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Understanding Those Who Won’t Understand Us
For a podcast I’m going to be on, Everything is Stories, we decided one of the segments should address how a sweet little gay boy from a loving family turned into such a prodigious liar — to the point of landing him in prison. I traced this back to the very first secret I had, expressing what I think is a near-universal experience of most LGBT people:
“I had known I was different before I was 11, but the concept of homosexuality itself was elusive. I was only sure of two things: 1) that I was drawn to members of my own sex in a sensual way; 2) that this attraction made me one of the worst things you could possibly be — although I cannot consciously remember being taught or told one thing about same-sex orientation in my entire life until then.”
In the same way that it is impossible to be raised in a racist society without absorbing some degree of racism, it is impossible to be raised in a homophobic society without internalizing homophobic and anti-trans sentiments. The difference between the general population and LGBT people is that we eventually have to confront our internalized phobia and bigotry as a matter of psychological survival — and I’ve known only one gay person amidst thousands I’ve asked who claims to have never gone through any internal strife to arrive at self-acceptance. (Bravo to him. But he’s an outlier.)
