Los Angeles (Photo: Lauren Barless)
A few weeks ago, my friend Mat and I were waiting for a bus under a Los Angeles overpass. In front of me, a man in his car was stopped at a crosswalk, waving a pedestrian to cross. Then a black car hurtled around a street corner to beat the oncoming bus and slammed, with a piercing squeal of too-late brakes and a nasty, echoed crunch, into the back of the stopped car; the airbags in the black car deployed, just after the driver’s head struck the wheel. As a few frazzled bystanders called 9-1-1, he stepped out of the car and promptly fainted.
Then, my day got really scary.
My friend and I boarded the bus, along with two women. One was fairly old, in her seventies; the other perhaps 35. The second woman wore a fitted black hoodie that stopped at a cast on her wrist, maroon jeans, and sunglasses, her black hair in braids that stopped at the back of her neck. She looked approachable. In the commotion following the crash, she seemed to have been trying to help, and I wanted to know what she thought of the event. So, I walked to the front of the bus and tapped her shoulder. I was shocked when she turned to me, screaming as she did, “Don’t fucking touch me!”
Flustered, I returned to my seat near the back of the bus, but she continued to yell at me, bringing her belongings with her to a seat adjacent to mine.
“You don’t fucking touch people,” she emphasized. “You can get shot for that.”
“Okay,” I answered, rolling my eyes inwardly.
Then she stood up in front of me, and demanded: “What are you hiding? What’s in your hands?”
“My cell phone,” I said, as I traded it back and forth between my hands to show her there was nothing else there.
“Turn them over.”
“I AM turning them over. What are you expecting to find?”
“You got warts? Don’t touch me with your fucking dirty hands. Keep your diseases to your own kind.”
Suddenly, I understood what was happening: she thought Mat and I were “together.”
I protested: “I’m not gay.”
“Get out of the fucking closet,” she implored me.
A black girl in front of us stood up for me, bless her brazen, inclusive soul. “You need to shut the fuck up. He didn’t do nothin’ wrong.” The two exchanged threats of “spraying” each other (i.e., with bullets); my eyes flicked to my aggressor’s wrist cast which, in her new, violent context, suddenly seemed ominous.
I was scared. I thought my new comrade was taking the heat, but the homophobic woman was clearly more interested in me. Our female bus driver asked politely if she would be more comfortable moving seats. “I’m okay. Just get this guy to stop touching people!” Until our stop, the woman continued glaring at me as I did my best to look forward, uninterested. Then she followed Mat and I off the bus. She asked, once more, to see my hands which, she was convinced, even in broad daylight, concealed some sort of evidence of my “disease.”
Over an hour later, when Mat and I returned to the bus stop, she was there again. Exasperated, and still reeling from the first encounter, we walked to the next stop to avoid another encounter, but when the bus came, there she was, seated near the front. She seemed not to acknowledge us, but when we came to our transfer stop, she followed us off again. We climbed the overpass stairs to our transfer bus, and just when we thought we’d lost her, she appeared again, walking towards us. I told Mat to pretend we didn’t see her.
As she passed, she prodded my arm with her finger and, looking smug with some sort of perceived vengeance, walked away. Harmless, yes, but for the rest of the trip home, I was a paranoid mess. She’d popped up so many times, it seemed possible to me she might be clinging to the bottom of the bus.
That night, poring over the events in my head, I was still shaken. I’d never borne personal witness to such extreme homophobia, nor to such misunderstanding of how diseases like AIDS are spread. I was struck, too, at how her words made me feel. Though I’m not gay, her words, despite my knowledge that they originated from a place of fear and ignorance, still stung. That she perceived me to be so unpalatable that my simply touching her arm sent her into such a rage – I couldn’t help but feel somehow less human. Worst of all, I felt like a coward.
I’ve been a supporter of gender and sexuality equality for years. I have many friends in the gay community, and my sister recently courageously came out as a lesbian; in other words, I like to consider myself fairly enlightened when it comes to these matters. And yet, when this woman accosted me and presumed my homosexuality, I protested.
In so doing, all of my pro-gay declarations had been effectively nullified: my protestation didn’t suggest that what she was doing was wrong because it was hateful; it suggested she was directing her hatred at the wrong target. I could say that I only renounced my perceived homosexuality because I was scared, but that doesn’t make it okay. All night, and for the next few days, it tormented me to think that a gay man in the same scenario might also have felt the need to claim straightness, and that’s terribly unfair; nobody should have to hide or deny their sexual identity.
In a world where the President of the United States has given the thumbs-up to gay marriage (albeit hesitantly), many of us are apt to think that we’ve reached some sort of political finish-line, but traces of homophobia still linger in the same latent way that racism and sexism do – in insensitive jokes, statistically-evident occupational and economic inequality, and the like. True equality is in the mind, and is expressed more loudly in our actions than in our official policies and platitudes; it requires understanding, and it requires vigilance. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Jerry Seinfeld once famously quipped about being mistaken for a gay man, but if that were true, why did he deny it so vehemently? Just saying “there’s nothing wrong with that” would have sufficed, Jerry. It should have for me, too.
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Stephen Carlick is a music writer in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @stephencarlick.
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