List But Not Least

[“Many gay people will say that their families are “fine.” But when you ask for details, this means, basically, that the gay person has not been completely excluded from family events. Or that their partner, if they have one, is allowed in the house. Very few experience their personhood, lives, and feelings to be actively understood as equal to the heterosexual family members. Often parents or siblings keep the person’s homosexuality secret from others, or euphemize it. They vote for politicians who hurt gay people; they contribute to religious organizations that humiliate gay people; they patronize cultural products that depict gay people as pathological. They speak and act in ways that reinforce the idea of gay people as “special interest.” In many ways the message is clear that the gay person is not fully human. But because many gay people know others who have been more severely punished by their family’s prejudices, they look on their own continued compromised inclusion to be miraculously positive and a product of their own correct behavior.”]