Hello comrades, today, I’m not writing about socialism, I’m writing about social ideas. Specifically, people who love their own sex.
Just before I wrote this, I watched a short film created by Wingspan Pictures, portraying a world where hetreosexuality was taboo and homosexuality was the norm. In it a middle school girl named Ashley grows up hetero, while everyone around her, her church, her friends and even her moms look down on heterosexuality.
When she discovered holding hands with a boy, the kids around her torture her. She gets cornered in the gym and a mob of kids circle her. A boy hits her in the face, knocking her to the hardwood floor. The mob jeers her, screaming taunts at her as they kick her in the ribs. Blood and tears run down her face as a girl sharpies ‘HETERO’ across her forehead.
She comes home late, her moms see what happens to her. They send her to wash up. She locks the bathroom door as she hears her parents yell at each other down stairs. She cries, washing ‘HETERO’ off her forehead. She starts the tub. As the water pours in, she pulls the case off of a razor. From there, the movie gets difficult to watch.
At the very end of the movie there’s a sentence, “All the events that took place in this film are true stories from bullying victims.”
How? I thought. How could people treat each other this badly for loving someone?
This is a little embarrassing to say, but it was the first movie to ever bring me to tears, and I’ve watched both Marley and Me and Hachi. Watching those kids physically and mentally rip her apart was appalling. And I sat there thinking, this was all an over-the-top and exaggeration of what actually happens.
That’s what I feel the worst about; believing things like that don’t happen. Because they do. It’s hard to imagine that at East. Here in the socially liberal, progressively thinking, “we’ve had a gay homecoming king” bubble we call East. But we don’t see what’s happening outside of the bubble.
I’ve tried not to use the term ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ in this writing. I’ve tried not to because they don’t need a label. They are people just like you and me. They are Ashley, they are our friends and family, they are names. They’re not just a label. We shouldn’t be talking about “gay rights” because they’re not. They’re human rights that every single person is born with. They deserve not only that, but the freedom not to be persecuted. They’re our family members and our neighbors. They’re people and they deserve to be seen that way. No slurs, no hate, no labels.
We have so much difficulty seeing the people around us in our society as just people. We label them for some of the most basic things about them. They’re gay, they’re black, they’re women, none of which can describe who the person is. They’re a way to dehumanize and homogenize a diverse group of people. It’s time we throw away these labels. I can tell you one thing; there won’t be any labels next year in Copenhagen. Just people.
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