting" is learned behaviour, rather than an innate reaction. Most children think that all sex is distgusting, and I think that comes from the social attitude that sex is taboo and dirty. What's the surprise that when they become teenagers, the only sexuality they think about in any way other than that is their own? Incidentally, I've met gay people who feel the same way about straight sex, so I think this theory has some merit. I think that without the preceding "education" about sex from society, the worst people would feel towards gay sex is apathetic. Hell, I don't like a lot of food, but I don't feel sick at the thought of someone else eating it, whereas some people claim to feel sick at the sight of two blokes kissing.
As for the solution, I really don't know. The problem with labelling a group as "them" is that sooner or later, they'll say "fair enough" and call themselves "us" and identify themselves as a particular group (compared to other groups who will willingly identify themselves as "us" before anything happens - a certain nationality, or football supporters for example). Personally, I don't think this is particularly useful in dealing with the problem at its core, although obviously it tend to make life better for most of the people who belong to the group, because they can then lobby for rights to prevent persecution. But in terms of removing the reason for the persecution (not refusing to reveal yourself as gay, refusing to consider it any more of a factor in your personality than your hair colour or what sport you enjoy playing) it fails completely. Maybe once it's been done, you can never really get rid of that label, and so this is the next best thing.
Incidentally, this is the exact debate that's going on among atheists in America at the moment, since some believe that they are discriminated against in politics and the workplace in general. Personally, I'm against the idea of them becoming a group, because I've seen it work in Europe without it ever being necessary. In other words, I don't think you campaign for gay rights, you campaign for no discrimination based on people's sexual preferences or practices. A tiny difference in semantics, but the whole insinuation is changed, and it is no longer an "us vs. them" battle, which was the whole problem in the first place. I think "us vs. them" has the same effect, except that the really homophobic people will become even more so, and you end up with murders and assaults. Like I said about the atheists in Europe, they didn't get equal rights in politics by campaigning for equal rights in politics, they got equal rights in politics by campaigning alongside religious people for religion to not be a factor in a politician's electability. And most of them agreed, so it's no longer a factor. But I'm really undecided on this, and so I really don't know what the best way of going about it is. I suppose with atheism, the point is that it's one of an infinite number of private belief systems, whereas homosexualty is one of two sexualities, so it's more difficult to campaign for "equal rights for all sexualities" without turning into an "us and them" campaign. But I think you'll notice a similar pattern in class in politics, where there seems to be a certain "us and them" attitude, which I think is partly a result of deliberately trying to get more working class people into government, rather than the aim simply being that class isn't important (in which case, it would never be mentioned).
But anyway, I think what I'm trying to say is that the message always has to be that sexuality doesn't matter, rather than being gay/straight/bisexual/whatever is brilliant. If sexuality doesn't matter, then everyone in the country is apathetic to it, and it becomes are abitrary as having blue eyes. If you make a point of it, then the odd crazy person will always take the us and them attitude. But it's hard not to make a point of it, when non-gay people have made fortunes and killed thousands making a point of it.