Underlying Homophobia
by: Alex Wolfe
In my opinion there is a major problem in our school that has largely gone completely unnoticed. If you’ve read the title of this article, I’m sure that you can guess what this is. But if this is unclear, the problem is of course, homophobia.
There is an assumption today that just because gay people aren’t executed on sight it means that they are accepted properly. That’s just not the case. I’ve recently noticed how you can always hear someone calling someone or something gay. One Wednesday I decided to count it, the main reason I’m writing this article, actually. I heard 23 times that day the word gay used in a negative context, only of course, counting people in TY. Of course, this could be taken as people “only having a laugh” but if you were LGBT+ it would be clear to see how this could make people at best uncomfortable.
I know people will read this and fall guilty to doing this, if you feel bad about it there’s not much you can do other than stop. It isn’t necessarily their fault, when done for 3 years and a bit with looking to older years doing the same and many other similar influences it makes a lot of sense as to why people act this way, it’s not something you immediately think about. Now this non-intentional homophobia is a problem of course, but the homophobes in TY are probably hidden as well as closeted LGBT+ people in our year. Or maybe they are open enough amongst their friend groups but again, those friend groups are simply one of the factors to people being “passively” homophobic.
I know that this may sound very preachy but the reason this whole article was written, is that there most likely are a substantial amount of LGBT+ people in our year who are very closeted and not open about who they are, I’d say TY is as good a time as ever to make these people feel accepted and able to be themselves. It’s up to us to make them feel in the least bit accepted. And even if there aren’t many if any LGBT+ people in our year what’s the use in being homophobic anyway. I hope others can understand my viewpoint here, thanks for reading anyway but an even bigger thanks if you can try a little bit with what this article suggests.