I was Homophobic before Dallas Buyers, Now I am not!

How in the world could DBC have changed your opinion about gay people? Who was portrayed as gay in the movie? I don't remember seeing any.

I was similar when I was younger. I just didn't have exposure to any homosexual friends and was kind of a chauvinist, dreaming of this black and white world of strong men and damsels in distress. Sexism kind of accompanied those views.

I dreamed up reasons about why I should dislike gay men since they can't create children, since I saw the behavior that could accompany it as weak and feminine, etc. etc. Unlike some homophobics, I didn't pretend like being gay was a choice. That defied not only the evidence I could find but also common sense. Yet I still disliked them for these reasons. Plus I was attending this homophobic church that was protesting it all the time (I eventually left and dropped the religious nonsense outright) and my parents were and still remain homophobic.

I didn't really have the same strong feelings against lesbians for some reason. I think it was mostly the idea of queer men that didn't seem manly at all that bothered me. The least manly thing I could think of was for a man to be in love with another man. It just went against everything I considered macho where some lone warrior battles an army and saves the damsel -- all the stories I admired hinged upon that notion of a man fighting for the woman of his dreams, and to consider the hero to be fighting for another man just seemed so wrong in that fantasy world I wanted to live in. My childhood was filled with those testosterone-filled cliches of the man ultimately fighting against all odds for a woman with action films like Mad Max.

Then it just kind of increasingly occurred to me as I got older that all these beliefs are dumb, and given some of the mistakes I've made in life where I acted on emotions rather than the level-headed, right thing to do, that it's just completely hypocritical for me or anyone but a saint to be judgmental towards an entire group of people who never did anything to me.

Plus I thought of counter-arguments to all my former arguments I made when I was homophobic. Like if it's wrong because it can't create kids, then is a woman having sex after menopause also bad? Is it bad to have sex with contraception? Oral sex? I found out that's also sodomy in Biblical terms. Most of all, how does it affect me and the people I care about? It doesn't as long as we're not rubbing our noses in it. Initially I even began with the notion that, hey, homosexuals being able to openly show their sexual orientation means more free women out there who don't end up marrying some closet homosexual. Why should I have a problem with that?

If there's anything I've learned about being a good person, it's being slower to judge others, to find a reason truly worth being offended about before we become offended. Otherwise it's easy to build this growing inner hatred towards people that seem strange, and before you know it, you've become like Adolf Hitler.

GeekCritique, you are most likely from a Muslim or Communist country.

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Great.