I was sitting at the bar one night. It’s a Gay Bar. Most of the patrons are of the GLBTQMORELETTERS Community, although there are quite a few straight people who are regulars. It’s not the fanciest bar in town, but there it is, having that neighborhood feel to it in which patrons develop friendships and conversations are usually friendly and the people of like mind.
Allow me an expository digression.
Once, when home from California visiting my family in Massachusetts for Christmas, I was watching the news on television with my father when a story came on about politics and Gay rights. I became a little uncomfortable because when I first “came out” my father had a bit of a conflict with it, but finally agreed to be as open minded as possible so long as we didn’t talk about it. He wasn’t uninformed regarding my life as a Gay man and a Gay Rights Activist as my mother would ask all the parental questions and then relate all the information to my father later that night in bed. So he was informed, although he often pretended not to be.
He might have been somewhat conservative in matters of religion and to some extent politics, but, even though he belonged to neither political party as an “Independent”, he tended toward the Democratic politicians because they seemed to be out for the little guy while the Republicans seemed more interested in protecting the interests of the upper class. As someone who grew up in Boston during the Depression and then World War II, politics was something he paid attention to.
So there we were sitting, and through no fault of my own and not having brought up the Gay topic, watching someone on TV talking about Gay politics. The report included interviews with some activists supporting a change in law that would benefit the Gay Community, and, in an attempt to present balance, there was an interview with the president of the Log Cabin Republicans who, for some reason, opposed the change.
Apparently taking it for granted that viewers knew what the LCR was, their being Gay Republicans was not explained, so my father, assuming they were a conservative political or religious group that opposed Gay Rights, asked if I knew who that group was. After filling him in, my father turned to me with an incredulous look on his face and asked,
“You have those?”
He found it strange that anyone in the Gay Community would form an organization that works against what was in the community’s best interest and supported politicians who did the same.
Yes. They are a strange group of people who are “fiscally conservative” while “socially liberal ” so long as what was socially liberal did not interfere with the benefits their membership gets from the fiscal part, the rest of the Gay Community be damned. Every group, ethnic, religious, political, gender, orientation, has those members who put personal benefit above that of the group and are willing to be denied basic rights so long as there is some financial advantage to them.
Remember, before they got the vote in 1920, there were women working against the Suffragettes having drunk the Koolaid supplied by the “patriarchy”.
Among the patrons at the bar there are some Gay Republicans who get their news from Fox and the Boston Herald. If it was not reported there, it didn’t happen or doesn’t exist, and, in spite of verifiable facts to the contrary, nothing will sway them from their stances on any and all topics, including those Gay related, when those two are their major sources.
Many, while having done nothing to get the rights the Gay Community had won over the years, simply accepted what changes had come about like those people in the work place who condemn the existence of unions while happily accepting the benefits the union fights for and wins during contract negotiations.
A while back, a news story about a recent anti-Gay executive order the president had gleefully signed came on the television behind the bar, and the reaction of the patrons’ was anger at this set back. However, a Gay Republican immediately declared that as a friend of the Gay Community, the story had to be fake news since Trump would never go along with it. The fact that he had signed the executive order meant nothing to him, and rather than accept the information he was given both verbally and by some who showed him news articles they brought up on their cell-phones or tablets, this patron held firmly to what he wanted to believe in spite of evidence.
In response to his denial that Trump had ever done anything that negatively affected the Gay Community, the bartender and some patrons attempted to point out actions taken by Trump that negatively affected the Gay Community since he took office.
His only response was to deny it all as just stories made up to make Trump look bad because we didn’t like that he swept the election, even though this too was not true but acceptable the Gay Republican patron.
This is the main reason why their problem further deteriorates tadalafil 80mg to the extent that they stop getting hard at all. In this manner, the medicine makes man able to gain or sustain erections. official web-site levitra ordering Don’t panic as it is very common and is now treatable with an operative and reliable medicine- sildenafil citrate. purchase cialis online It increases the level of energy as it is viagra brand a powerful antioxidant.To support what became a broader claim that people buy into fake news too easily, for some reason he began to recount all the fake news and what he claimed were made up stories that had been used by Gay Activists to change the laws that ultimately benefited him. Although he was glad we now had equal rights laws, he did not like that the good had been gained by false stories meant to sway people’s opinions.
The silence in the bar lasted until the bartender asked for an example, and that is when he turned into the woman who complains to the manager and denies that non-white people have not been treated equally because she had never been treated like they claim they have been.
His chosen example was the claim of people that they had been attacked verbally and physically merely because they were entering or exiting a Gay bar. He was old enough to have experienced the days when Gay bars which are now just part of a city’s entertainment fabric were relegated by needed safety to the seedy parts of town or were known only by word of mouth, and whose patrons were often the victims of Gay bashings and bar raids.
Because he had never been in a bar raid nor physically attacked entering or exiting a Gay bar, these claims were, to him, obviously exaggerated tales either because an individual wanted attention or an activist individual or group needed an illustration to support change.
Since it had never happened to him, it had never happened to anyone.
Those of us who had been in a bar that was raided, knew someone who had been attacked or had seen and perhaps intervened when someone was, or had been in a bar when the music was interrupted by a warning from the DJ to watch out for a particular car that was driving around the area, or groups of men roaming the area near the bar because it was obvious from what they were yelling that some Gay person’s night was not going to end well, knew that he was denying facts.
He insisted that no one had ever been attacked mainly because he had never been attacked or knew anyone who had been.
In response, one patron who obviously had been a regular before he had moved away, this being made clear by all the cheers and back slapping when he had entered the bar that night, and who had been speaking with the Gay Republican about old times, recounted how one night in Boston he was attacked by a group of men as he walked out of a bar. It was one of the reasons he had stopped going to bars in the city and had eventually moved to a new place for a new start in a new location with nothing negative connected to it.
The Gay Republican as part of that moment in history, but, according to him, the person might have been attacked by someone, but it wasn’t because he had just exited a Gay bar, and over the years the events obviously morphed in his mind until it had become more than just a tussle with a stranger.
I should also point out that the bar I was in had been a women’s bar up until about a dozen years ago when someone with a hatchet attacked patrons in what was at the time the Gay men’s bar whose subsequent closing left the men to find a friendly place to patronize.
Rather than accept that there were people who experienced things he never did, will, or hasn’t yet, he preferred to believe his experience was universal.
To me he is like those people who criticized the legitimate aims of the Black Lives Matter movement because they believe, or want to believe, what they are protesting never really happened in spite of evidence that it did and still does.
The claim that it couldn’t have happened to anyone because it did not happen to me is the revealing and comfortable excuse for the general refusal to examine the facts, acknowledge the problem, seek solutions and implement them.
And this is the attitude of many who reflexively oppose the Black Lives Matter movement because they have experience what this movement opposes and wants to end.
What they comfortably refuse to accept is that others have had experiences that they themselves have not, and since they have not experienced something they will not accept that others may have.
So while People of color point out systemic disparity of treatment many White people claim their own experience proves these claims wrong.
They are comfortable in denial.