I took my life in my hands less than an hour ago. [Okay, that's a bit of hyperboly, and I've already been blasted for it.] I confronted a homophobe on the Light Rail on my way to work. She was, as they say, asking for it.

She was talking with her girlfriend (both of them middle-aged white women) about the Tony Awards; how everybody there seemed to be gay, and how she felt like an alien. Surrounded by "it." I listened to this for a little while, put down my book -- I just couldn't concentrate any more -- and turned to her and said, "You better get used to it."

I went on to tell her and her friend how WE feel being surrounded by THEM and having THEIR lifestyle shoved in OUR faces. Asked her why the hell I should not be able to marry the women I love, live with, share a house and bank account with. Told her about having no role models while I was growing up.

She claimed that, as a woman, she knows about oppression. She opined that it is wrong for anybody to hate anybody, even for the oppressed to hate their oppressors ("you don't hate rapists, then?" -- no, she's so evolved she claims actually doesn't. I told her she might feel different about that if she were a Black person living in South Africa) and that everybody has "different feelings" about preferences and lifestyles. (Note that I'm not quoting her verbatim, except for her parting shot as I got off the train: "We just don't want to have it shoved in our faces." "Neither do we," was my reply.)

complain about us being in their faces when we cannot walk down the street, go to school or work or to the movies, to a bookstore or even a fucking McDonald's without having them and their breeder lifestyles in OUR faces? How fucking DARE they?

Straight people have some kinda nerve. We've got one hell of a battle ahead of us, when even the liberals are against us.

Damn it, I forgot to correct the bitch about the red ribbons: it's an AIDS thing, not a gay thing -- of course, to so many bigoted, ignorant straights it's six of one, half a dozen of the other, isn't it? GRRRRRRR.

I still think it's up to us to come out. Coming out is our greatest weapon. I could have kept my goddamn mouth shut this morning, I guess, if my life depended on it. My feeling, though, is that our lives depend on visibility. We and our friends are everywhere, but that does us little good if we're all hiding!

Well, plenty of folks were eavesdropping on that conversation. Perhaps some dumbfuck will recognize me on the way to the Light Rail this evening and beat the shit out of me. Fine, asshole...... martyr me.

[Note: nobody did.]

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