So, my friend Tom (you know Tom, right? Tom’s awesome. If you don’t know him I will introduce you, because you should). He has written a genuinely fantastic blog post on oppression, identity and sexuality, covering his rage as a human being at the oppression heaped on homosexuals and homosexuality.
Note that I said “human being”, not “homosexual”. Because Tom is gay, yes, but I’d like to hope that the anger people have for this failure to offer basic human rights to a large chunk of the population is not based on their sexual identity. Tom is also a Wikipedian, a philosopher, and hairy. I doubt he’s angry about homophobia because you could shave his arms and make mattresses out of the trimmings.
Now, the same subject makes me pretty fucking angry too, and I’m not gay. I am, however, bicurious, which roughly translates as “I like ladies but have an intense fascination with the workings of penises”. It’s like being an anatomist but you occasionally get laid. Why yes, I am also incapable of treating serious subjects with due respect, preferring to mask them in humour, why do you ask?
Anyway. I’m not gay, although I still have a stake in the game, and large chunks of the post resonate with me. The cost/benefit analysis of whether telling people is worth the grief and the questioning. The knowledge that in vast chunks of the world you are unable to safely express who you are and what you identify as. The knowledge that these vast chunks include not only third-world nations and middle eastern pseudo-dictatorships, but the United Kingdom and most of the United States.
So if you’re angry, read Tom’s post. If you’re not angry, read it closely. But either way, read it: it’s bile and passion spat out in prose that could melt through sheet metal.