when were your first expereinces of homophobia and other sexual discrimination

I'm sure I knew of the concept of homosexuality when I was in elementary school, because I remember knowing that the Village People were gay. I remember someone calling someone else a "gayfer" in fourth grade, but I knew that it was a hurtful comment so I must have had prior exposure to homophobia. I'm not sure tho.

"why?"
"you know what they do, right?"
"not really."
"they... [she goes into detail, ending with a horrified expression]"
"*shrug*"

I want to know what the hell they do now?!?! Cuz I wasn't under the impression it was that much different than what most straight couples do!

(sorry it HAD to be said ...

u FAGTOGS)

in my experience, theres a non-trivial intersection between those groups.

sorry.

I do remember when I became acquainted with the concept of bisexuality, a word which I'd heard but wasn't sure what it meant: I thought maybe it had something to do with hermaphrodites. But no, there was an article in Time magazine about bisexuality in June of '92, just a few months after the incident related above, and I found it very useful in developing my own sense of self for the next few years. (Part of which, no doubt, had to do with coming to a concept of sexuality as fluid and not tied to prevailing stereotypes of what it means to be Gay or Lesbian.)

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they could still be closet lesbians -- many women start fighting for the other team after they get divorced.

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yeah, its been really weird to run into some of them years later - some of whom made a real "political" issue out of being lesbians - and then kind of tip-toe around the fact that they're now straight in conversation. It just seems sorta wrong to out and out blurt "so you aren't a lesbian anymore? what's up with that?"

(also I hate the idea that sexuality is black or white. either gay or straight. it's a continuum.)

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Actually I know quite a few guys who do/did this.

bingo. which is why it always makes me laugh when someone says "so-and-so can't be gay, he's married!"

do you really think this is the reason it doesn't happen?

I've been lucky, perhaps because I came out relatively late. And I was "queer" in so many ways before I realized I was gay (I don't like sports, am an omniverous reader, looked people in the eye, etc). The dynamic is different with men: if you're not effeminate you don't get called gay. When I came out to my male friends (who were all straight), they were like, "So what? Get over yourself. We knew already!" My charm and charisma usually wear strangers down :)

"gayfer" hahaha. i had no idea what it was either, which made it such a scary putdown.

also if someone had made a circle with their thumb and forefinger and you looked at it,, you were gay. just one false move and..!

the first time i even contemplated the reality of someone being gay was when the fam and i went on our Big Trip Out West. we travelled through arizona, new mexico (white sands national monument + Ford LTD - air conditioning = GOOD TIMES), and wound up finally in S.F. we stayed with a friend of my folks' whose house, incidentally, was the first place i ever heard that crazy bulgarian women's choir. at some point after we left - wait actually i'm getting this story wrong. i guess i had some idea of gay. kind of. but then my mom was telling me about her friend, and told me she was bisexual, which i thought meant she had a dick hurr hurr. my mom was like no, it means she likes to have relationships with men and women both. in fact, that may be the first time i ever really contemplated someone having more than one partner in their lives, and i think that may have blown my mind even more than the bi thing! in any case the way my mom explained it, like this was just something in the world, was gr8

a 10th grade teacher was also gay. i was put up to saying something really homophobic to him by some friends, he (understandably) got really pissed off and threatened to have me suspended, and i apologized. (i was REALLY out of it then, had NO IDEA that he was gay though i later found out that his sexual preference was an open secret). when i saw him at some point after i graduated (and found out the truth), i sincerely apologized -- he had forgotten about the incident (!), but was nice about it. 10th graders can be assholes :-(

I don't recall my first experience, but I guess my most vivid early one is of arguing with my fundy best friend in 5th grade, he was very gays-are-going-to-hell and i was all no-way-dude-hell-doesn't-exist-and-anyway-who-cares-what-they-do! we were both hella obnoxious. my mom was a huge faghag, so I was aware of homophobia for as long as I was aware of gays, but I hadn't actually experienced it until later on...

And I think the reason why it is SO viscerally unappealling has something to do with repression and homophobia (on a cultural level.) Girl-on-girl action gets a much better rap.

what's a gayfer?

Tragically, the first time I heard "gay" used as an insult was several weeks AFTER I first heard "gay" used as something pleasant and nice. There was a reading-aloud time in first or second grade class with these books that could've been from the forties. It had the word "gay" in it. The teacher defined it as "happy." Nice word. A couple of weeks later some older kids asked me in the cafeteria "Are you GAY?" as I passed by. And I said "uh, sure!" This cracked them up and I had no idea why. Confused, I sat down with them and they kept asking the same question over and over and over again. (This is partly why the whole let's-reclaim-the-word-queer thing doesn't resonate with me. Growing up, NOBODY I knew ever used "queer" -- it was always "gay" with maybe a "fag" on occasion.)

Somewhat later, right around the time AIDS started making the news, my older brother developed this near-psychotic hatred towards the gays and would go on these iterminable rants about the subject. Loudly. VERY LOUDLY. With many threats of mass murder. And usually when we went out to eat. I didn't identify yet as gay but I didn't need to to know what he was saying was just bullying and desparate and it was just fucking embarrassing having to be around him when he acted up. He's normal now but I still haven't come out to him.

that said, when i was little i just thought that for a man to be "gay" was that he acted like a girl. i didn't know anything at that point about the sexual stuff (prob. would've been grossed out ... but then, at 10 i probably would have been grossed out if i heard someone talking about hetero sex, too).

I don't remember what my point was.

2. We move to a small town in Oregon (pop. was only like 3000 or so, now it's over 10000 and rising). Our next-door neighbor is a woman with a girl my age (hubba hubba, very beautiful and very good at basketball) and a boy my brother's age and no husband and a very close friendship with another neighbor with kids and no husband. Later I find out that one of the husbands sued the other woman for "alienation of affection" before dying in a fire (he was a fireman). Later still, I defend Kim's mom when someone else calls her a lesbian: "You just don't know what you're talking about!" Hmmmm.

3. Teresa G (a girl) is crawling through the concrete tunnel thing in our elementary school playground. Jeff M (a weird hypersexualized boy) crawls in after her. Teresa emerges from the other side and yells "JEFF WAS TRYING TO FAG ME!!!!"

Teresa G (a girl)

YES. and they usually just do it to get chicks, adding insult to injury.

"Penis breath" became the ultimate insult in the early 80s... thank you, Spielberg, for making young elementary school cocksuckers feel more self-conscious!

I think the first time I got called "fag" or "queer" was probably in junior high school. I really wanted to be Dave Gahan when I was 14, and even tried to emulate his "Shake The Disease"-era haircut (short and spiky with the front bleached blonde). Later in high school there was a campaign to try and out me (I think I wrote about this another thread) - a "let's get the new guy" practical joke that went too far and almost resulted in getting me beaten up.
(It never happened, thank God.)

The sad / funny part is that I'm straight. I had my first crush on a girl when I was five, and I started dating when I was fifteen. (Lost my virginity later that same year.) I guess I've just always come off as a little femme.

she calmly asked me, "do you know what that means?" and i had to admit that yes i do, it means someone is gay like homosexual gay. and she said, "you know that's what Richard is," referring to a dear family friend Richard B3ckl3y, a literature professor my dad had worked with when we lived in the UK, and an all-around absolute PRINCE who i adored. He's pretty old now, and in awful health, and legally blind, and his partner (of whom i have no memory) is in rough shape too. (none of the health stuff has a thing to do with being gay, if that needs saying).

it worked i guess, the larger moral logic of "that's what Richard is" was immediately clear to me.

I didn't even know what a lesbian was. When I was finally told by my best friend that it was "a girl who kisses other girls" I was shocked and shamefaced.

Around the same time, there was a huge scandal in our church because our vicar lived with his (same sex) partner in the rectory. He swore up and down to my mother that he was not gay, but no one except her believed him, and the partner was bannished to his country cottage. My mother, despite his defense, claimed that years later, (after both priest and partner had died of AIDS) she was far more devastated by the betrayal of his having *lied* to her than she ever would have been by the notion that he was homosexual. So homosexuality was forever tied up in my preadolescent mind with lying and betrayal than of anything dirty or shameful or inherently bad.

I have to confess, I was a teenage D.U.G. I grew out of it, like I grew out of most things, through trial and error. But I've slept with enough overtly gay men to know that sexuality is *always* fluid and almost invariably situational.

The big one-two punch was the time I left a computer disk with my name on it in the computer lab and a very kind and considerate individual changed the essage in the little startup script I wrote on it so that it said "I AM A NIGGER FAGGOT". This prompted me to write an article about prejudice in the school newspaper which I ended with a request for info about who did this because my friend Louisville Slugger wanted to have a conversation with him about tolerance. I later found out that the new skater kid in school had been showing all of the other skater kids white power paraphenalia, not knowing that all of the other skater kids were friends with me. All of the other skater kids beat the snot out of this guy and he switched to a different school district.

Three cheers for the power of the press.

"This article is great, but the end sounds like you're looking for a fight."
"That's because I am. When I find this kid I am going to hurt him like he's never been hurt before."
"...Um. I don't think that's a good idea."
"How about I rewrite the end so that it's less obvious that I inted to beat this idiot with a blunt instrument until he is horribly disfigured and needs months of hospitalization?"
"Okay!"

I loved her.)

On the other hand, I have seen plenty of cross racial bonding over a nice warm fire of homophobia, expecially in HS sports teams.

Later on came the AIDS jokes, but they were never that popular in Finland. When I was maybe nine or ten it became common to insult someone by calling him a "fucking homo"; however it was just swear word and even though we knew what a homo was, the word was used on everyone regardless of their supposed "gayness". When I was maybe 14 or 15 I realized I shouldn't use such words in a derogatory way, and stopped. I never had anyone tell me being gay was bad or good, I came to the conclusion that it was perfectly fine all by myself, by watching films and reading books and magazines. I first met an openly gay person when I was 16 or 17, even though I later found out that this guy in my school who was rumoured to be gay already in 8th grade was indeed one.

Tuomas I think most people's is! they just don't know to call it that/too young to really have a f'in clue and later in life perhaps turn violently weird about the subject yet probably never ever would categorize those pre-grown-up experience as "gay"

Thankfully the schools I went to weren't really very brutish so I escaped physical agression mostly. The occasion I remember most clearly was a science class discussion about STDs when I was fourteen. The teacher was talking about comparative AIDS infection rates among straight women, straight men, gay men etc. in the west, and someone yelled out, "I guess there's no hope for you then Tim." It wasn't the worst example but it came at a time when my formerly latent awareness of my homosexuality was becoming painfully manifest, and this casual put-down totally devastated me.

"I think most of this stuff is tied into tired conceptions of masculinity and feminity and has fuck all to do with any genetic truth that women are more attractive or that the kind of sex that they have is more acceptable."

OTM. People find a lot of things revolting without any necessary anatomical imperative driving their disgust.

Looked around for a better thread for this, and if there is one, let me know, as it involved employment law and trans rights.

So, looking for some advice here. I left my last job a few months ago because my new boss (a C-level executive) was a monster who I just could not get along with. I was Director level with many employees, all of whom (well, most of whom) I really cared deeply about and almost all of whom were exceptional workers. I had one employee, who was incidentally the BEST engineer that we had in the US, who got sick with MS suddenly last year. He recovered, but because he didn't have good support in this area, we allowed him to move home to Washington and work remotely. This was with the approval of HR. He continued to perform exceptionally, in fact, there are projects that would NOT have completed without his work. He had sterling reviews.

When I told my team members I could no longer deal with the new boss, most were disappointed, but he was really upset. His first comment was "am I going to lose my job?" I said I couldn't see wny that would possibly happen. He said 'what if it were a situation where it was 'he goes or I go'?" I didn't quite understand what he meant. I said look, if you're really concerned about something, go to HR and get on top of it. Your work is excellent, we actually need you to complete these projects, etc.

Then I left.

Two weeks after I left, and while I was on vacation, my phone exploded. Everyone contacted me. He'd been fired.

So, here's the story I didn't get while I worked there. Apparently he had come out to his team in either a meeting or via Slack that he was going to go through gender transition. And the team really didn't care one way or the other, some were supportive, some said nothing. But I guess one employee, who is deeply Catholic, started ribbing him in some manner and giving him some hassle. I really wish he'd brought htis up to me at the time so I could have stopped it, but he didn't. Either way, still...you go to HR with this, right?

So he did try after I left. He tried contacting our one HR person. she was unresponsive. He tried to setup a meeting with my former boss. Also unresponsive. Difficult to get ahold of anyone during that time I guess. Then FINALLY HR responsds to his emails saying he wanted to have a meeting with the CTO to meet him (a remote meeting). They set it up. He logs on. He is fired immediately.

The reason officially given? They don't want someone working remotely for 'team synergy' reasons (we had other people who work remotely, including entire teams in MX, Poland, and London).

He starts to protest and asks about his medical insurance, says he was about to go through gender transition, CTO walks out of the room and immediately terminates his company access, cutting his termination meeting short.

I was enraged when I found out about this. Sadly, I no longer work there. I did email HR and say I was deeply disappointed in them and that I assumed this would go poorly. Talked with my former employee and he was not feeling like suing them at the time.

Now that a few months have gone by, he's thinking differently.

From my perspective, this was a clear case of discrimination on at least one front if not two. 1) accomodations were made for someone with a physical disability to work remotely with the understanding and support of HR. They did not go to him first and say 'we'd prefer it if you moved back' 2) every employee and his former boss (me) would attest to his talent and how valuable he was to the company 2) the fact that there was some friction of his coming out as trans would tip this toward trans discrimination.

Do we have a case here?

Ugh, what a shitty way to treat someone.

I think so.

I have a "funny story", which I won't recount in full here but the middle of the story has:

Apparently, one of the managers had informally wandered into HR, and asked "um, would there be a risk of him being fired for going through this?" and HR told him "No only can he not be fired, but you could be purely for asking."

So, this being the UK, it's definitely protected. How the US hangs, I don't know.

Yeah imo, even if the CTO didn’t do this because of transition, or because of disability, our HR was grossly negligent in failing to mention it and intervene. But head of HR is actually the wife of the CEO and they’ve had to settle other wrongful terminations due to harassment claims about her hisband so .... she’s no professional