Oh, yeah, that is pretty nasty. I was imagining something more along the lines of “Oh, we support you and you family, you’re not like those other gay families”.
Yeah, I get that sort of thing too, by virtue of not being stereotypically Other in any particularly visible way.
When i was growing up, I got a lot of variants on “Funny, you don’t look Jewish”; when I came out I got a lot of “But you don’t really act gay.” (To which my usual response was “I do, actually. This is how a lot of gay people act. It’s part of our devious plot to trick you into treating us like people.”)
I mostly treat that kind of statement as a good sign, though… a symptom of cracks in the infrastructure.
That is, someone starts out believing that all Xes are Y, and that W is not Y, and then discovers W is an X. If they can avoid concluding that W actually is Y after all (which is the easiest fix), the contradictions in their worldview will start to build up. My usual experience is that after weeks or months or years of continued acquaintance, those people ultimately reject the “All Xes are Y” bit.
I’ve gone through the analogous process myself when breaking down some of my own prejudices, and I appreciate the patience of the folks who helped me through it. It seems only just to pay that forward.
Oh, yeah, that is pretty nasty. I was imagining something more along the lines of “Oh, we support you and you family, you’re not like those other gay families”.
Ah, I see.
Yeah, I get that sort of thing too, by virtue of not being stereotypically Other in any particularly visible way.
When i was growing up, I got a lot of variants on “Funny, you don’t look Jewish”; when I came out I got a lot of “But you don’t really act gay.” (To which my usual response was “I do, actually. This is how a lot of gay people act. It’s part of our devious plot to trick you into treating us like people.”)
I mostly treat that kind of statement as a good sign, though… a symptom of cracks in the infrastructure.
That is, someone starts out believing that all Xes are Y, and that W is not Y, and then discovers W is an X. If they can avoid concluding that W actually is Y after all (which is the easiest fix), the contradictions in their worldview will start to build up. My usual experience is that after weeks or months or years of continued acquaintance, those people ultimately reject the “All Xes are Y” bit.
I’ve gone through the analogous process myself when breaking down some of my own prejudices, and I appreciate the patience of the folks who helped me through it. It seems only just to pay that forward.