Love is Love

It has always astounded me that there is such a belief that who a person loves or is attracted to can be seen as dirty or unnatural by someone else who doesn't share their feelings towards said focus of their attraction. Even at four or five years old, I could never understand why such a thing as a man in love with another man was seen as something to fear or ridicule; and I couldn't understand why a woman in love with another woman was only appealing if on screen, only if they were both what society views as sexy, and preferably if it wasn't real love but rather a way to show the audience that they were both fun and wild.

Oh, the stories many of us grew up watching, how could we have ever believed that much of it was based in reality? Lesbians and bisexuals written into the story just as a fetish, but only if the bisexual was a female assigned at birth, because God forbid a male assigned at birth even dared to be bisexual, that was reported as sick! And if the bisexual girl wasn't conventionally attractive, then the story wasn't so much about her being fun and wild, but about her being confused or traumatised and just waiting for the right man to come along and rescue her so that they could have a happy ending (after a makeover, of course). An entry on conventional attractiveness and natural beauty is in the works, but for now I'll get back to the matter at hand. For the purposes of this entry I will refocus on homosexuality and return to bisexuality soon, but first I want to say that I never understood, for that matter, why either was considered skewed or insane.

The way I figured, if a man and a woman could love each other, or at the very least find each other attractive, what was wrong with a man finding another man attractive? If we, as women, could find that man attractive, then by all means another man sure could as well! Otherwise, wouldn't we as women be wrong in finding said man attractive in the first place? Surely if we found a man attractive then it was because said man *was* attractive, not because we *had* to find him attractive and no one else? And exactly the same was considered regarding women finding other women attractive. Granted, back then I was a lot more knowledgeable than most of my classmates - six years old and already pretty much knowing where babies came from, seven years old and already pretty much knew how babies were made, eight years old and I pretty much understood that some people could be born intersex, even if I couldn't quite grasp the dynamics of it. It's the kind of thing that happens when your mum is an Agnostic Biologist and your parents let you read everything that you can find in the house. So, yeah I'm aware that I had a head start when it came to LGBTQIA+ knowledge, but even back then I couldn't understand why other people found it so difficult! I still don't, to be honest!

Culturally speaking I can see how difficult it would have been for my parents to step out of that pattern anyway, but even now, when I hear certain Mexican jokes, I still cringe at how homophobic, misogynistic and bigoted they are. I don't get it! From a culture that boasts hyper-friendliness and a tradition of fully welcoming open arms - which they truly do have fully open, by the way - how can it even be that a third of their jokes have to do with hating men that love other men and the other third have to do with hating women? The remaining third I'd say it's okay - Mexicans do have a particularly good sense of humour when it comes to ridiculous situations and things like the weather - so please don't think I'm dissing the whole of my cultural background...

To be perfectly honest, I've never quite stopped feeling sore because I was the one who was called intolerant for not liking said jokes (and to be honest, for not liking the music, too, which I also believe it's uncalled for), and I was also often called uptight and boring for not liking said "sense of humour". So, yes, part of me is still feeling the pangs of being ostracized for standing up for other people's rights when no one else did, and that's probably never going to go away, but that's not why I'm writing this series. The reason I'm writing it is because people need to understand that it has never been not normal to be LGBTQIA+. It has never been strange, odd, sick or unnatural. What it has been, on and off throughout history and depending on the region, is UNACCEPTED. Unaccepted by society depending on religious views and sometimes class expectations too. Man-made laws to satisfy man-aggrandized ego.

Unfortunately I did grow up in that culture, though, which also means that as understanding as I was about homosexuality and, to a certain extent, intersex cases, I was not introduced to transgender people until my mid-thirties, and it took me a while to understand the physiological and psychological dynamics of what they go through. To my disgrace, I was amongst the ones who couldn't understand why in the world a man would want to turn into a woman and vice versa, as I grew up with the deep set belief that that is about the worst thing that you would want to do to yourself - and, horribly enough, with the perception that saying that a woman looks like a man is just about the worst thing you can say about any woman. It took me a while to shake off those paradigms, but once I did, I realised something that shook me to the core: the whole world is just as plagued in misandry as it is in misogyny! We all know that misogyny is very real and very dangerous, and I intend to talk about it more in its own entry, but misandry is quite dangerous on its own merit because in so many cases it's disguised as the aggrandizing of men, so it far less visible as what it truly is than misogyny. I will talk about this in the next entry.

In any case, the question we need to be asking ourselves is why we have such a social trigger against same-sex forms of attraction, because we can pretty much bet that all of it is learned, not a natural human response. Many people justify their homophobia by saying that then the couple in question cannot reproduce – but that is just the laziest reason ever, given that a) humanity is not going to fade out just because some of our fellow humans are homosexual, and b) no other animal has ever gone extinct even when they show homosexual traits in their kind. And even then, so what if a couple can’t physically reproduce between them? There are plenty of people around the world who don’t want to have children anyway, regardless of their gender identity or their sexual orientation. That is a subject in and of itself which I’m not going to continue here, but which needs to be said. In any case, if one of the members of the couple is Trans, maybe they can still choose to reproduce anyway, so there’s also that, which debunks the point which homophobes try so ardently to make.

Another one of the excuses that many use to try to justify their homophobia is about the “sanctity of marriage”, but a) marriage wasn’t invented by Christians, and b) just the fact that a whole community of people have been fighting for decades for their right to marry proves that marriage in itself is not going anywhere, as many homophobes seem to be worried that will happen. The family nucleus is changing, but the intention behind getting together and forming a home in the first place is just as strong as it has ever been throughout history, if not more, given that heteronormative marriages of convenience, which had been the norm for centuries, are disappearing anyway, so the real reason people wish to marry is more in tune with what the “sanctity of marriage” seems to imply.

So, yes, we really need to ask ourselves where such a trigger is really coming from, because we certainly weren’t born with it, and it’s not as easy as just saying it’s “religion’s” fault, either. With that question to mull over, I will leave you until my next entry in the series.

Hope you have a good week!

Sandra Cole ~ Actress, Model, Writer, Esoteric Practitioner

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Edit in 2022: last year I came out as bisexual, just as my husband came out as Genderfluid. A piece about that is in the works, yet I want to state that I am still an ally: a Cis woman ally to Trans, Genderfluid and Non-binary people. An intro piece on those topics can be found here. More will come soon!