Every month, we give our community the opportunity to blog for us. This month Ellen has written an emotive piece on homophobia. Check it out!

I’m feel sick with anger as I write this, as it’s hit me hard very recently. My best friend is gay and proud, and we are in a social group on a dating app. Just this evening we matched with a group that began to tease my friend for being gay.

 

This was completely unmotivated as he had said nothing, yet he was still called ‘disgusting’.

Now, I cannot stand for this so I got involved asking what the issue was and tried to defend my friend. I was met with comments calling me ugly and that I ‘need surgery’ to fix my face and plenty of other foul language. And all I was doing was defending my friend’s proud life decision of being an openly gay man?
Homophobia is a constant struggle, and although I cannot fully understand it being a straight woman, I can at least empathise with the people that suffer. With 40% of trans adults reported to have made at least one suicide attempt in their lives, I just cannot stand the attitude people still have towards the LGBT+ community. When a person talks to my friend like that and then proceeds to ask me if I want to go on a date with him, does he really expect that I’ll accept his homophobia and go on a date with him? Of course not, so I immediately rejected him and highlighted my issue with the proposal. Again, I was faced with awful language and messages of ‘I didn’t like you anyway’. This man I am speaking about actually went as far as threatening violence towards me and my friend.

Although, this is not a pleasant topic of conversation, it has to be said. I cannot comprehend the austerity of some people in the way that they excuse their homophobic actions?  We are in the 21st century people, why can’t we just learn to accept love? Love is beautiful in every form and we need to learn to accept others for who they are and who they love. My experience is nowhere near what others have faced for so many years, but even being effected in the way that I have really highlights for me how awful it is for the LGBT+ community. I’ve always been extremely supportive of the LGBT+ movement, and I find it empowering to see people that have gone through this and then continued to be themselves, despite these experiences. Did you know that more than 75% of LGBT people suffered verbal harassment, and that one in seven reported physical attacks? This is completely outrageous, that this occurs based on a feeling of love and a disagreement from another.

Homophobia comes from an outdated text known as the Old Testament. However, in the New Testament we see Jesus accepting all love, and bending the rules from the Old Testament to supply the greatest love. He worked on the Sabbath to help heal people, he forgave an adulterer and most importantly, people that are in a committed and consensual homosexual relationship do not violate Jesus’ golden rule of “love your neighbour as thyself”. This harmful attack on the LGBT+ community has no validity, why agree with homosexuality being wrong in the Bible, but reject the idea of not wearing clothing of more than two materials (yes, that is a rule in the Bible!). As the Bible is an ancient text, let us compare it to some other historical facts and tales, for example the church actually sanctified gay marriages in the ‘Dark Ages’ including the Byzantine Emperor Basil 1 and his partner John.

Furthermore, a tale from Ancient Egypt about two rulers, ends with the two quarrelling rulers having gay sex. If you want more gay historical tales, then in the creation myth by Aristophanes, there were originally three sexes, those with two male heads, those with two female heads and those with one male and one female head. Zeus then chopped them in half and they spent their lives looking for their other halves to create a whole. All in all, Zeus was a big old LGBT+ activist, and he creates the ‘Origin of Love’ to include gay, lesbian and straight couples. So which tales do we believe? Do we believe in Jesus’ policy of love, do we accept Zeus’ Origin of Love, or do we accept that these all are outdated texts, so we should make our own decisions on how we feel in a modern context? I don’t condemn religion, but I believe that we should just apply some of the more modern concepts to the time we live in, and leave the clauses of wearing no-mixed material clothing and homophobic ideas in the past where they belong.

When I started writing this I was outraged and honestly, I just wanted to cry in anger. But now I feel stronger about the situation, as I feel sorry for the people that are homophobic, transphobic etc.

I feel sorry for them that they are not able to accept love in such a pure form. Let people be who they are and express themselves, what is wrong with letting more people love in this world? I want to just highlight that it has been scientifically proven that there is homosexuality in approximately 450 species, but only homophobia in one. In the words of Simone de Beauvoir “the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man… without feeling fear, restraint or obligation.”