Welcome to Valentine’s Day, Singles Awareness Day and Day Before 50% off Chocolates Day 2014. (If you celebrate all three of them, you may have some explaining to do.) This year, I’m in the latter two categories, but that didn’t change the fact that I started thinking about love this morning. So many couples out there celebrating together in romantic fashion and not intentionally rubbing single people’s noses in it, but doing it anyway, which is really, really annoying. But I digress.
I know a wide range of people who enjoy Valentine’s Day with their partners: teenagers and great-grandparents, married and unmarried, straight and gay. I’m happy for all of them. But what I thought about this morning (and I honestly don’t know why it popped into my head) was the concept of “homophobia”, the fear of gay people. And maybe there are homophobes out there who are afraid of how they might be celebrating: giving each other Valentine’s Day cards, going out for a nice meal at a restaurant, cuddling while watching a romantic comedy on Netflix… pretty scary, isn’t it?
I understand some phobias. Arachnophobia: fear of spiders. Those fuzzy little things that squirm around in your hand and could crawl inside your mouth while you’re sleeping, whereas gay people… wait. Okay, maybe not a good comparison.
But a spider can bite you, inject you with poison and kill you. Acrophobia: fear of heights. Because falling down a really long distance can kill you. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia: fear of long words. Because it’s a really long word and anyone who can pronounce it properly on their first try is probably a psychopath who plans to sneak into your bedroom tonight while you’re asleep and kill you. Lots of scary things out there.
So arachnophobes don’t want to hold spiders in their hands because they might get poisoned. Homophobes don’t want to shake a gay person’s hand because… they might get queerness on their palm that could kill them? No, they don’t want to shake hands because they hate gay people.
It seems more along the lines of sexism and racism: some people are beneath you and you want to treat them like second-hand citizens, if not worse. That’s not a phobia; that’s being an asshole. But trying to call their behavior “homoism” or “homocism”… those words don’t make any sense. And calling them assholes is both non-specific and kind of ironic, if you think about it. So what are we stuck with? Homophobia, which sucks. And not in the good way.
But I don’t want to cast a pall over the day. Valentine’s Day should be a happy celebration, even for us lonely folk because we get to smother our sorrows with half-price chocolate over the weekend. So to all of my friends who are spending the day with someone special regardless of your lifestyles, I’ll be enjoying the rest of today vicariously through you, especially since I don’t have a subscription to Netflix.
