I Don't Care If You're Gay

If I had a penny for every time someone had said to me, “I don't care if you're gay, straight or whatever”, I would probably have enough for at least a second-hand VW polo and enough leftover change to pay for my third (yes third) theory test which is about to expire again because of the damn pandemic. Yes, I am ashamed I still cannot drive. Sorry, Granny for spending the £37.50 you sent me for my 17th birthday in Wetherspoons on jugs of mostly blue cocktails.

Why does this phrase annoy me so much? Surely the whole point of activism and the work that I do is to create a world in which no one is judged by who they love or what colour they are or their religion, race or identity. Of course, that is the ultimate aim. I can imagine a future where none of that stuff actually matters – one where we are so enlightened and open-minded that we really have managed to unpick every tiny thread of bias that we've ever been exposed to. More than that, we’ve stopped teaching our children the same things we were taught about the differences between us and about the dangers of the unknown. But in the meantime we would be lying to ourselves and society if we said we do not see these things when in fact sometimes it is all we think about; whether that's consciously or as is so often the case, deeply unconsciously.

I have a story I often tell in my training about this stuff. When someone says to me, “I don't understand why we're still talking about this, I only ever hire and promote people based on the productivity and quality of their work”, I say to them, “Hang on a minute - you're telling me that you are the exception to the rule and have in some way been able to do sufficient work to truly not respond to all of the stuff you've grown up with?” I say it more nicely than that by the way. None of us is immune to homophobia, racism, sexism or ableism because that is how we've been brought up.

The story I tell is from when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old. I love my sister don't get me wrong - she is by far one of the best people I've had the privilege of meeting, let alone knowing as well as I do for the last 32 years, but my goodness did/does she know how to press my buttons. It was almost like she came out of the womb pre-programmed. One such button pressing episode was on a sunny afternoon sitting on the pavement outside of our house in Greater London. She was sat as close to me as she could humanly get and explained to me in icy cold terms that it was a free world and that she could sit wherever she wanted. I remember boiling up inside and becoming so enraged by the existence of this tiny human that I turned around to her and in my head, I mustered the most offensive term I could think of - the worst word I could think of - and I turned round to my sister and I said to her:

“You lesbian.”

It was the worst word I could think of.

I was a kid who knew they were queer (I'd even written it in my diary by this point). But yet, still, I was able to access such internalised homophobia that the worst thing I could call my baby sister was the thing that I was.

None of us is free yet of the deeply programmed biases that have been passed down to us. So, when you say you don't see colour or race or sexuality or gender, you're fooling yourself but you're not fooling me, because I have those things in me too. I have learnt so much from Black activists like Layla F. Saad in her work ‘Me and White Supremacy’. The problem with denial is that it stops us from talking about the problem. It stops us from acknowledging that the systemic structural isms and phobias that exist throughout our societies are not there because we are bad people or because you are a bad person, but because of the world in which we happen to exist. We cannot fix these problems unless we admit they are real and present.

Please next time you feel like you want to say you don't care if someone is gay or black or disabled or whatever take a moment to think, “Have I earned the right to say that or am I saying it simply to avoid taking accountability for the stuff that through no fault of my own lives deep within me?” or perhaps “I don’t like talking about this because it makes me feel uncomfortable”.

It's okay not to be perfect - none of us is. But it’s not ok to pretend you are . . . well not until you’ve done the work first. You do see sexuality, gender, colour, disability, religion and race because we all see it too. The good news is there is lots you can do to make it affect your decisions less. It just takes admitting you need a little help.