Challenging norms....

When I was in my early twenties just before I began to realize that I was gay, I remember attending a course in England where I first encountered an openly gay woman. Coming from the Bahamas where this was thought of to be an abnormality, my first response was to move as far away from her as possible. I became afraid of being any where near her. I was repulsed at the very notion. It was just plain wrong, I thought. She took it with a quiet dignity and smiled. I suspect it was a common response that she had learned to accept. I had just broken up from a long time relationship and in retrospect this was the beginning of a process of tolerance and eventual acceptance of my own orientation which has taken me over twenty years to openly admit. I later lived with a gay couple which stretched me further in this understanding. I was as homophobic as any of the people I now criticize maybe even more. What I realized is that I was bought up to be afraid of things I didn't understand, even the thing that was me. My point is simply this, it is important to challenge the cultural norms which we have all grown up with and continue with dialogue. There is hope and people are not fixed in stone neither was I. In my case, it took exposure and education. It took an honesty to let surface that which I kept buried through fear. It means challenging the very things in society and in your own home that has framed your identity in order to discover that autonomous self. I am still half way out the revolving door but know there is only ahead to go. So the next time you hear a homophobic quip could be, as Shakespeare would say ,they 'doth protest too much...'