{"id":18468,"date":"2014-03-13T04:13:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-13T11:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18468"},"modified":"2014-03-13T04:13:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-13T11:13:00","slug":"panti-bliss-lectures-about-being-lectured-about-what-is-not-homophobia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18468","title":{"rendered":"Panti Bliss Lectures About Being Lectured About What Is Not Homophobia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Drag queen performer and &#8220;accidental and occasional gay rights activist&#8221; Rory O&#8217;Neill, aka Panti Bliss, gave a wonderful speech. It&#8217;s worth listening to the whole thing (about ten minutes), or at least reading through the transcript.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"590\" height=\"332\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/WXayhUzWnl0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>)<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s my favorite bit, but the full transcript follows.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>And for the last three weeks I have been lectured by heterosexual people about what homophobia is and who should be allowed to identify it. Straight people \u2013 ministers, senators, lawyers, journalists \u2013 have lined up to tell me what homophobia is and what I am allowed to feel oppressed by. People who have never experienced homophobia in their lives, people who have never checked themselves at a pedestrian crossing, have told me that unless I am being thrown in prison or herded onto a cattle train, then it is not homophobia.<\/p>\n<p>    And that feels oppressive.<\/p>\n<p>    So now Irish gay people find ourselves in a ludicrous situation where not only are we not allowed to say publicly what we feel oppressed by, we are not even allowed to think it because our definition has been disallowed by our betters.<\/p>\n<p>    And for the last three weeks I have been denounced from the floor of parliament to newspaper columns to the seething morass of internet commentary for \u201chate speech\u201d because I dared to use the word \u201chomophobia\u201d. And a jumped-up queer like me should know that the word \u201chomophobia\u201d is no longer available to gay people. Which is a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia \u2013 homophobes are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I read that quote on Tumblr, and I reblogged it on my own Tumblr, adding:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Reblog, reblog, a thousand times reblog. The biggest lie the devil ever told was that homophobia is \u201conly a slur word,\u201d that bigotry is \u201conly a pejorative,\u201d that there is no such thing as sexism, as racism, as cissexism, that these are all words that have been made up by mean liberals, with no meaning apart from meaning to make innocent straight white cis men feel saaaad.<\/p>\n<p>Well, screw that. Bigotry exists, and the reason so many people are so devoted to claiming that bigotry ain\u2019t nothing but a slur word is because they don\u2019t want bigotry named, because something that is named is something that can be discussed and fought, and they sure don\u2019t want that to happen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Full transcript (taken from <a href=\"http:\/\/americablog.com\/2014\/02\/panti-bliss-homophobe-rory-oneill-irish-drag-queen.html\">AmericaBlog<\/a>, which also has some background if you want it):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Hello. My name is Panti and for the benefit of the visually impaired or the incredibly na\u00efve, I am a drag queen, a performer, and an accidental and occasional gay rights activist.<\/p>\n<p>    And as you may have already gathered, I am also painfully middle-class. My father was a country vet, I went to a nice school, and afterwards to that most middle-class of institutions \u2013 art college. And although this may surprise some of you, I have always managed to find gainful employment in my chosen field \u2013 gender discombobulation.<\/p>\n<p>    So the grinding, abject poverty so powerfully displayed in tonight\u2019s performance is something I can thankfully say I have no experience of.<\/p>\n<p>    But oppression is something I can relate to. Oh, I\u2019m not comparing my experience to Dublin workers of 1913, but I do know what it feels like to be put in your place.<\/p>\n<p>    Have you ever been standing at a pedestrian crossing when a car drives by and in it are a bunch of lads, and they lean out the window and they shout \u201cFag!\u201d and throw a milk carton at you?<\/p>\n<p>    Now it doesn\u2019t really hurt. It\u2019s just a wet carton and anyway they\u2019re right \u2013 I am a fag. But it feels oppressive.<\/p>\n<p>    When it really does hurt, is afterwards. Afterwards I wonder and worry and obsess over what was it about me, what was it they saw in me? What was it that gave me away? And I hate myself for wondering that. It feels oppressive and the next time I\u2019m at a pedestrian crossing I check myself to see what is it about me that \u201cgives the gay away\u201d and I check myself to make sure I\u2019m not doing it this time.<\/p>\n<p>    Have any of you ever come home in the evening and turned on the television and there is a panel of people \u2013 nice people, respectable people, smart people, the kind of people who make good neighbourly neighbours and write for newspapers. And they are having a reasoned debate about you. About what kind of a person you are, about whether you are capable of being a good parent, about whether you want to destroy marriage, about whether you are safe around children, about whether God herself thinks you are an abomination, about whether in fact you are \u201cintrinsically disordered\u201d. And even the nice TV presenter lady who you feel like you know thinks it\u2019s perfectly ok that they are all having this reasonable debate about who you are and what rights you \u201cdeserve\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>    And that feels oppressive.<\/p>\n<p>    Have you ever been on a crowded train with your gay friend and a small part of you is cringing because he is being SO gay and you find yourself trying to compensate by butching up or nudging the conversation onto \u201cstraighter\u201d territory? This is you who have spent 35 years trying to be the best gay possible and yet still a small part of you is embarrassed by his gayness.<\/p>\n<p>    And I hate myself for that. And that feels oppressive. And when I\u2019m standing at the pedestrian lights I am checking myself.<\/p>\n<p>    Have you ever gone into your favourite neighbourhood caf\u00e9 with the paper that you buy every day, and you open it up and inside is a 500-word opinion written by a nice middle-class woman, the kind of woman who probably gives to charity, the kind of woman that you would be happy to leave your children with. And she is arguing so reasonably about whether you should be treated less than everybody else, arguing that you should be given fewer rights than everybody else. And when the woman at the next table gets up and excuses herself to squeeze by you with a smile you wonder, \u201cDoes she think that about me too?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>    And that feels oppressive. And you go outside and you stand at the pedestrian crossing and you check yourself and I hate myself for that.<\/p>\n<p>    Have you ever turned on the computer and seen videos of people just like you in far away countries, and countries not far away at all, being beaten and imprisoned and tortured and murdered because they are just like you?<\/p>\n<p>    And that feels oppressive.<\/p>\n<p>    Three weeks ago I was on the television and I said that I believed that people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less or differently are, in my gay opinion, homophobic. Some people, people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less under the law took great exception at this characterisation and threatened legal action against me and RT\u00c9. RT\u00c9, in its wisdom, decided incredibly quickly to hand over a huge sum of money to make it go away. I haven\u2019t been so lucky.<\/p>\n<p>    And for the last three weeks I have been lectured by heterosexual people about what homophobia is and who should be allowed to identify it. Straight people \u2013 ministers, senators, lawyers, journalists \u2013 have lined up to tell me what homophobia is and what I am allowed to feel oppressed by. People who have never experienced homophobia in their lives, people who have never checked themselves at a pedestrian crossing, have told me that unless I am being thrown in prison or herded onto a cattle train, then it is not homophobia.<\/p>\n<p>    And that feels oppressive.<\/p>\n<p>    So now Irish gay people find ourselves in a ludicrous situation where not only are we not allowed to say publicly what we feel oppressed by, we are not even allowed to think it because our definition has been disallowed by our betters.<\/p>\n<p>    And for the last three weeks I have been denounced from the floor of parliament to newspaper columns to the seething morass of internet commentary for \u201chate speech\u201d because I dared to use the word \u201chomophobia\u201d. And a jumped-up queer like me should know that the word \u201chomophobia\u201d is no longer available to gay people. Which is a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia \u2013 homophobes are.<\/p>\n<p>    But I want to say that it is not true. I don\u2019t hate you.<\/p>\n<p>    I do, it is true, believe that almost all of you are probably homophobes. But I\u2019m a homophobe. It would be incredible if we weren\u2019t. To grow up in a society that is overwhelmingly homophobic and to escape unscathed would be miraculous. So I don\u2019t hate you because you are homophobic. I actually admire you. I admire you because most of you are only a bit homophobic. Which all things considered is pretty good going.<\/p>\n<p>    But I do sometimes hate myself. I hate myself because I f*cking check myself while standing at pedestrian crossings. And sometimes I hate you for doing that to me.<\/p>\n<p>    But not right now. Right now, I like you all very much for giving me a few moments of your time. And I thank you for it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Drag queen performer and &#8220;accidental and occasional gay rights activist&#8221; Rory O&#8217;Neill, aka Panti Bliss, gave a wonderful speech. It&#8217;s worth listening to the whole thing (about ten minutes), or at least reading through the transcript. ) Here&#8217;s my favorite &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18468\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homophobic-zaninessmore-lgbtq-issues","category-lesbian-gay-bi-trans-and-queer-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18469,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18468\/revisions\/18469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}