With
all the media attention lately on gay marriage and gay rights, there's an
aspect of the whole thing that nobody mentioned; peer pressure. I have a brother whose former co-workers decided he
was gay and were just cruel to him. My
brother isn't gay. He's bi-polar.
It
bothers me that people think its okay to speculate about someone's sexual
orientation. If a person doesn't fit
their idea of normal they label him or her as gay, then try to convince the
person that it's true- like they know better than you do what you should be
doing with your own body. If you try to
defend yourself they say you're just afraid to come out of the closet. If you don't want to have sex with anyone -man
or woman- that somehow `proves' you're gay, too. There's no way to win.
It's
got to affect a lot of high-school kids who are already trying to figure out
who they are. If you're getting bullied
already, if everyone else decides you're gay, do you really have a
choice, or has that just been stolen from you by rumors? People tend to be what's expected of them,
teens more than anyone, because they're still just learning that they do
get to decide what kind of person they'll become; who they are isn't up for
vote and sometimes the majority is just wrong.
Sounds like your brother was a victim of mob-think. People speculate on people who are different, and then others go along with it. They want to put them in a slot. Gay and bi-polar really don't seem similar to me to me. But if he didn't have much to do with women, people are going to speculate. There was a guy that I used to work with who was clearly over 50 and was the shyest person I ever knew, and who had never been known to have a girlfriend. Everyone speculated on his virginity. But no one thought he was gay. A woman, for some reason, is allowed to be single or a long-term widow without anyone speculating on her sexuality. But not, it seems, a man. The "confirmed bachelor" was once a valid lifestyle choice, but is almost unheard of now.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's sad that people feel like they have to speculate. Weird, too. I mean, is sex so much on people's minds that that's really the first thing they wonder about when they meet someone? Really? (Probably not. I'm good at paranoid.)
ReplyDelete