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12/13/2010
If hetero men can no longer play with balls, pile ontop one other, or pat each other's butts, that's not our fault!
If you're not confident, secure, and/or adjusted enough to have friendships with people of any sexual orientation or gender without that palling around turning intimate, then that is on you.
If you feel insecure or scared or guilty or angry or whatever when someone questions whether something more is going on between you and your like-genitalied pal (instead of simply saying, "nope, nothing more's going on"), then that too is your own issue.
If your platonic same-gender friendship is somehow altered, weakened, or otherwise adjusted by growing gay acceptance andrights, then yes -- that's also something you've internalized and allowed to bother you for reasons unknown.
But of course that's just this gay writer's opinion. Others, like Focus on the Family's resident "ex-gay" Jeff Johnston, blame gays and their associated push for peace for destroying heterosexuals' right to have no-questions-asked sleepovers:
Given our current culture, a boy must be very secure in his identity to engage in a deep friendship with another boy.
In the same way that modern relationships are questioned, close same-sex friendships from the past are now questioned and co-opted by the gay community and revisionist historians. After all, if this is how we think and live, those in the past must have thought and lived the same way. A couple hundred years ago it would have been inconceivable for a theologian to question the biblical accounts of David’s friendship with Jonathon or of Ruth’s relationship with Naomi. Today you can find sites all over the internet that take it for granted that they were all “gay.”
The sexual revolution trampled and distorted marriage and sexuality. Similarly, the constant onslaught of homosexual television, books, movies, pride and parades has colored our thinking today, casting the shadow of a rainbow flag over close same-sex relationships.
Oprah and the L Word – Suspicion about Friendship [Focus on the Family's CitizenLink]
Weird, since the onslaught of heterosexual culture has never made me want to work at a hospital where the only ten or so doctors who apparently matter all end up sleeping with one another, subscribe to any biblical themes about one partner in my marriage being submissive to the other, or transpose the contrived "war of the sexes" meme onto my own same-gender union (even if I do have great Bars/Penis wordplay to fit into the "Women Are From Mars, Men are From Venus" setup). Guess we gays are just so darn powerful, we stave off the considerable influences brought forth by a society that is still 99.75% hetero-centric, so as to stealthily clobber others' happiness with our unduly brute in-your-faceiness. Simply godly, we are.
Or -- or, or, or, or, or: It could be that the vast majority of people, LGBT or S, are actually confident and able enough to conduct their relational going and, uhm, coming, in ways that fit their own personal wants, desires, needs, interests, concerns, and mores rather than anyone else's hangups, agendas, or political causes, and that it's "ex-gay"-motivated folks on the far-right who truly need to step outside their own incentivized interests and look at the operational world in which billions of us easily coexist. A world where we'd all more easily coexist without advocacy that seeks to stigmatize large swaths.
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