Lessons Learned From ‘She Called Me Woman’ (Entry 10)

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LESSON 10

From the chapter, ‘What Is Happiness’, ZH says:

“I believe in living like this: if someone is not hurting you, you do not have the right to hurt them. You might not agree with what they are doing and you can judge. But you keep that judgment to yourself. Sexuality is a tiny part of who LGBT people. You judging … says a lot about you.”

I stopped being friends with someone after she began to let her judgment show. I was out to her, but because I knew who she was – a Christian who had made herself the cynosure of female strength and chastity – I didn’t expect any acceptance from her. But for us to be friends, I damn well deserved – and demanded – her tolerance. I knew she was judgy, but for us to be friends, I expected her to respect me well enough to not wear her prejudice on her sleeve.

And that is it. When homophobes wail and lament about the deprivation of their freedom of speech by the forces fighting for LGBT equality, I shake my head and wonder at the inhumanity that drives a person to want to enjoy the right to say things or hold opinions that hurt others, especially in this age when it’s been established that words have as much power to take lives as lethal physical force does. Words hurt, opinions kill – but let’s step aside and allow bigots to enjoy their freedom of speech.

I wonder at a world that actively seeks to hurt a person, whether by words or action, whose loving of someone else has done nothing to hurt anybody in the first place.

In the How I Resist campaign, a contributor, Jazz, said: “I love sex. Nigerians hate my kind of sex. Every time I lay with a man, I like to imagine a homophobic Nigerian is somewhere dying a slow, painful death. And so I resist by having a lot of sex.”

LOL! Sometimes I think about all the ways LGBT people have been blamed for the worst tragedies to befall humanity, and I think about how much I want this to start being true: for people to simply drop dead and economies combust and natural disasters to wreak havoc – every time a man shows love to a man and a woman to a woman.

Written by Pink Panther