(August 4, 2017 at 2:54 pm)Khemikal Wrote: You;re expressing, above, that you;d rather live in a society where homophobes liked you, so you're willing to be nice to homophobes. They're never going to like you, Regina......no matter how well you keep yourself in your place...they're homophobes.
That's pretty harsh. Obviously homophobes aren't going to like a homosexual: that's what the word means. But I think if people like Regina can stand strong to their values and be seen to be high-quality individuals, some homophobes will awaken to the fact that their prejudices were malformed, and change their views. I would say by today's standards, 1980s-era bennyboy would probably be called a homophobe. However, in my rave days, I met a couple gay actors who I thought were cool, and I crashed at their house often enough that questions were asked. A couple dancers who I liked had gay friends hanging around all the time, who I ended up liking a lot. We even had a gay member of parliament in Vancouver in the early 90s, and he was just about the coolest politician anybody knew of.
If those people had been constantly policing the society for homophobes to fight against, mock, or otherwise maintain friction with, I wouldn't have had the chance to change my mind about gay people in general-- if anything, I'm now biased in favor of the gay community on the grounds that gay people are more cultured and more interesting than the average Joe.
