Now, dark jokes aside, living in Western Europe opens a different perspective on words tolerance and equality – thus I found no excuse for the hatred, especially if it is based on prejudice and your own lower self-esteem, which you want to raise, using suffering of the others.
I visited Christopher Street Day in Berlin on June 25 – one of the biggest gay pride parades in Europe. You might have even seen the pictures from this prominent event in the press – of course, not of the 98 percent normal-looking people, including children, who attended this feast of love and fun, but those 2 percent who would turn your head on the street by their outrageous looks and crazy behavior.
Those 2 percent are the people who are tolerated the least by the gay haters and who turn people who don’t have an established opinion about homosexuality against the sexual minority.
This kind of event is still not possible in Ukraine. Ukrainians, as a part of the Eastern European crowd, traditionally are intolerant of gay people. By gay I mean all kind of queer, including drag, transsexual and transgender – which nevertheless doesn’t prevent the biggest transvestite of them all – Verka Serduchka – from being a national star whose music is played at almost all Ukrainian weddings.
Many people from the Soviet space are full of hatred towards others in general. As said in an infamous anecdote, a Ukrainian feels better when his neighbor is in trouble. The unhappier someone else is, the better we feel about ourselves. If you are poor, it is always nice to hear that your pal just lost his job. If you are not good looking, it is always heart-warming to discover cellulite on Ani Lorak’s ass.
Many people from the Soviet space are full of hatred towards others in general. As said in an infamous anecdote, a Ukrainian feels better when his neighbor is in trouble. The unhappier someone else is, the better we feel about ourselves. If you are poor, it is always nice to hear that your pal just lost his job. If you are not good looking, it is always heart-warming to discover cellulite on Ani Lorak’s ass.
What bothers me is not the general attitude to the gay community. Acceptance is something which cannot be forced on people, even if you know that they are wrong. What scares me more is the approach which people use to express their opinion.
I was reading some comments to the pictures of Berlin’s gay pride in a popular in Russian-speaking community blog Livejournal.com. Most people had something negative to say about the queer people on the pictures. And it was not just disagreement with their way of life or the way they are dressed. It was pure homophobia and aggression.
Students, teachers, businessmen and designers were writing about “killing the perverts,” “prohibiting those monsters to adopt kids” and “sending them all to a freak island.”
What is wrong with all those people, I asked myself? What did gay people do to them, other than disturb their limited worldview by being different? It is not that most Ukrainians (or Russians) live a highly moral, in the traditional meaning, life. When it comes to bribes, lies, sometimes even physical violence, my countrymen are very tolerant. But when it comes to two men or women having a family that is when moral lines are drawn.
I understand that it is much easier to hurt unprotected ones to raise your own self-esteem. But has hate ever made the world better?
Sometimes, homophobes compare gay people to pedophiles and zoophiles, as in: “If we approve gay people, we should approve any kind of sexual perversion. That would be wrong!”
And it is wrong. Mutual agreement between two adults which doesn’t hurt anyone is much different than sexual abuse of children, who are too small to make their own decisions, or animals, who do not have free will at all. There are many other prejudices and clichés, among which are:
– gay people cannot reproduce;
– a child raised in a gay family will become gay as well;
– anal sex is not natural; and
– gay people who want to marry are destroying the sanctity of the whole notion of marriage.
Homophobes use the same statements to protect their old-fashioned opinion, forgetting that:
– the inability to reproduce makes gay people loving parents since they never have unwanted children, unlike millions of heterosexuals, who abort and abandon accidental kids;
– most gay people grew up in heterosexual families with heterosexual siblings;
– anal sex is also very common with heterosexuals (among which are many homophobes); and
– “normal” couples destroyed the sanctity of marriage way before by high divorce rates and family abuse.
I do believe that God created some people gay, so if they are happy about themselves, why should others try to prove so hard that they shouldn’t be?
And when it comes to religion – well, I might meet some disagreement now, but I do believe that God created some people gay, so if they are happy about themselves, why should others try to prove so hard that they shouldn’t be? Christians, or those people who claim to be ones but still bash the gay community, before judging someone’s behaviour should first check out the Bible for the world of God:
“He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at her.”
John 8:1-11
I don’t want to prove to anyone whether being gay is a choice or is it biologically pre-determined. I don’t want to try to change people’s opinions, which were probably formed by education, tradition and upbringing. I only want to remind that tolerance is not an empty word, but something which we have to establish in our hearts and minds.
I know that the time will come when gay people will be accepted fully into our society, without any inequality, hatred or prejudice. I also hope that gay couples won’t have problems adopting children, abandoned by their heterosexual parents. I’m looking forward to Ukraine becoming a friendlier place for people who are different, whether by color of their skin, religion or sexual orientation.
Alina Rudya is a former Kyiv Post staff writer living in Berlin.
