”This is a #gay space”
”No heterosexuals allowed”
“Straight people ruin everything”
“lol heterophobia isn’t a real thing”
Oh, really now?
The quotes are from just last week. From the public introductory instance of Mastodon, a fairly fresh social media thingamabob. All of them rapid fired from the mouth of fresh blood flooding into the channel. Like crusaders wielding double-edged swords.
Now, it’d be well within my power to just leave it there. I could just wrap this up and start drinking early. I could get good and properly sauced and start sexually harassing poor defenceless women with digital pictures of my flaccid dong, like all white heterosexual cis-males do. The quotes really do speak wonderfully for themselves…
But seeing as I’d like to give a professional performance whenever I’m called for, I’ll produce a whole orchestral number around the mentality and rhetoric of the woeful words that introduced this column. Just. For. You.
If this came from the mouth of nationalistic pricks, religious zealots or conservative fuckwads, then I couldn’t have given less of a shit. This is the kind of exclusionary mouth vomit that one might expect from such sources. But when it comes from the loud minority of a social movement that is (should?) be looking for equal acceptance and tolerance, it just breaks my fucking heart. What kind of troglodyte does it take to turn a cause about inclusion into the same phobic resentment that they propose to want to stop? It most certainly isn’t an egalitarian. It’s a supremacist.
I really shouldn’t have to point out that this sort of talk, that “heterosexuals aren’t allowed” or that “straight people ruin everything”, is the same sort of warped mentality that has made everything worse for everyone since ever. It doesn’t take a lot to prove it, either. Swap out one word, just one, and the whole thing darkens. Instead of “heterosexuals” aren’t allowed, how about “Muslims”? How about “Christians”, “Pagans”, “Blacks”, “Browns”, “Yellows”, “Whites” or “Refugees”? How about just stampeding straight into Godwin’s Law at break-neck speed? How about swapping it out with “Jews”?
And you have the gall, the audacity, to say to my face that heterophobia isn’t a real thing? Heterosexuals don’t have to be shot, shived, beaten, bludgeoned and gassed for you and your mind to be just as bad as the monstrosities you supposedly fight against. Because all those things that I just rattled off, all of them begin with one string of words. Just one. And that’s for you to conjure the name of your target, followed with “aren’t allowed”.
I know that in large parts of the world, unorthodox genders and sexuality are suppressed. Sometimes culturally. Sometimes violently. I realise that there are ramparts to guard. That there are trenches to arm, and it is very hard to remain beyond moral reproach in a foxhole. I know that I am not part of that war. I know that I do not even live close to the front lines. But that does not give you the right to conduct unto me the same evils that you fight.
For, “one should be careful when they fight monsters so that they do not become monsters themselves. And when you stare long into the abyss, the abyss stares also into you.” /Friedrich Nietzsche
/Sebastian Lindberg 20/6-2017
WastedWords 