Came out to my landlord by accident.

Okay, I was out at my old trailer trying to get some of my stuff moved out from there, and my former landlord showed up. We got to talking, and talk eventually turned to politics. (He is a staunct religious conservative.) I started talking about the fact that I was economically conservative, and socially liberal, using gay marriage as an example where I didn't think the state had the right to step in and tell people whether or not they were allowed to get married.

So my landlord goes into a diatribe about how gays are unnatural, how being gay is wrong, on and on and on, how he doesn't care what other people do but he doesn't want it shoved in his face, it's perverted, it's a sin, it makes him sick to his stomach to see it, etc, etc...

I let it go on for awhile, getting more and more uncomfortable with his rhetoric, until he started making really stupid generalizations. Finally, he said that he thought all gays were molested as children, and that was the last straw for me. I told him that I was gay, and that as a point of fact I was NEVER been molested as a kid, and neither was any gay individual I know, so that was a crap hypothesis. (Note: This guy is not someone I would EVER have put on my list of people to come out to, and if he hadn't started this conversation, he'd seriously still think I was straight right now.)

Well his jaw just about hit the ground, and he started laughing in disbelief. "No you're not, no you're not," he kept repeating. Finally, when he saw that I was being dead serious, he was all chagrined and said, "Wow, I never would have guessed you were gay and I've known you for years."

To which I was like, "Yeah, that's my point. We're normal people. Also, I don't believe in going around parading my personal business to everyone."

(Digression: I was standing there in men's jeans, a men's shirt, and with my hair cut like a man's. You really didn't know I was gay? :lol

So we got to talking about queer theory for two hours straight, just standing in the front yard. My landlord apparently had a couple of bad experiences with gay people, one where he was passing a gay pride parade with his wife and had condoms filled with some kind of lube thrown on them and once when he accidentally went into a gay bar and was accosted by a group of guys who couldn't take no for an answer (so he says). I told him most gay people weren't like that, which is something he seemed to accept easily enough because he was so flabbergasted that I was gay. We could be hiding behind every bush and he'd never know it!

He did kind of piss me off when he kept insisting that being gay was a choice (by using the phrase "That's your choice, it's none of my business to tell you what to do until it affects me") until I asked him if he made the choice to be straight. He said no, and I asked him why he thought gay people would make the choice to be gay when all it brings them is ridicule and oppression. He didn't have an answer.

I talked to him about growing up gay, and how hard it was knowing that if I hit on the wrong person they might want to hurt or kill me. I talked about how lonely it was knowing that 90% of women would never be romantically interested in me. I talked about not understanding why someone would speak against me or want to hurt me when they don't even know who I am as a person. And I talked to him about growing up in the church and having a strong relationship with God even as my own congregation condemned me to hell.

We also talked about the contention between the church and the gay community, problems facing the gay community (drugs, rejection by family, self worth issues, militant atheism, promiscuity), and the civil rights issues that gay people have to face. I told him that I didn't think it was fair at all that the religious fundamentalists tell people to be monogamous and to be faithful, but then refuse to give gay people the right to do those things. I shot down his Leviticus argument with the whole "seafood and polyester" counterpoint.

In the end though, he was all, "You're a good person, you're not evil. I won't tell anyone. To be honest now that we've talked about it, I think my only problem is with militant radical gays, I don't have any problems with you. I think most people have a problem with gay people because they don't know any."

I told him, "It's not that they don't know any, it's just that they don't know they're gay."

So yeah, one person down, a bazillion to go.

Disclaimer: When I was talking about militant atheism as a problem in the gay community, I'm talking about the phenomenon where the religious community says, "**** you!" to gays, and in righteous indignation, gays abandon or lash out at the religious community. If you're an atheist, I don't care. I'm talking about spiteful behavior here that hurts relations between gays and the churches of the world where there could otherwise be compassion and tolerance.

Postscript: Forgot to mention, we also discussed the interdimensionality of heaven, an incident that he had where he encountered a demon, and George W. Bush Sr.'s role in the New World Order. All topics initiated by him. So take that as you will.

 

One other thing we talked about:



Thanks all you guys for making EC possible, I never would have had a feasible argument to defend myself before I came here, and I really do feel like it changed his mind.