It would help me to know what the gay community has ever done to you.
It is a fair question because this disdain and hatred seem personal. Personal enough that you lump them all together for your vitriol. Something is behind the attempts to legislate them to the margins, without rights, living in the shadows, unseen and forgotten.
What has this community ever done to you to merit legislating them away from the rest of us? Something has to lie beneath a grudge, a resentment, a dislike, and the constant companions of contempt and hatred.
I don’t know the full history of LGBTQ+ folks, but I know enough of human history to know they have always been around. Much of the time, they lived in the shadows.
I am not sure they wanted to live in the shadows, but many of them felt safe and out of harm’s way there. Which leads me to another question: What could someone possibly do to you, or have done to you, to cause such hatred and loathing?
I didn’t grow up in a family with the kind of pedigree or wealth that would make me feel entitled to look down on anyone. When we came in from work, we made our presence known through the gas fumes our clothes, skin, and hair had absorbed during the day. It probably was a good thing because it masked the body odor from working in the sun.
Our family was not prissy, pious, or privileged. We were just folks like the thousands of other folks in Odessa, Texas, at that time.
After a career working with a diverse collection of men incarcerated in a maximum-security prison, I had the privilege of working as a therapist with clients from all walks of life. That stream included many “variations of normal,” a phrase I learned from a cardiologist after a nuclear scan of my heart, EKGs, and other probing I have tried to forget.
We are all variations of normal. God has made us so that we can identify others we know and don’t know by their differences in appearance.
We are also all variations on a theme. I have spent a good bit of my life trying to understand my human experience and the human experience of others because of my curiosity. But I also can’t be a helpful therapist if I don’t understand, or am unwilling to learn, something from the client or clients.
Because of my experience, I don’t understand the declaration that something isn’t “normal.” What we are really saying is, “I don’t remember seeing or hearing that before.”
Of the eight billion people in the world, 8.2% are estimated to be part of the LGBTQ+ community, which would be about 660 million people. That, my friend, is a whole lot of normal people to have a grudge against.
Personally, I would rather love, respect, and help than waste time hating anyone.
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A private practice counselor working with veterans and survivors of trauma. Previously, Chancellor served four churches in Texas for 33 years, then ran a Mental Health Department of Alan B. Polunsky Maximum Security prison which houses death row.