There is sometimes nothing more annoying in the world than the phrase "it's so gay". Let's look at it this way. Just to the left, look at this picture here. Now, somebody said to me the other day that "physics is gay". This. This right here is most definitely not gay. This is a textbook. In fact, out of everything on Freedom Requires Wings, I think this picture will be the most out of place. Unfortunately it's not just the sciences that are gay now, no, any number of things could now apparently fall into that category.
"I talked to this guy the other day online, and it turned out he really liked cheese. Like, really liked. I mean cheese? I can understand liking it, but he obsessed over it - that’s so gay. Then there was this girl, who had her boyfriend of four years run off with some slag – that is so GAY, I mean really. Also some girl the other week, she totally slapped my best friend. Oh my god it was gay. Yeah. In fact, the internet as a whole is pretty gay - especially including those freaks that go around on the internet telling people not to call things gay, because really those guys are the gayest. It doesn’t even mean homosexual, it just means happy. Look it up.”
Now, if you read that with a grimace and a nervous tic developing, I applaud you. I took it upon myself to write out what has genuinely been said to me – and I mean these were their actual words. I haven’t made it sound any more stupid than it actually was. I just put all the different parts together to make a single unpalatable lump of text. So if you managed to read and take in what it says, then well done, because I actually can’t read it through without feeling the urge to do something drastic.
It’s not the use of the word that irritates me most, no. The prize winner is the way that when anyone that uses it is called out on it, they try to cover up their initial idiocy with a tinned failure of an argument that didn’t work the first time, but as long as they keep saying it then it will somehow start making coherent sense.
Things like “oh, I don’t intend it as offensive, so it can’t be. It can only be offensive if you intend it to be.”
No dice, kiddo. How offensive a statement happens to be is always defined by the receiver of the statement, regardless of intent. I am offended, therefore it is offensive.
“It can’t be offensive, because gay means happy. I’m just saying that it’s happy. Well done for overreacting”
Oh, I am so sorry. I didn’t realise that somebody slapping your best friend was a happy event. Remind me never to enrage you, hm? I may not survive.
Then there’s the old favourite: “Gay doesn’t mean homosexual, really you should do some research.”
Yes, and dick used to mean boy maybe you need to do research. Language develops; language changes. Next argument? Unless you want to admit that you’re not winning?
Ah, but my counter there has opened up another line of attack! The good old “well, maybe gay is evolving past meaning that. Maybe it’s just starting to mean bad.”
Thank you for finally admitting that you meant it as a slur. Clearly your penchant for lying and skipping about in your previous arguments has lent weight to this current premise. Oh wait – no it hasn’t. You see, language can evolve. Language can sort its own affairs out, for certain. I’m not trying to rain on language’s parade. But the evolution of words applies to words that don’t apply to a particular group of people. Especially not when that group of people happens to be much ignored, misunderstood, and even outright hated by some. So no, I’m sorry but gay can’t evolve to mean bad. That is not how the world works. That’s not how the world should work, at any rate.
There is frankly no other reason they can give once they have exhausted the old ideas. Occasionally there’s a faint outcry of “my gay friend doesn’t care”, but I’m afraid that as long as I talk to you and not your ‘gay friend’, then that’s not even an adequate rebuke. Sometimes you even get people that identify with the LGBT spectrum that attempt to argue for using the phrase.
Let me say something to you, if you do use it. Reclaiming a phrase is fine. It is your right. But saying that just because you have reclaimed it then anyone can use the phrase is ridiculous. Do at least attempt to consider the people that get offended by it, at least?
Frankly, it’s only a phrase used to express general distaste because our particular minority apparently isn’t as worth protecting from abuse than any other. It’s a way to snipe at our community, to simultaneously manage to degrade whatever specific thing that you want to while bringing down everyone that is anywhere away from the “norm” to however low they want to bring us.
And that is why, if you use that phrase, I am not impressed. Oh, feel free to use it. You have your own rights of course. Just employ a little thought to go with those rights.
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