Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
To be honest, I don't really care. The problem in the Netherlands is that (especially famous gay people) feel the need to announce it to the world over and over again, and that has made me cross regarding them.
I'm not going around telling them that I'm not gay all the time, do I?
Just keep the personal stuff personal.
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Again: The exercise which could have taught you so much seems not to have registered. You
could have understood, through your very distaste for the subject, how it might feel to grow up in a society in which the thing that you love is taboo and that which you might feel alienated from is omnipresent. Instead, you make resentful comments about "famous gay people" who come out (as it were) and in so doing make the same argument as that of a bigot who rails against "reverse racism" in the States: "I'm not the one who's talking about [insert object of prejudice who points it out]; they're the ones who feel the need to announce it" -- as if ignoring a problem means that it doesn't exist.
But the problem does exist. The reason it's important for "famous gay people" to come out is because that preference is made more acceptable among people who
aren't famous (or powerful). The level of violence and persecution against gay kids is the true obscenity.
Whether intended that way or not, Harry's comment redirected a specific point about
prejudiced distaste to an irrelevant one through the substitution of a straw man, implying that distaste for explicit language of
any kind is interchangeable with someone's
specific distaste for explicit
gay language. The discussion then proceeds as if a distinction concerning the gay subject had never been made, which ignores the specific problem of stigmatizing an entire group of people as inherently more obscene than normative straight people.
It's to your credit that you said "this, too," rather than "this is what I meant."