Gay cruises are inappropriate, apparently

This is my worst nightmare realized

This afternoon I was walking behind three women who were discussing their “gay” colleague. Note the quotation remarks around the word gay. His sexual orientation was so scandalous that he couldn’t just be a colleague — he had to be a “gay” colleague. I learned from their conversation that he’s a “gay” nurse, and he recently returned from a “gay” cruise.

“Okay that is totally inappropriate for him to be talking about,” one of them animated. I chuckled. What exactly was inappropriate, the fact that he went on a cruise, or that he went on a “gay” cruise?

I think we all know the answer to this. Maybe they think that a gay cruise is a cornucopia of orgies where men prance around naked and are found humping tables, chairs, each other and whatever else is or isn’t nailed down. Ummmm… sign me up. If this happens to be true, what is the problem? How does it affect these women? The answer: It doesn’t. They’re prejudiced.

It’s kind of laughable that people think only gay men are hypersexual, because I believe that the majority of men, gay or straight, are obsessed with sex. The difference with gay men is that they don’t have to wine and dine another man to get what they want; they can just cut through all the bullshit and hop into bed. There’s an agreement that they both want the same thing and they go after it.

Trust me if straight men could get away with a more promiscuous lifestyle they would. In fact, many of them do, but we don’t hold them to the same scrutiny and judgment that we do with gay men. It’s the gay thing that’s the real problem for people. They don’t like gay people. I’m not spending a lot of my time thinking about what heterosexual people do in their own bedrooms, so I don’t know why straight people care so much about gay sex. They’re obsessed with it!

A while back I made a comment on a woman’s blog I often read. I said something about drag queens and she wrote to me to explain that as a Christian woman she found what I wrote to be offensive and she had to delete my comment. She was afraid that children would read what I wrote and ask her what a drag queen was.

Uh huh. So because you can’t have a conversation with your children about drag queens without reacting hysterically the only recourse is to censor anyone who raises the topic. Right. Wouldn’t it just be easier to explain that a drag queen is a man who dresses up like a woman and entertains people? Wouldn’t it be easier to explain to children that we live in a world where people are free to choose to be whoever they want to be, and that they are too? Wouldn’t that just be easier?

Funnily enough I had been reading her blog for months with the knowledge that she lived in the Bible Belt of America, which I was initially cautious about, but I enjoyed her writing and the photographs that she shared about her travels so much that I remained open-minded and assumed that maybe she was too. It never occurred to me that she would be homophobic because she presented herself as a modern woman who happened to believe in God. Lesson learned.

For the record, I don’t have any problems with people of faith, even though they may have problems with just about anyone who is different from them. That’s their choice.

I wish I had interjected with some witty response to the three women talking about how inappropriate it was for their “gay” colleague to openly share his “gay” cruise experience. I didn’t. I just laughed and went about my day. Personally, I’m not interested in being stuck on a boat with countless hormonal gay men, but I don’t have a problem when someone thinks it’s heaven and wants to talk about it. How does it hurt me? It doesn’t.