feotakahari | Entries tagged with homophobia

I vaguely recall this book called 13 Bullets where one of the villains had a psychosexual obsession with showing lesbians what a “real man” was like. The protagonist defeated him when she realized how weak and cowardly he was. I wanna see a villain like that who’s a chaser. Someone who wants to prove his masculinity by dominating “failed men.” His downfall would be glorious.

A lot of people act like whatever culture they were born in is the only culture ever to have subcultures, and they treat everyone else as having the culture of the most powerful and influential people. For instance, if they’re not Japanese, they pretend Japanese gay subculture doesn’t exist, so they see it as both natural and inevitable for any Japanese person to adopt the bigger anti-gay culture of Japan. If you play along with that, and then you point out how shitty the dominant culture tends to be towards minorities, “my culture is good for being the one that has subcultures” is the obvious response. But it’s better to just say “other cultures have subcultures too.”

In the same spirit as “fundie Christians accuse people who aren’t fundie Christians of being in a death cult” and “Nazis accuse people who aren’t Nazis of wanting to commit genocide”: you know those women who claim men aren’t really gay, but just have sex with other men because they hate women? I haven’t looked into whether there’s any link to lesbian separatism there, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a pretty high overlap.

Not directly responding to the post that inspired this, but: a gay man is uncomfortable with you referring to his gay male OCs as women, and you think he’s the asshole here?

While I complain about parents who want to remove Heather Has Two Mommies from libraries, it’s not like I have any moral high ground over them. I’d pitch a fit if I walked into a library and they had Melanie’s Marvelous Measles in the kids’ section.

“alleged comments by David Cage in particular that were raised during the court case earlier this year . . .”

”At Quantic Dream, we don’t make games for f**s.”

Dude, the only people I’ve seen who are fans of your games are gay shippers.

(I read this in an article about how his company’s making a Star Wars game. Please do panic.)

Still thinking about that poster who said the category of “woman” is set up to exclude lesbians. I actually have think she’s got the wrong gender there. Patriarchy already has a way to fit lesbians into its categories, and it’s called “corrective rape.” But you could definitely argue that gay men aren’t considered ”real” men.

(Reminds me of something I heard about segregation. If you’ve got a men’s bathroom and a colored bathroom, then you’re saying the guys in the colored bathroom ain’t really men.)

People talk about how they interpret villains as gay. A lot of villains come across to me as the kind of straight person who's aware other straight people think they're gay, so they publicly make a big deal over how much they hate gay people and how they couldn't possibly be something as vile and inferior as a gay person.

I did not call that OP thinks “faggot” is an appropriate thing to call someone, but it does explain a lot. Always watch for the words people use once, or use at the end of a long argument, or use when they think you’ve warmed up to them. They’re a lot more revealing than the words they use to make their intended point.

There would be plenty of material for an AO3 equivalent of Safebooru. If you look at the My Little Pony fandom, for instance, there are a lot of folks who see a cute, wholesome show and want to make cute, wholesome fic in the same style. But just like how a lot of children’s cartoons have boys who kiss girls (and do nothing more than kissing), a lot of the wholesome My Little Pony fandom content involves girl ponies kissing girl ponies. And even on the sites that allowed all manner of NSFW content, there were people who went apeshit about “promoting homosexuality.” So does your child-safe site allow gay kissing? Does it allow straight kissing? Who legislates the ensuing arguments over whether a romance is “child-inappropriate”?

Eventually, the folks who feel their fics are unfairly rejected will want to go somewhere they won’t have to argue over every post. You know, some sort of archive of their own.

This is not an easy movie to defend. It’s a comedy in which most of the jokes aren’t funny. If you take it seriously, it’s hard to root for Oscar because most of his problems are his own fault. And you can’t just sit back and let the visuals wash over you, because human faces on fish bodies are deep in the uncanny valley.

Lenny is a shark who doesn’t want to eat fish, and the farther the movie progresses, the more blatantly this is treated as a metaphor for being gay. When the whole stack of cards comes tumbling down, this is what Oscar has to say to Lenny’s father:

“What is your problem?! So your son likes kelp, so his best friend is a fish, so he likes to dress like a dolphin! So what?! Everybody loves him, just the way he is. Why can’t you?“

This was revolutionary in 2004, and I think it redeems the movie.

Lots of trigger warnings here.

Chained to the Rhythm is something that exists comfortably within the window. It's heartfelt and strong, but it's an easily recognizable style. It's not at all surprising to hear it on the radio.

Farther out on the spectrum is something like Someone Saved My Life Tonight or Take Me to Church. You can connect it to other things that play on popular radio stations, but something about it sets it apart. It feels strange, shocking even. You're vaguely impressed that the performers were able to get a "regular" station to air it. In some cases, they can even move the window, and songs more like that start appearing more frequently.

The most brain-scrambling moment music has ever given to me was when I was sitting in a Taco Bell, listening to the most generic pop music imaginable, and it suddenly started playing Zombie. I wasn't confused that this song existed. I was confused that it could be played on the same station as the things that play in a Taco Bell.

https://kotaku.com/deadmau5-says-he-s-quitting-twitch-after-getting-suspen-1832606460

So, would it be “directed at an entire group of people” if I said Deadmau5 is a fuckwit?

I've realized that the way I think about and categorize anti-gay religious beliefs is fundamentally different from how the people who hold those beliefs categorize them.

I saw a post on Ask a Manager about an office organizing donations to the Salvation Army. The OP wasn’t comfortable with this, due to the Salvation Army’s refusal to support gay people. In the course of suggesting alternatives, a different poster said they wouldn’t be comfortable giving money to Doctors Without Borders because that organization “promotes abortion.” That turned into a derail about abortion politics, so the moderator started removing comments.

One person posted this: “Your website, of course free to moderate the comments as you see fit. But sure – abortion as a nonstarter for charities is off-limits but Christian affiliation/views are a legit concern. Word.”

This was the moderator’s reply (emphasis mine): “Why wouldn’t the topic of religiously affiliated charities at work — in the comments on a post about exactly that — be on topic? Abortion politics aren’t relevant to the question the letter writer asked. (That said, little of the conversation here is about religious affiliation; it’s about discrimination.)”

The moderator was expressing her thoughts about religion and discrimination in the same sense I would think: that the two are separate categories. How religious you are is unrelated to how anti-gay you are, and statements you make about the fact that someone is anti-gay are unrelated to statements you make about the fact that someone is religious. Someone who is not religious may be anti-gay, and someone who is religious may not be anti-gay.

The poster she responded to was thinking in the sense that being religious and discriminating against gay people are synonymous. If you don’t like that an organization discriminates against gay people, then you don’t like that this organization is religious. If you ask an organization to stop discriminating against gay people, then you are asking that organization to give up being religious.

I understand now why all those anti-gay people insist everyone else is being intolerant of their religion, and frankly, the thought scares the hell out of me.

Among my social circle, people tend to assume the reason someone’s anti-gay is that they think Leviticus 18 tells them to be anti-gay. We regularly pass around the counterargument that Leviticus says all kinds of other things, like not to wear jewelry or cut the hair on the sides of your head. We treat it as an instant win condition–if you say that people don’t follow the other proscriptions in Leviticus, then as far as we’re concerned, you’ve won any possible argument over whether people should be anti-gay.

I once tried that on a person who was actually anti-gay. He started telling me about the three different kinds of laws in Leviticus and how to tell which ones modern Christians are and aren’t allowed to ignore. I looked this up, and I still think he was talking bullshit, but it was bullshit that took a lot more thought and effort to take apart.

Conversely, try spending some time on an anti-evolution website. They have a lot of simple, logical-sounding arguments that are treated as instant win conditions against evolution (e.g. “how could wings evolve when partly-evolved wings are useless for flying?”) If you’ve done a lot of reading about evolution, you can find theories that address these issues. But explaining these theories takes time, and someone who expected to instantly win the argument will probably be frustrated with you “evading the issue.”

Obviously, my perspective on these issues is skewed because I believe in evolution and am not anti-gay. But either way you frame it, I think it’s important to recognize that other people have probably thought about the same issues you’re bringing up.

Note 1: This probably ties into Turning Verbal Traps Into Honest Questions, although that’s more about how to frame the argument than about whether the argument has been properly thought through.

Note 2: For the bonus round, try to find and take apart these sorts of arguments in anarchist vs. socialist vs. capitalist socioeconomic disagreements. The instant win conditions fly fast and thick from every side.

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feotakahari

June 2025

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Originally posted in response to a post praising “Western culture” for not being homophobic
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Originally posted in response to an argument about Dungeons and Dragons
Thinking about AO3 discourse
Cream of the Crap: Shark Tale
There's a kind of Overton Window for popular music
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Intolerant of Their Intolerance
Instant Win Conditions

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