It is victim blaming, we are not the reason homophobia exists or that people become extremely homophobic. It is not oppressed people that cause their own oppression, we don’t in some way “deserve” it.

Some aspects of the identity of sexuality may be related to physical and things we cannot control, but at the end of the day it is an identity. If they do not see themselves as gay, they are not. It is not for you to assign an identity to someone, even someone you don’t like. Even if someone might identify as gay outside of these power structures, in here they aren’t. Even if they would be gay, they participate in our oppression because being straight is beneficial to them, not because they “are secretly gay”. If they did homophobia because they were “ashamed” it wouldn’t be helping so many of them get into positions of power

  • Ideology [she/her]
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    edit-2
    22 days ago

    I am in the camp that Kinsey was kind of right in that most people fall on a spectrum somewhere between fully straight and fully gay, but most people treat it like a binary on/off out of convenience to fit into a culture. People who lean on the straight side just happen to be aligned with the hegemonic culture and abandon even the slightest tendency toward gay attraction because it doesn't serve them in the realm of social power. But there are enough documented cases of people in power who consider themselves untouchable and subsequently get found out that it gives the impression they suppress homoerotic/romantic feelings until it is "safe" to express them, often in secret and at the expense of their paramours who they treat like objects. When you are powerful you can afford to treat people like objects.

    So on the queer side of things, you see these giant hypocrites using people like you for personal pleasure. On the cis/straight side of things you see the powerful violating norms that on some level you feel are forbidden to you in the lower class, and there's a sense of irony there whether or not you yourself are in the closet. And when these feelings get signalboosted, there's a perversion which occurs where the reasons for calling out hypocrisy are filtered out and all that remains is putting a transgressive act under a magnifying glass. That transgressive act being gay attraction.

    • Des [she/her, they/them]
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      22 days ago

      my own theory is that in a fully culturally liberated post-capitalist world (with a few generations removed from our current hellscape) the two ends of the scale might actually be the smallest % of total population