An excerpt:
...Three weeks ago, I was on the television and I said that I believed that people who actively campaigned for gay people to be treated less or treated differently are, in my gay opinion, homophobic.
Now, some people — people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less under the law, took great exception to that characterization and they threatened legal action against me and RTE.
Now, RTE, in its wisdom, decided incredibly quickly to hand over a huge sum of money to make it all go away.
I haven't been quite so lucky. And for the last few weeks, I have been lectured to by heterosexual people about what homophobia is and about who is allowed to identify it.
Straight people have lined up: ministers, senators, barristers, journalists have lined up to tell me what homophobia is and to tell me what I am allowed to feel oppressed by.
People who have never experienced homophobia in their lives, people who have never checked themselves at a pedestrian crossing, have told me that unless I am being thrown into prison or herded onto a cattle truck, then it is not homophobia, and that feels oppressive.
And so now, Irish gay people, we find ourselves in this ludicrous situation where we are not only not allowed to say publicly what we feel oppressed by, we're not even allowed to think it, because the very definition — our definition — has been disallowed by our betters.
And for the last few weeks, I've been denounced from the floor of [parliament] to newspaper columns to the seething morass of Internet commentary.
Denounced for using hate speech because I dared to use the word homophobia and a jumped-up queer like me should know that the word homophobia is no longer available to gay people, which is a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia — homophobes are the victims of homophobia...
No comments:
Post a Comment