a kiss is just a kiss
February 27, 2007 by thinking girl
so, around here, there’s been some pretty rampant homophobia happening. A couple weekends ago, Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac married his boyfriend, onstage at his ECMA performance (that’s East Coast Music Awards to you) here in Halifax. And the next day, one of the local newspapers, The Daily News, ran a story on the event, with this picture on the front cover.
(Photo: Ryan Taplin; Ashley’s the shorter one)
Now, myself, I didn’t really even give it a second glance. But all kinds of hate-filled messages started popping up on the paper’s message board, and several haters also wrote letters to the editor, saying things like the picture was disgusting, made them want to vomit, that they objected to the guys “deepthroating” one another, that they didn’t know how to talk to their kids about the picture and tried to hide it from them, and that the picture was practically soft-corn pornography. Most of them, while expressing these words of hate, were careful to temper their language with that common phrase, “I don’t have anything against gays, but…”
Lots of folks wrote in to condemn those letter writers and support gay rights to marry and to have their lives represented in the media, which was heartening. But that phrase has haunted me. “I don’t have anything against gays, but…” I mean, it’s a blatent lie! It’s so obvious to everyone that these people do in fact have something against gay people, that this phrase does absolutely nothing to conceal their true intention, which is to protest queer equality. Do they really think that saying this will actually make anyone believe them? Or is it just cursory now in our politically correct world to at least make an effort to appear as though you think everything is hunky dorey? Has political correctness simply pushed hatred deeper underground, made us package it in pretty phrases that denote passive acceptance, but really do nothing but point a big fat flashing neon arrow at the fact that we are contradicting ourselves?
Let’s just do ourselves a favour, and eliminate this ridiculously contradictory statement from our vocabularies, and stop trying to couch what we say in equality rhetoric. If you truly don’t have anything against gays, or any other kind of social group, then chances are, you won’t be objecting.
I hadn’t heard the ruckus about it all. I thought it was a lovely photo for the front page, but ask only why didn’t he get married in his kilt? My ex is maybe 1/4 scottish and he got married in a kilt. But he’s a also a total wanker. So maybe there’s my answer.
Hey Sage - yeah, I thought it was a nice photo too, and great to have it on the front page. Looks like his hubby is quite a handsome man!
Ya know, we’ve got a pretty big scottish descendant thing going on (”Nova Scotia” is literally New Scotland, after all), so we do have a lot of weddings with the whole scottish theme, bagpipes and kilts and the like. Maybe the kilt thing got tired for Ashley since it did get him in trouble a couple years back, flashing his audience and all.
Incidentally, a paper in Ottawa ran the same pic a few days later, and not a peep about it. Also, nobody cared the dozen or so times the same paper here ran the infamous Britney-Madonna open-mouther.
a few years ago, I would have been one of those “hate writers”… while I never preached against gays, I never made a secter that I did not like them… that was than, and this is now
a few years ago, a close friend confided in me of being gay… it was quite a shock, at first I wanted to react with hate and never speak to my friend again… but than after I had time to think about it I realized something… we had been friends for many years, we were best friends, and I was the ONLY person my friend trusted enough to share that secret with…. that’s when I realized, he was still the same person he had been the day before, so why was I now not speaking to him? I realized how foolish I was acting, and since than have learned to see gays in a new light
today, I still do not agree with them, but now neither do I hate them