Last week there was a report from America - a college in Elmhurst, Illinois, has added a question to its application form. 'Are you gay?'
Of course they don't ask it quite like that, they phrase it in the boorish modern manner. 'Would you consider yourself to be a member of the LGBT community? ' (i.e. 'Are you lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered?')
If I were to answer at all, it certainly wouldn't be with a simple yes or no, it would be angrily. 'What my knob chooses to point at is none of your damned business.'
More likely though, I'd just scrawl 'Bollocks!' right across the application form and start looking for another college.
Yet, despite the monstrously retro nature of Elmhurst college's new application form, Mr Shane Windmeyer, executive director of the gay advocacy group Campus Pride, praised the decision. 'In the next 10 years, we'll look back and ask why colleges didn't make this change much sooner.'
Extraordinary! Difficult to know what he's thinking. We know most Americans are totally out of touch with the rest of the sane world. Even so, when you read rubbish like that you have to raise a bit of an eyebrow.
Especially as, in the same week, we get news of a murder trial in Los Angeles where a fourteen-year-old boy took a gun to school and shot the boy who sat in front of him in the back of the head - because he was gay.
Well wouldn't you just love to fill in that form! 'Yes, I'm gay. Elmhurst College here I come. Psychos get your guns out.'
Personally I hate the whole concept of an LGBT community. For years now, by admitting I'm a bit the other way I've found myself lumped together with every other gay man on the planet. Now it gets worse. Apparently I'm in in a club sandwich with all those BLT people too. Just because of an errant willie.
But why should any of us be identified by just one small part of our personality?
Stuck on a desert island with a gang of people I wish I wasn't stuck with, would I automatically make an alliance with someone just because they were lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgendered?
Look at all the characteristics muddled up inside me - middle-class, English, bought up in a capital city, public school educated, well-travelled, bilingual, anarchic (a bit), conservative (a bit), socialist (a bit), wine-loving, food-loving, workaholic (but also ridiculously lazy), and oh yes... gay too.
Let's suppose one of the other people on the island is Johnny Goodchap - ex-Oxford cricketer, failed restauranteur, occasional travel writer, and now the international marketing director of a Brazilian condom company. We take an instant shine to each other and talk nonstop. He knows I'm gay and I know he has a wife back home and four children. And what happens? We find we have so much in common it feels like were long lost brothers.
Another castaway on the island is a Ukranian ostrich farmer's Russian-speaking daughter who's had testosterone injections and grown a beard and has giant biceps which she uses for chopping wood for the camp fire. Do you really think I'm going to ditch good conversation with Johnny Goodchap in order to start an LGBT community with Muscles Buchilova?
Only one thing will ever bring equality to gays (and all those BLT people too), and that is complete and utter indifference to other people's sexuality. Not well-meaning liberalism, or reasonableness, but indifference. And especially, not tolerance.
Tolerance is the most miserable of qualities. It means putting up with something you don't much like - probably something that's annoying you a great deal - like an unpleasant child banging on the back of your seat in an aeroplane. Don't even think about being tolerant. If you do, sooner or later you'll snap, and blow up. It's just not worth it.
Only indifference will overcome prejudice. Beautiful indifference. And thankfully in Britain these days it's on the increase.
More and more often, when someone learns that someone else is gay, they say, 'So what? It's none of my business. I couldn't care less.'
Those are lovely words to hear.
While gay attacks carry on everyday, the haven of places and groups that shelter LGBT´s is needed. It´s not just about the banner and being bunched together. It´s about a community where you can come down off the top shelf, at least for a short time and be yourself.
Ignorant people don't see us as any different from one another, and lump us all together. Find me a homophobic person who thinks it's okay to be trans...So why not group together and fight for equality for each other and ourselves? There's strength in numbers.
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Sounds so romantic.
The school in question is a well-known *private* college with a solid reputation for encouraging great diversity among students who apply and are accepted to the school.
Students who attend Enormous State University (ESU) might be surprised to be solicited for information about their gender identity and sexual orientation, but those at Elmhurst are not. They recognize that the school seeks to ensure a campus that's not merely "indifferent" to LGBTs, but genuinely welcoming. Especially as most of society is hostile to LGBTs.
But this is also a GENERATIONAL difference between yourself and the teens and 20-somethings who apply to Elmhurst and who aren't bothered by the question. Teen and 20-something LGBTs are not *indifferent* to their sexual identities and orientation, but they are far more *comfortable* than you appear to be.
When the rest of society ceases to be hostile to LGBTs, then indifference will undoubtedly follow.
But in 2011, with society so very hostile to LGBTs, you ought to really be celebrating a school that goes the extra mile to find ways to ensure an LGBT-campus, and a generation of young people who are not put off by it the way you are.
If you did not feel some level of negativity due to your gayness, you would embrace that instead of eschewing it.
Being gay is A-OK, Simon. Like Christmas EVERYDAY.
And if you're doing it right, being gay won't have a heck of a lot to do with your 'errant willie.' Gay people do not define ourselves by sexual acts. Straight people define us that way. Straight people, not all, but very many, view gay people solely as gay sex. Not as human beings. As if we do not have careers, children, families, and dreams, but rather are just a sex act instead of a human being.
It's unfortunate that the older gay men have put up with so much abuse that they still do not seem readily able to embrace even themselves. Heterosexuals do not feel shame (religious folks excluded) for doing what comes naturally to them, and neither should you.
To me, a desire for people not to respectfully acknowledge our differences suggests a humanity that has abandoned all hope of enlightenment.
Sadly, I hear some disdain for the LBTs in his comments. It reminds me of the US English people who say they are for English as our official language but inevitably reveal their bias against foreigners and their funny languages too. I am for integrating differencing sexualities into our conceptualization of "normal," but rejecting the different is not the path to get there, nor is rejecting what is different about ourselves. Of course, America's "check the box" classification system is horrible, but we know no better way to understand who we are (see France for a contrasting sense of minorities by not counting them, and therefore officially ignoring them).
Finally, the idea that an "errant willie" is what defines someone as gay sounds like a leftover of Christianity's anti-sex fixation. My gayness is way more fabulous, intrinsic, and extensive, than my sex acts.
My question is, how will we get to indifference?