Oh you're not homophobic huh?

You know what is totally infuriating about people who consistently claim they are not homophobic?  How utterly homophobic that makes them!

I mean, on some surface level I understand.  You rationalize, confuse, inundate a person with the truckload of bullshit you've told yourself about it so long you now believe.  But since oppression is a kind of continuum, I kind of look at it like this:

They say they're not homophobic to me.  But we live amidst a blatantly heterosexist society.  We don't even just live in it; we were born into it.  I had a hard time coming out in large part due to my own internalized homophobia, and that is despite being totally confounded over the expectation that some guy would ever honestly make me weak in the knees.

So I try to empathize.  I think of racism.  I am a college-educated urban liberal raised by other college-educated urban liberals.  I was never taught to in any way regard any other skin color as inherently better or worse than me.  And I can never imagine the occasion where I'd feel it necessary to announce that wasn't racist.  Just the other day, I'm driving up my own block and I realized I'd just done a double take at a dark skinned teenager walking by.  There is no defending that move.  It wasn't conscious but I recognized in seconds that it was tremendously problematic.  I didn't offer up excuses to myself and I won't pretend them here.  To be perfectly honest, it's only now dawned on me to really feel bad for the kid on the off chance that he saw and recognized me make that move in my car.

Why then - how then am I to accept this shallow apology from an insult bandaged with a "this is not homophobic" title?  How do you know it's not?  Why would you care?  How little must you think of my social location and what I've been through to muddle through it's complexities, that you feel comfortable in the amount of time and energy you've devoted to this analysis?  How can you possibly separate your experience from the thousands of years of oppression that paved the way for our current locality?  Why do you care what I think of it anyway?  

Could it be that in some way you know it is?  It's the most homophobic people that turn out to be gay you know.  Yet the more you tell me you don't care?  The more I know you do.  Perhaps you really can't see it.  And believe it or not, I forgive you. The unique perspective - that internal understanding is the reason why I know God made me gay.  It was so that I could truly know His message.  - Not that "He" was the only way, or that "God" is this or that, but love.  I know love.  I see it.  I feel it.  I'm in it.  I know it and I follow it.  And as much as I know and love you?  I know your announcement doesn't come from it.  Niether does this: Shut the fuck up.

But it's okay.  You'll learn.  We both will.