Letter To The Editor

Weekend Winners will be back with a vengeance and tied in with Mid-week Munters tomorrow! This is a letter that I would love to write to an editor somewhere hahha. But actually, it's futile so there's no point! So I hope you don't mind reading a more serious post on The Way It Is.

Taipei Gay Pride Parade is coming up this weekend and I wasn't shocked to hear that a number of Christian denominations had banded together on Sunday to protest against gays. What exactly does it mean to protest against gays? This is how it was phrased in the local press and I am so curious to know how to protest against a group of people. I suppose it means that they were protesting the mere existence of gays. 

I still fail to understand how in a world like ours, where horrific crimes are committed on a daily basis, (people are murdered, people go missing, children are abused and abandoned, countries are bombed by other countries...the list goes on) we can still have groups banding together to complain about gays. 

OK, sequins were so 1985, those of us with lithpth wish we didn't have them while others are putting them on, and sometimes we're all up half the night trying to work out the gender of the person who pumped our petrol in the morning BUT WHO CARES? Seriously, how does it affect anyone else who one chooses to love? 

On the weekend I was talking to my girlfriend about how sometimes I purposely avoid the subject with people to spare the awkwardness and to avoid making them feel uncomfortable, but the thing is that it's my life and they don't reserve the right to feel uncomfortable about what I do in my free time or who I choose to be with. 

If a person can be wholly defined by their sexuality then they don't have much substance to them. If sexuality was all there was to a person maybe it would make more sense marginalising people. But all my straight friends, my gay friends, and my bisexual friends, are more to me than walking representations of sexuality. In fact, their sexualities really have no bearing on our relationships at all. And why should they? 

The thing I find most ironic about these protests denouncing anyone who isn't a heterosexual is that for some reason, in my experience, I have dealt with huge numbers of homosexual people in community development contexts. I'm sure I'm not alone in making this sweeping generalisation, but the community sector is powered by people of all different sexual orientations (and a large amount of them aren't heterosexual). I've never heard any of my friends refuse to help a drug user in their support center because they're straight, not one of my friends has turned away a teenage runaway because they're straight, none of them have refused a straight person sexual health advice. Simply, because they don't care. Sexuality is such a small piece of the puzzle that makes us human. 

Why can't people learn to put their time and money to better use. Why waste time marching around complaining about gay people when there are more productive things to be done? Protest about the murderer who is being released after 5 years in jail, protest about the corporations releasing pollutants into our waterways and our air, protest about taxes being increased. Whatever, but leave the feather-boa wearing boys and the tuxedo wearing girls out of it. 

After all of these years of hearing people complain about gays I've reached the conclusion that it just comes down to jealousy. No one can throw a party like the gays. 

xx