A straight experiences being gay

This is about a bag. This bag:

A straight, white, heterosexual father was the owner of the suitcase on a Jetstar flight. He has blogged about his experiences in a most insightful post. The how or why some baggage handler did this is beside the point, as in the post he realises what it can be like being gay in a public space.

I plucked the suitcase off the carousel and had many eyes look me up and down. I was taken aback by the slogan but thought I had thick enough skin to ignore the leering. My connecting flight was about to board so I had to speed through the terminal to check in with Qantas. As I dragged the case through the terminal, I looked back at the people I had passed and they too looked at me differently. My luggage was a scarlet letter. 

I am a white heterosexual male. This trifecta of privilege means that I'm not routinely subjected to prejudice. But for a few minutes I got to walk in the shoes of a gay person in a public place. For no good reason I had had a slur marked over my luggage. I was degraded. I was shamed. I was humiliated. 

For me, this was only a few minutes of one day of my life. If what I felt for those few minutes is extrapolated out every day over a lifetime, then I can fully understand why our gay friends feel persecuted and why they have such high rates of suicide. It is unacceptable. 

It is said that words can't hurt you. That it is true. But it isn't the words that hurt, it's the intention behind them. "I am gay" was not emblazened across my luggage as a celebration. It was used as a pejorative. It was used to humiliate. It was used as a slur. more

I've often reflected on this myself. After being, as he described in his post, a white, married father with a child, it's been quite the eye opener what life is like on the other side of the fence so to speak. I didn't think there was that much of a problem with homophobia today in Australia, but this is far from the case. 

Being as I don't give a flying fuck what people think of me (haven't done for much of my life) it's not an issue to me personally. I mean I've gone completely the other way now; gay as well as having HIV. I am in essence the focal point of much stigma, ignorance, bigotry and discrimination. 

David has been in the gay world all his life, and just accepts that he's going to face discrimination and all; like that's just the way it is sort of thing. Whereas I tend to become quite outraged at such things. I don't accept that simply because I'm with David and part of a minority now, that I should be treated any different than I was when I had a wife and baby daughter. 

For example, a while back David and I were sitting at The Oxford pub on the balcony having a beer, and this blind drunk homeless guy started screaming filthy abuse at us at the top of his voice. I at one point yelled back, but to my surprise David wanted me to calm down and not make a fuss. I explained that I didn't think I should be treated like that by anyone, pointed to the largely straight bar across the road and said "Imagine if the bloke was screaming abuse at them! There'd be a fuckin riot. Are we supposed to just accept that sort of treatment simply because we're gay?"