WORKING WITH THE ENEMY

Sometimes you overhear conversations that make you laugh, as in my last post, and sometimes you overhear conversations that make you want to cry, as in the one I overheard just now at work.

I don't work at a liberal or highbrow think tank by any means, but I usually assume a certain level of enlightenment and decency among my co-workers. I usually assume it is a safe and tolerable place to be gay.

Then someone casually lobs a staggeringly homophobic remark into the open, and — even more staggering — it is received with warm approbation.

I didn't hear the whole conversation because it took place on another floor among people I mostly know only by name. I could just hear voices coming over the balcony, some of which I could put faces to and some of which I couldn't. The gist of the conversation was that these guys were trying to figure out where to have dinner. One of them was naming restaurants, and when he got to a certain restaurant, another guy said "No! No way!" And the other guy said, "Why? Did you get some bad food?" And the guy just answered, "Never again!" Then a third guy, someone I actually know, said, "He got hit on there." Long pause, in which I could imagine the other guys thinking, "Awesome! He got hit on! What's the problem?" Then the guy I know continued: "By a guy."

Then followed a display of repulsion. Well, yeah, of course we won't go there now. We'd probably be anally raped as soon as we walked in the door. Whew! Dodged a bullet.

You would have thought the guy had said he was served a burrito filled with vomit, instead of that someone found him attractive and expressed interest in him that he was perfectly free to accept or decline.

I understand that some people are really uncomfortable with homosexuality and that they might not feel exactly flattered when someone who really turns them off makes a pass at them, but I don't understand feeling so outraged and appalled that you would "never again" patronize a good restaurant because of the fear that the same (highly improbable, when you think about it) homosexual might be there to prey on you again.

Or maybe you don't fear that exactly. Maybe you were just so traumatized by the gayness of it that you can't bear being in those four walls again. You can't bear any reminder of the faggotry that befell you. Your appetite for the restaurant's delicious food has been permanently lost.

And I don't understand why not a single one of the four or five guys involved in this conversation didn't speak up and say, "We can never eat at this restaurant because you're afraid that some gay guy will hit on you? Really? Isn't that kind of silly?" Instead they all just seemed to accept it as a perfectly rational, understandable response.

What if some female customer whom he found highly unattractive had hit on him? Would he let the fear of a repeat episode keep him from the restaurant? I doubt it. He'd probably politely tell her he wasn't interested and not give it another thought. He wouldn't flee the premises with a (flamboyant, don't you think?) cry of "Never again!"

Why does the unwanted attention from another man strike such a nerve?

I know that if you asked any of these guys if they were homophobic that they'd say no, that they'd insist they had "nothing against gays." But that's kind of the scary part, because they're just normal, average guys behaving like, well, normal, average guys who have nothing against anybody (as long as everything remains sort of "separate but equal"). They probably don't say "fag" in front of their kids — they're decent people, after all, not mean-spirited — but you don't really need to say "fag" when you otherwise manage to convey that a man being interested in another man is about the most appalling thing you can think of.