It occurred to me on this morning (and this is what I think about in bed on a Saturday morning [when this post was written] when I should be dreaming) that there is probably an inverse relation between how much you use the term “I have a gay friend” (especially in political conversations) and actually having meaningful relationships you have with people who happen to be sexually attracted to people with similar reproductive equipment. This data set, of course, excludes people who publicly own their hostility towards gays. I can find no instances of Glenn Beck or James Dobson admitting to having gay friends. It makes me wonder, too, if Ted Haggard and Larry Craig have any friends.
I’ve written a lot on gender and queer issues and against Prop 8, so I wondered if I ever used the phrase myself. I found only one instance, in a brilliant (if I do say so myself) *satirical* piece last October. I should note that this post is probably contains several counts of whatever it was that made them kick me out of the Church.
As far as I can tell, conservatives wield “I have a gay friend” like a talisman to shield themselves against charges of discrimination. “I can’t be homophobic or bigoted against gays, because I have a gay friend! (Vote for Prop 8!)” The most famous example in recent history is Sarah Palin, who said “I have one of my absolute best friends for the last 30 years happens to be gay, and I love her dearly. And she is not my ‘gay friend,’ she is one of my best friends, who happens to have made a choice that isn’t a choice that I have made. But I am not going to judge people.” Note her clever disavowal of the gay friend cliché: “I’m not using the trope if I say I’m not.” And her love for her friend allows her to dodge the bigot bullet when she opposes the right of all gays, including her friend, to marry.
Finally, I wonder what is the reverse of the phenomenon of the conservative’s gay friend? Do we liberals have token Fundamentalist Christian friends who we drag into political conversations as unwitting, never-present allies? Certainly conservatives aren’t the only ones who fall to this temptation?
On a serious note, I don’t think that I’ve escaped the trap of “I have a {blank} friend” in the past, and so in one respect, this is a self-critique. Hopefully I’ve learned from past mistakes. That said, let me state that at least in one sense, I don’t have any gay friends. I have friends with names and lives and passions and experiences and quirks and jobs and beliefs and heartaches and goals. This is not to deny that , and I acknowledge that, too. But I realize that all my friends and family and coworkers and acquaintances are complex human beings who don’t represent or sit in for an entire race or class or gender or sexual orientation. I hope that I will never will treat my friends of any stripe or creed as political or status symbols.
And remember, conservatives, that merely having a gay acquaintance is not an automatic “I’m not a bigot” card. No matter what kind of lip service you pay, no matter how you dress it up, denying an entire class of human beings of a basic right simply because they want to marry someone of the same gender is discrimination, bigotry, homophobia.
