Gay rights light the path for humankind

I grew up in the 80s. I remember some of the many degrading synonyms of “gay man” that boys used to throw at each other in order to provoke the other guy. Most of us didn’t even know what the words meant, we just knew that they were terrible insults. Actually we had a vague understanding that they were an attack on somebody’s manhood, that it would be a horrible shame for a guy to be “like this”. To us kids, these words were just describing something bad to avoid, we never thought much of it. There was a latent understanding in the background culture that being gay was a bad thing, and it would have been nearly impossible for a kid to have the moral strength to realize that this kind of violent normative view infused in the environment was pure bullshit.¹

The struggle of the LGBT minority against discriminations, many of which are still harrowingly real, looks like many other fights for justice: ethnic minorities, religious minorities, women, etc. There is a “system” which has maintained its crushing power over these oppressed groups² for a long time: the cultural domination of the norm imposed by the most powerful group in a society. Unavoidably this domination leads to various forms of physical violence, but at its root it’s just a moral violence that most of us tend to accept: society says that the norm is like this, anything that deviates from it is worth less. People who are lucky enough to be on the right side of the norm seldom question it.

The particularity of the discriminations against LGBT people is that they are not a threat to non-LGBT people in any way. I mean that very often, people who want to maintain excluding a group rely on a supposed threat posed by this group as a justification. For example: people of such origin are thieves; immigrants will take our jobs; women are too fragile for this job… Essentially, they fuel the fear that the the discriminated group would make “normal people” the victims of some future problem if they were given the same rights as everyone.³ But there is litteraly nothing that LGBT people could “take” from non-LGBT people. Yet the exclusionary fear never stops: bigots are afraid that the simple awareness of the existence of gay people could turn their kids into being gay somehow, and they can’t stand this thought.

Repulsion is a common way a prejudiced person would describe their feeling towards a group that they can’t bear. It’s as if they feel offended by the simple existence of people who are “too different” from them. When new laws ending discriminations against gay people were being debated, I remember seeing some bigot woman on the news who expressed her hatred with so much rage that she looked like she was having a full-on psychotic episode. This person, and many others, just doesn’t want to even have to think that gay people exist, even though the fact that gay people exist doesn’t impact her life in any way. This demonstrates that the only true problem that anti-gay people have is inside their head: they simply don’t want to change their internal vision of the world, in which gay people have no place. They feel threatened by something which would force them to question and update their vision of the world, and they are scared that it would make it collapse like a house of cards.⁴ We can extend this observation to other discriminations as well: even if various risks are often presented as the main reason why a discrimination should not be stopped, the real reason is that some people refuse to revise their little internal vision of the world.

More than any other minority rights, I think the recent progress of gay rights are a really clear sign of the positive direction that humankind is taking with respect to what it means to be human. It’s a shame that it takes so long and that it’s still not achieved, but the end goal is obvious: everybody has a right to exist and has to be accepted as they are by society at large. There will be a lot of new challenges for this future inclusive society, because a lot of things in this world have been based on organizing people hierarchically, relying on the implicit or explicit violence of domination… And many things are still based on this, obviously.

Structuring diversity in non-traditional (that is, non-violent) ways is a great challenge. The fact that new letters have to be added regularly to the acronym (up to LGBTQIA nowadays, as far as I’m aware) is a cute sign of this inclusive process. Incidentally, this also shows that we are still relying on descriptions of our identity in order to exist in society. It’s not so easy to get rid of our old habits: these labels that we feel the need to assign to ourselves are just our obsessive need to control and order everything, which in turn can generate norms, stereotypes and cause violence. In an ideal world, there would be no need to claim an identity, no need to even come out, no need for any shame or pride about who we are. I can’t really picture it, I don’t really know how it would work, but I believe this is where we are going… just slowly.

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