John Barrowman, The Making of Me (2008)
I’m going to try and explain why this really shook me, and I’ll probably fail, but here goes: John’s very secure in his sexuality. He’s known he was gay since he was eight, and he grew up in a loving, supportive family. Yet he still fears that if he’d stayed in a country where homosexuality was illegal for most of the first part of his life, that he wouldn’t have survived.
And that’s why equal rights are so important.
I wanted to bring this back, after the events of Saturday, on the eve of one year of nationwide marriage equality, in what is now National Pride Month.
Homophobia hurts people.
And not just from outside forces. Sometimes self hatred and self loathing turn inward and you get suicides. Sometimes people try to bury that part of themselves and that’s why you’ve got the trope of ‘the most anti-gay person you know is secretly gay themselves.’
There are rumors the terrorist twatwaffle was secretly gay. That he’d been to Pulse before.
And in a country where you can walk into a store and buy a semi-automatic rifle without any sort of waiting period, sometimes that anger explodes outwards.
If you’re angry about gay people being themselves, if you’re angry about abortion, if you’re angry about black people, or at women, it is frighteningly easy to get your hands on a weapon.
Hell, I’ll be honest, I have guns. Locked up and kept away and we don’t have any children. Nor do we own an assault rifle. I’ve bought a pistol at a gun show before, walked in, paid, filled out some paperwork, and walked right back out with a new to me gun.
We need gun control in this country, that’s been a fact for a long time. But we also need to unlearn homophobia. We need to unlearn toxic masculinity. We need to find ways to teach people from a young age.
And yet theres a piece of shit with a major party nomination for president.
I don’t have answers, much as I wish I did. This is probably just a rant. But I do know that it has to start with caring about our children, and loving them, no matter who they are and who they love, and then extending that to everyone else.
Homophobia is just one more ingredient in a toxic stew that is killing people every day. Not in some foreign country, but right here at home.