Sunnybank74

A year or so ago, I was driving some young people home, late at night, to a house in Garran. We drove past a house and one of them pointed it out to the others. “That’s one gay place there!” and everyone laughed. I looked at the GPS map. A very short street, named Gay Place, and of course the first house on the left was 1 Gay Place.

Gay had a different connotation in the days of the Sixties and Seventies when they were laying out Woden’s suburbs and I was at school in Brisbane. Our annual high school fete was called Gay Day, and while it was a festive occasion, it wasn’t THAT festive!

LGBT topics weren’t very openly discussed in my schoolday environment. By high school, I think we all had an idea of what homosexual folk did, but chiefly it was nudge-snigger innuendo television comedians. Poofters, horse’s hoofs, shirt-lifters. That chap on Are You Being Served?.

Not proper people.

Homosexuality didn’t feature in my family home discussions. Sex didn’t. Swear words didn’t. I said “Damn”, and my mouth got washed out with soap and water.

High school. Nobody was openly homosexual. It was something they might possibly do in university. This was Queensland in the Seventies, remember. But we knew. When the principal brought out one of the sport players on a Monday and praised him because he had been selected for a local football club, he said, “This boy plays with men!” and oh how we roared!

Fair enough, too. Good line.

Bosom buddies – photo by donlambson*

What sparks this post is a link provided by a friend of mine, on the subject of coming out in “middle school”, which I guess would translate to the early years of high school in Queensland. You may find the article here.

Good article, give it a read. Positive, optimistic, supportive.

So it is with some embarrassment that I confess that my attitudes to LGBT folk were pretty stone-age for the first 40 odd years of my life. I blame my upbringing for the original attitude, and BookCrossing.com for changing it.

I remember one Canberra Day parade, and there was a float from some gay group. I stood with wife and kids and watched and made some joking remark. My wife, instead of laughing, gave me one of those looks, and I thought, geez, what have I done now?

I joined BookCrossing.com shortly after, and there were openly gay people in the forums. Folk who were witty, charming, gentle, caring, loving people. Quite a difference from the stereotypical views of my youth. One of them in particular attracted every ounce of my sympathy, because he had been beaten up for being homosexual and the resultant medical and dental problems were a major factor in his present day life. He’d also come in for severe criticism from his family, notably his father, and I thought, poor bloke, he doesn’t deserve any of this, he’s such a sweet guy.

We became friends in BookCrossing.com and on the Livejournal blogging site, and I remember how his bitter, cynical posts changed when he found the right man and moved in with him. Loneliness became joy. Their region changed the law to permit gay marriage and his partner, returning from a long flight, descended the terminal stairs to find his guy down on one knee, ring in his hands, proposing marriage.

They were married, they have lived in sweet joy for years, and long may they continue. I love a romance story, and this has been one of the best ones.

My attitudes changed. I thought about it and concluded that gay people were people too. So where was the problem? Where was my problem?

There was no problem. From that moment, LGBT folk became normal in my book. My mother would frown on this if she knew, I’m sure. But what people get up to in their bedrooms is no business of mine anyway.

If I have any difficulties with LGBT people, it’s with the campaigners who try to present LGBT folk as being deserving of special positive treatment. This seems to me to be as abhorrent as singling them out for negative treatment. In my book, people are people, regardless of gender preference, skin colour, religion or any other similar factor. Men and women are different for certain medical aspects – very few blokes get to have an obstetrician checking them over, for example, but otherwise I find sexual discrimination as abhorrent as any other, and I long for the day when both sexes are treated equally in rights and respect and rewards.

I like to think that as the years go by, I’m becoming a better person. Less selfish, more tolerant of others. I think I’ve got a long way to go in many respects, but I like the person I am now a lot better than the person I was ten years ago.

–Peter Mac

* The photograph of two young women above is taken from a free stock photography exchange. The photographer makes no claims about sexuality of the subjects and neither do I, despite the caption and the post subject material implying a close relationship. They are just good friends.