A Boring Dystopia

When I was young I worked a grunt-work job with some repulsive people, people I never would have associated with otherwise. Once I was doing some grunt-work with a guy I'll call Tony. (His real name is also Tony. Fuck you, Tony.)

Tony was a legal adult. Tony had graduated from high school and had a full time job, a car, a place to live, etc. Tony was the sort of performatively super-hetero guy we used to call "macho." Always making comments about women's bodies, taking every opportunity to suggest a level of sexual experience he surely did not actually possess, etc. I was very young, I was very naive, and even I thought Tony was full of shit.

On one particular day, Tony was cheerfully and self-righteously showing how macho he was by ranting about "the f*ggots," how much he hated them, how despicable they were. As if this was just a totally normal topic of conversation among young blue-collar men-of-the-world such as ourselves.

I told Tony that I was actually in favor of encouraging as many men to "turn gay" (I never imagined that was a real thing, I was just trying to express this in a way he'd hear) as possible.

Tony's demeanor changed. His face darkened. He looked at me and said something like "What the FUCK did you just say?" He was genuinely upset.

I told Tony that if more men were gay, that could mean more unattached women in the dating pool for me. If more men were gay, it would mean more unmatched ladies out there for him.

I wouldn't say it took him a long time to work through this, exactly, but the contortions of his face made it clear there was some working-through involved. He was sort of floored. Derailed. Off-balance. He tried to recover: “Oh yeah, that would work out that way,” with a weak smile and not much conviction. It was pretty obvious that this had never occurred to him, not for one second.

I’ve wondered sometimes, in the years since, if he was closeted himself. But how could I know, really?

Closeted or not, I think he was into homophobia for the permission it gave him to hate An Other without reservation or regret. He thought of homosexual people as exotic and far-away, a phenomenon with no actual relevance to his daily life. And of course, that very attitude, that culture, that environment, made it next to impossible for him to meet any real person who would openly identify as homosexual. His hate made homosexuality exotic in his environment, and that exoticism gave him permission to indulge his hateful impulses, a vicious cycle.