"That's just so gay."  

"She's a dyke, just look at her." 

"I know he's gay but does he have to be so flaming...?" 

"You are such a homo." 

There are worse but I think you get the general drift.  If you spend any time in a high school hallway, the first is ubiquitous.  The others are heard in general conversation anywhere, offices, restaurants and much worse can be heard in some places where most talk is pretty rough, like construction sites, etc.  But the question is: if a guy in a hard hat calls someone a fucking faggot, does that make him homophobic?  Or are those high school kids all making fun of gay people when they call something or someone "gay"?  I think the answer is no.

I use these words in general conversation and some of my best friends are gay. 

I know, I know, that sounds like a joke line, or Archie Bunker telling Meathead he isn't a racist. But most of us do it, and I bet that we don't give it a second thought.  While 99% of you would never even think of using the "N" word to describe a person of colour or as a slur against anyone else, we think nothing of using fag or homo as derogatory terms.  So all of us so-called liberals who profess to believe in gay marriage, who pretend to be libertarians, who think that we have come so far in our beliefs that we are willing to accept "the other" whoever it might be, better think again. 

Surely if you use these words, even in jest, there is a bit of a problem. 

Now if you are a bible thumper who thinks that homosexuality is an abomination, you are probably also someone who thinks that they get what they deserve, and that the kikes, wops, slanteyes, ragheads, etc. should go home to wherever they came from. You should also maybe stop reading this as you are the 1% who will never get it.   

While the women's liberation movement has had its stops and starts, we have, I think at least, stopped calling women "girls" in formal situations and only Rush Limbaugh thinks that single women who use birth control are "sluts."  Maybe it isn't 99%, but I truly believe that 75% of us think that women should do whatever the hell they want with their minds and bodies and that they should be the ones who determine how they want to be referenced.  I work with several 20-somethings and if I ever used the terms "honey" or "sweetheart" or said "you did a great job on this beautiful," I am sure that I would eventually be told to fuck off or eventually get a slap up the head.  But I have been brought up by my grandmother, my mother, my wife and my daughters not to talk like that. 

But with homosexuality we are very uncomfortable.  We profess to accept it, we have close gay friends, but we continue to make jokes that could be hurtful to those friends and we ignore the kind of dialogue that would be unacceptable if it were about any other segment of society.  Even guys and girls (sic) who work in construction or other "tough" jobs, the ones I know anyway, have nothing against gay people, but you certainly think they do if you listen to their conversations.  It's like gays have replaced the other people we used to like to make fun of and there is no one else left so let’s use homophobic slurs whenever we think we want to be funny or even jokingly put someone down. 

Fat is much the same but I’ll leave that topic to another day. 

So what to do?  Just say no!  Don't bloody well do it anymore.  Think before you speak. I am going to work on it for sure.  I am not a person who thinks we have to be politically correct all of the time but some things are just not acceptable.  I call my First Nations friends "Indians" and they don't mind, like it in fact.  And we joke amongst ourselves about scalping, but that is with them.  I know gays who I can joke with about being "homos" and lesbians "dykes."  We all need a sense of humour and if you don't, then poor you.  But I think it is odorous to pick a group of people who have traditionally been treated very poorly by society, who have been objects of ridicule, who have been burned at the stake (by pedophile priests in many cases), who are still in many quarters not accepted as "normal," and abuse them in this way by making these words part of our everyday conversation in a way that denigrates them. 

We don't accept it with women or men in general, people with a different skin colour, little people (well mostly we don't), people with accents, so we need to stop accepting it in the case of gays.  You cannot be a liberal and use these terms in the way many of us do.  And if you aren't a liberal then why are you here?