Anywho... let's get to the point. Basically most of my classes are related to each other this semester in the fact that Human Sexuality talks about the history of sexuality & where some of our morals that have to do with sexuality come from & tradition & such. Then my Dance Appreciation class talks about the history of dance and the traditions & religions in which it originated. Then I have my Philosophy class which talks about past, present, & future of mankind & the way we think about everything. So all of these classes are pretty interconnected.
Well, this past week in my Human Sexuality class we had a guest speaker come & talk to the class about hate speech. It was a really interesting way of presenting the idea that words like "faggot" or "fruit" should be thought just as offensive as words like "nigger" or "spic". It seemed to be a really effective discussion from the reactions of my classmates. However, when the guest speaker opened it up for questioning, my Human Sexuality class turned into an all out religious debate. Now, I'm a Christian but these people were just saying hateful things & telling this man that basically all gay people were going to Hell & that he could become a Christian if he wanted to. I listened to the "questioning" for a little while but as soon as someone asked, "Do you think gay people can be Christians?" I checked out & wanted to know when it was that I had signed up for a moral problems class.
If that had been the only time I had to talk about the subject of homosexuality I would've still been sick of talking about it, but the next day I opened up my text book to read for my Philosophy class & hey look we have a reading about Homosexuality. Then later that week I get an e-mail from my grandmother that talks about it again (something about some guy wanting to make schools pro-homosexual... who knows my grandmama is super right-wing conservative so the guy probably just wanted to educate children so they wouldn't be so homophobic).
Lol, but today was the fizz oozing popping open my bottle, saying this is enough. In my Philosophy class when we were talking about a topic that wasn't even related to homosexuals we managed to bring back in a gay topic. We were talking about how when you are making a decision in the public sphere, according to this one philosopher, you should leave all your beliefs about politics, religion, etc. in the private sphere & it should not affect the choice you make. My teacher was trying to illustrate how hard it is to create an argument without using any elements from the private sphere to base that argument upon. So she asked the class, "What's a controversial topic today?" Someone said health care, death penalty, abortion, etc. No one said anything about gay people! And all of a sudden my teacher is like, "What about gay marriage?" WTF? Where did that even come from? Just randomly pulled that one out of her ass. While we talked about what we could use to argue gay marriage for the rest of the class, I texted my ex girlfriend about how it was really odd how many times I'd talked about homosexual issues in the past week.
As the class ended I stood up & said a little louder than intended, "Gosh, I'm so tired of talking about gay people!" Everyone in the class just kind of stared at me with this evil glares like I was the most horrible person in the world. I mean you've got to understand I definitely don't look like the queerest person in the world. To most people in that class at that moment I looked like a homophobic ass face. So I immediately followed myself up with, "I say as I get off the phone with my ex girlfriend!!!" By the time I did my follow up I don't think people were listening to me anymore, though.
Though I should be more careful what I say and how loud I say it, I am tired of talking about gay people. I know what the issues are. I live them day in & day out. Talking about them every other day only reminds me how sucky things are. Oh & let's not mention the fact that when people talk about all this stuff they never once mention anyone besides gay men & lesbian women... apparently those are the only people that are discriminated against. Wrong! Bisexual men & women are discriminated against even within the gay community. Let's not even open up the topic of how much trans people are discriminated against. I hate how little understanding most people have of the situation, even people who claim to be authorities on it.
