jumpingjacktrash:

the-real-seebs:

argumate:

zexreborn:

argumate:

argumate:

does anyone have a convincing explanation for why homophobia declined so precipitously

femmenietzsche said: Byproduct of making sex and marriage about individual fulfillment.

that doesn’t really feel sufficient, I mean yes it’s obviously correlated with all kinds of other social change, most of which boost the value of individual lives over traditional institutions, but we’re still going from mental disorder to officially sanctioned love-is-love within 20 years, few other changes seem this fast.

It’s namby pamby liberalism, basically.

You know that black guy who befriended the KKK to get them to give up their robes? Daryl Davis? It turns out bigots actually are reasonably persuadable if you can get in under their defenses. Not to go all Saturday Morning Cartoon very special episode and everything, but the power of empathy and brotherhood is real and just knowing a member of an oppressed group on a personal level makes it hard to keep oppressing them.

And gay people had advantages even Daryl Davis didn’t have. We could and basically had to remain hidden for a long time. Before we came out of the closet, we were sons and daughters, best friends and pupils, the kid on the debate team or the co-worker. The fundamentals of the situation required that the intense personal confessionals and bridge building to bigots happened naturally and on a massive scale. One agonizing conversation with family after another, one difficult decision about whether to hold hands at thanksgiving or invite grandma to the commitment ceremony at a time, we won hearts and minds.

The strategy scaled, and in fact was made easier and easier as time went on. Some people come out, which made it a little safer to come out, which let more people come out, and on and on until everyone had a daughter or a mechanic that they knew was gay.

It baffles me that this is supposed to make me a naive and unsophisticated when most of those same progressives yelling at me about it either were queer themselves or involved in gay activism when all of this as going down. I saw dozens of people go from bigots to grudgingly accepting people to enthusiastic advocates of gay rights, And I’m betting you did, too, so where the current pessimism about converting the bigoted comes from is a mystery to me. Sometimes the spiritually uplifting and optimistic answer happens to be the right one. And the attitude of the modern-day to conversion of bigots strikes me as an intentional decision to stick to comforting and politically easy facts when the truth is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the past 20 years.

yay for namby pamby liberalism!

I’ve seen people argue that Will and Grace was hugely influential, just because “prime time TV”. You see something weird and scary and unfamiliar, and nothing happens, and you see it again, and nothing happens, and after a while it’s not scary anymore.

But think about the famous judge saying he’s never met a gay person, and his clerk saying “uh, actually”. Back in the 80s, when a kid in my school came out as gay, it was a huge fucking deal. I saw one other kid openly claim to be bisexual, and… like, that was it. That was what we had for anyone talking about being gay or admitting to it or anything.

So that kid came out in his senior speech, and said “you know, people keep saying they think I’m gay, and you know what? Yeah, I am.” And he got a standing ovation. And all the kids at that school got the impression that being gay was something that a cool person you really liked might be doing, and that it was hard on them when people were jerks to them.

And honestly, a big part of the reason it became a massive shift was precisely that homophobia was weaponized as a get-out-the-vote strategy. For a long time before that, the actual degree of active hostility was actually lower in most of the US; people just avoided the topic. So some of this was a result of the realization that this could be used as a topic to motivate people to vote. But that meant making it a major topic. And doing things like pushing for a law banning gay marriage, when no one had seriously been talking about it before that. (Almost no one. I know Quakers whose church was doing same-sex marriages in the late 80s.)

So suddenly it became a major thing people talked about, and it turns out that when it keeps getting talked about, and influential people keep saying “hey, this is… just sorta stupid really”, and stories about kids getting kicked out by their parents are heartbreaking and awful… People just kept moving over, and moving over.

One of my friends decided to come out as a trans girl at school, by showing up at a party in a dress and makeup. No one gave her a hard time about it. We asked.

But we asked “did anyone give you a hard time about it”. Not “was anyone okay with it”. Not “did you get seriously injured.” Because that’s where the question is, now, in most of our culture.

So, yeah, you can absolutely persuade bigots. It’s stunningly effective. And I know someone’s gonna jump in with “well, it wouldn’t work on the KKK”, but obviously it does; Daryl Davis has proven that.

And someone’s gonna say “okay, but it wouldn’t work on Aryan Brotherhood people”, but actually it can and does. One guy talked to reporters about it a fair bit; he went to jail, ended up with the Aryan Brotherhood, hated Jews, and all that. Got out, got a job working for a guy who was Jewish, was just dreading the Jewish guy stiffing him on his salary. First paycheck rolled around, guy gave him a bonus and said “you’re a really hard worker, you deserve this bonus, thanks for being a good worker.” Boom. Loyalty to Aryan Brotherhood: Gone. They lied to him and he knows it.

And someone’s gonna say “but it wouldn’t work on someone involved with Stormfront”, but it turns out the kid of the guy who founded Stormfront, who was active in promoting Stormfront, ended up getting outed at school, so some of the Jewish kids said “hey, let’s invite him to dinner since no one else will talk to him”, and now he’s actively speaking against white nationalism.

It’s not just that it works. It’s that it works extremely well, and most of the competing strategies backfire more than they work.

i think a lot of the panicky-hostile reaction against the idea of talking to bigots comes from people thinking “it works” means “you personally have to do it instead of any other thing” and they freak out because they don’t feel confident they can have a civil conversation with a douchebag without becoming a doormat.

folks, it’s fine if you’re not the one to do that. it takes social skills, luck, and guts. it also takes a lot of focus, so even if you have the ability you might not have the time/attention/energy.

YOU don’t have to do it.

but it’s really good that some people do.