An email to a friend

I have a friend that's far to the left of me politically. We got to talking about gay rights, 'homophobia' and other such controversial topics. He finally asked me just what I believed (not theologically, but in terms of social interactions). I'm saving it here so the next time I get flack for being a "homophobe" or some other kind of "phobe" I won't have to redo it.  Sorry about the typos. I'm a lazy writer.

Hey no fair responding to emails from last October. That's BT (before Trump).

​​

​A coupl​e of contextual data points on me and mine:

When I was a teen my family had a live in houseboy

​ named Endang​

. He also 

​moonlighted as ​

a Banci - a gay transvestite prostitute. We'd see him in his heels and mini skirt at

​ the​

 Blok P  

​whor​

e market about 

​a kilometer away

. We used to wrestle for fun. And yes we knew. My right wing

​, then Southern Baptist ​

​

​

parents said live and let live

​ for three years​

. Until he began stealing and wearing mom's lingerie. Then he was toast.

​My sophomore year ​

I 

​lived in a Dorm "Pod" of six men, four of whom were gay in the stereotyped style. Including my roommate

. 

​I got some

 collateral flack

​ but it motivated me to date girls​

. 

​And​

 after the trannie hooker

​,​

 a mild mannered 

​moderate Republican ​

queer from Lawton seemed tame. He never wanted to wrestle.

​ One of them was Arturo Herrera - he's now a rather successful artist who has had solo exhibits at the Whitney among others.​ There's a PBS vignette about him at the link. He used to be much more flamboyant. I bought several of his pieces when he needed money. Somehow they got lost in the fog of divorce and collapse. Damn, damn, damn.

​Yet today I'm a "homophobe".

My ideology and religious commitments back then were more conservative than they are today - I was in the  Baptist Youth Groups both in HS and this period in College for Crissakes (really, I did it for His sake).​ I am called a homophobe by people that when I knew them would never have done something like befriend or live with a 'homo'. They are conformists, doing only what they think the people around them will approve of. But that's a common refrain of my life.

I have always been prepared to take people as I find them. What I am not prepared to do is to let people define what is 'right', what is 'moral', whether they are 'victims' or choose who the victimizers are based some arbitrary definition of their 'identity'.  There are now 50 Facebook identity options each presumably with it's own list of microagressions and political manifestos. I reject the notion that simply by clicking a different FB box you are allowed to define whether my behavior is 'acceptable' or what you get to do to me.

As I said: I take people as I find them. I expect people to take me as I am found. I expect to find conflicts with people that I meet. Conflicts of values, beliefs, politics, the definition of life, the universe and everything. Whether they're Muslim Trannie Whores or Venezuelan Artists. I expect them to respect my views and values even when they conflict with theirs. I expect them to respect my speech rights and not call me names just because I disagree with them because I have shown through my life that I will respect theirs.

It used to be called the "Liberal" position. But I don't they exist anymore, do you?