How to keep away from gay?

The post title is a phrase someone googled to get to my website today. Depending on what definition of gay they meant, I might be able to help them. Today I managed to avoid all possible happiness, so they were right on with that one. I’m sure I also avoided homosexuals, but not on purpose; it’s just that I was home most of the day, and when I went outside it was cold and dark and there weren’t many people out there. They might have been gay, but when it’s that cold, isn’t everybody gay? Well, it wasn’t that cold, but it was scarf-wearing cold. Bright, stylish gay scarves.*

A while back I showed an online acquaintance a news article about how someone in the local tourism industry wanted funding to advertise to lesbians, because Vancouver is a popular vacation destination for the same-sex demographic. I was rather surprised to see him get upset over this news, since I assumed that most guys I knew were at least ambivalent to the existence of homosexuals, if not particularly for them. In fact, I don’t know how you can live in Vancouver and hate gays. I suppose that’s easier than living here and hating (for example) Asians, but that’s still a lot of pointless negativity, not to mention missing out on all the great restaurants on Davie Street.

I tried to find humour in what he was saying to me in response to the article, because it’s otherwise kind of depressing:

[him] why don’t you spend money for facilities for normal people? why transform this beautiful city into a place where you dare not leave your kids alone?
…
[me] what are lesbians or gays going to do to kids?
[him] I wouldn’t have the courage to leave even a 16-to-18-year-old boy walking on Vancouver streets
[me] why, because gangs of lesbians are going to attack him?

I couldn’t get a straight answer from him, nor could I get him to admit that homosexuality and pedophilia are not the same thing. He also thought it was wrong for gays to have or adopt children. Obviously he thinks being gay is contagious like rabies in dogs, that someone who’s gay is going to go bite someone else, who then becomes gay and bites other people, and then goes and pisses on a fire hydrant. Although instead of biting it would be butt sex, and right on the sidewalk (where it’s not safe for children to walk).

I actually like the idea of lesbian gangsters, but unfortunately my imagination ends there for anything that’s not a porn movie plot (I suppose A Clockwork Orgy might be a good reference in this case) (it’s hilarious). But, really, I wonder where the idea came from that gays would attack people in public and be, uh, violently gay at them? Maybe it was from some old world stories fathers would tell their sons to scare them into not masturbating in bed.

Now, I don’t mean to be intolerant myself in the sense that I’m intolerant of people who don’t tolerate what I do (like, I don’t want to be biased against racists, although it’s really hard and I can’t tell if I’m being hypocritical or not) but I wanted this guy to admit to being homophobic, and he didn’t think he was. In fact,

[him] I’m not an homophobic but everything has its limits

I had no answer to that.

*I always like to say a bunch of politically incorrect statements at the beginning of such a discussion, just to get it out of my system so that I don’t accidentally say something wrong later on. Like how I used to tease my one black friend about having grown up in the ghetto, and didn’t find out until months later that he actually did grow up in the ghetto, at which point I felt really bad but he figured he’d just told me about it already.