Same Love

Over the last year or so I’ve befriended a couple of young bucks, my lil homies... I’ve grown to love them very much over a short period of time... a light they shed bright on my view of the next generation. Bright young men, with maturity and understanding that rival mine and most of my generation.

They’re best friends... 1 is gay... 1 is not...

Hanging out with them I don’t notice and it doesn’t bother me. The 3 of us just chill, drink and listen to music or whatever... although we do pick on the gay 1 sometimes (that sounds really stupid but I don’t feel like making up fake names because it’ll confuse me and wreck my train of thought and I haven’t asked their permission to use their names so I’m just going to call them the “gay 1” and the “straight 1”, ridiculous, I know but that’s what I’m going to do) never in a mean or hurtful way and most of the time not because he’s gay but because of his gentle nature we bust his balls. Kind of like when I’m the only brown guy with a bunch of white friends and my brown balls get busted... anyway, it’s when they pop in my mind when they’re not around, as our friends tend to do, that I think of “gay” and my Neanderthal relation to it...

I considered myself pretty liberal and open until I became friends with gay 1... not that he’s pointing out my wrongs or anything but observing and letting my mind wander and trying to relate to his life I realized how backwards I am... and hypocritical...

Before him my encounters with gay men have been very brief aside from the super friendly and funny man that rented me a room in his home for a week while I was vacationing in NYC, they’ve been either hitting on me (unfortunately more men have professed their lust for me than women) and making me very uncomfortable or friends of friends at parties that aren’t hitting on me but making small talk and not making me uncomfortable at all, maybe just bored and uninterested. Pretty much all of these men save a couple exceptions have been stereotypical... flamboyant... some even OVERLY feminine to the point they make my girliest girl friend seem like Mr. T. I’m not trying to put these people down; I’m simply sharing with you my experience and observations thus far... I never saw myself being more than an acquaintance for the same reason I wouldn’t with someone full of hatred and negativity, not because they were gay but because I would eventually be too irritated to continue that friendship. My closer friends know my low tolerance for annoying people. I’m not mean about it, I just keep my distance... anyway I’m distancing myself from the track at hand...

Sometimes I think about how tough it must’ve been for gay 1 in school and it makes me think of myself as a straight boy and constantly using the words “fag” and “gay” in a derogatory manner... and I STILL do! Not nearly as much, as I’ve made conscious efforts to stop or at least take it down a few notches. I find myself sometimes commenting the word “gay” on someone’s status without realizing and then erasing it and writing “lame” because that’s what I really want to say but that word “gay” has been so ingrained into my everyday language that it just automatically comes out. HOW FUCKED UP IS THAT!?!? It makes me think about “what ifs?” like... what if gay was replaced with “brown”...” man, that’s so brown”... “fuck that, what’re you brown??”  The subconscious toll that must take on a gay person’s self-esteem seems horrendous to me even just because of the simple fact that some of them have probably shrugged it off so much that they’re ok with it and maybe even use it themselves. I’m doing to them what white Americans did to the slaves with the word “nigger”. So when I feel victimized by racism, I should think about how I victimize my gay brothers and sisters.

Gay and straight 1’s friendship is an example of the times the next generation is coming up in... A new enlightening... a new understanding... a new love... the same love our mothers and their mothers fought for a woman’s rightful place in this world... and our daughters will continue to fight if we raise them to be like our mothers and grandmothers... our generation and the our parents’ generation are going to be the last of the dying homosexual haters and the next generation of homosexual haters are going to be laughed at as we do at those crazy hillbilly hicks on fox news.

I know the gay fight has been going on for awhile but the men are coming out left and right now, which is great! 2 of my favourite singers are gay men. The women have been coming out for a long time. I’ve had gay women acquaintances since high school. I think the women have been coming out faster because women in general are more understanding whereas us Neanderthal straight men are much more likely to shun someone that comes out and even act out with intent to physically hurt... not to minimize a woman’s coming out experience... but the fact that more and more gay men are feeling safe to come out is a great sign of progress for all of us as HUMANS... how ludicrous is it that in 2013 I’m talking about how far we’re coming along in love, peace and understanding as if there wasn’t gay people or different races or even women for that matter since the beginning of mankind...