I realized this week that gay jokes, gay slurs and anti-gay comments offend me. I have always believed that giving the words that insult us any kind of power is giving too much credence to ignorance. I have never understood the need to be upset over a hate filled “f” bomb being flung in my direction, because its just a word–and besides, in other parts of the world a “f” is a cigarette or a bundle of sticks. This week, in my workplace, I heard a slur that made me question my conviction and for the first time I saw “f” as the pejorative that it can be. When a co-worker said of another co-worker “He talks like a f** with a d–do shoved up his a–” I was offended almost to the point of saying something.
Why do we allow these insults to affect us? From one perspective, you might say that this is no different than the playground slander of children. As parents, we tell our children that “sticks and stones can break our bones but words can never hurt us.” All the while knowing that words can hurt as much as any stick or stone. We also teach our children the lesson that if you react to it then they (the transgressor) will keep doing it–therefore if you ignore it then it will go away, right? These lessons and more are taught to us from our first playground brawl throughout our lives. Somehow as adults the rules become so much different. In the adult world we give the words power. We let them hurt us as if they were a stick or a stone. We petition for more sensitivity and become so mired in political correctness that our very presence is almost guaranteed to offend someone somewhere. We fight against them. We petition to have words removed from our language. In the adult world we take the battles of the playground into the courts and the boardrooms leaving behind the lessons of the playground–a place where a transgressor can call us a fag one minute and we can play side by side the next. We call this the innocence of children.
There are many words aside from the dreaded “f” bomb that are insulting and derogatory to the BLGT community. These words are filled with hate. They propagate the fear that surrounds anything different–in this case, the relationship between two men. They have power. As much as we might not want them to, they do. They have the ability to influence a person’s opinion of you or of your lifestyle. I have written before about the power of words–and they’re ability to cause confusion rather than clarification. In this case, though, I think perhaps the wisdom of the playground is far more astute than the battles of our adult life. The words themselves should be treated as what they are–words–whether or not they belong in our lexicon is a debate for another time and place. It is the speaker of the words that deserves our attention–our limited attention. Rather than anger, the speaker deserves sympathy and compassion. Sympathy because the utterances attest to a lack of understanding that love can exist outside the predetermined confines of what we’ve all been taught. Compassion because the verbiage explains the fear of something that isn’t understood. Perhaps if more of us could respond to hate in this way then the words themselves could exist as they are meant to–as letters on a page.
About Adam Borders (Managing Editor)