‘Euuggh, that is so gay’

My son was lucky enough recently to meet an accomplished ex-Springbok rugby player with a huge, kind heart and a natural affection for people.

His excitement was great. He told his friends about meeting the great man and gave one or two of them signed copies of a magazine with the player’s face on. He also told them that the player gave him a hug after talking to him.

”Euuggh,” responded one, ”that is so gay.”

Some of my son’s most loved people and greatest role models are gay: an uncle, a cousin and a godfather. So he was more than a little perplexed at this response.

My son — who is in a pointedly non-sexual phase of his life — cannot know yet whether he is gay. But what if he is? Every time a boy at school expostulates on homosexuality, a nugget of negative information about a particular sexual orientation is inserted in his brain.

If my son turns out to be gay — and even though he has parents who really couldn’t give a toss whether he is gay or straight — he would be half filled with a sense of shame and disgust about himself.

”It never leaves you, you know,” his godfather told me. In his late thirties, with enviable human relations, a steady job and a great sense of humour, this man has no qualms about his homosexuality.

”There’s always a granule of embarrassment that stays with you right through life because of those school taunts. Actually, it’s not really embarrassment. It’s more about the fact that someone might make that kind of comment in your company if they don’t know you’re gay, and about how that makes you feel. Especially if the person making that comment is an ignorant, crotch-scratching berk.

”You feel like a good, kind ‘I’m okay’ human being and then they make a comment like that and it momentarily shakes your sense of self and you’re back in your youth when you were really struggling with whether you’re okay or not. I now know I am okay, but my skin is not six inches thick and made of asbestos­. It still hurts.”

I am enraged that this form of goading and insult still happens in schools. I am enraged, because it disturbs my world view. I thought we’d moved on since I was in primary school 30 years ago.

I have little influence over my children’s upbringing, except choosing­ the environment in which they will become adults and — I hope — some influence on their attitudes towards other people. I had hoped that sending­ my son to a school that espoused values of non-racism, and with clear messages about the unacceptability of bullying, all messages of non-discrimination would be consolidated outside the home.

Of course, the school is not responsible for individual families’ dodgy value systems, but wouldn’t it be really fantastic if these seemingly innocuous incidents of gay bashing were as clearly condemned as littering­, racism and bullying are?

What is worrying, though, is that the children who use gay insults to taunt and tease and irritate others must be getting negative messages from somewhere about homosexuality. Since the home has been proved over and over again to be the place where children form most of their ideas about the world, one must assume they’re getting these messages from home. Or, at the very least, that these negative messages about homosexuality are not being rejected at home.

Prejudice is sadly something we will never really get rid of in any society, but the rank ignorance of educated middle-class people who pour scorn on those with obvious genetic differences from what the ignoramuses of the world consider to be the default human being is mind boggling.

To insult someone who is black, or atheist, or homosexual, or blind, or is a woman, is to assume the ”correct” kind of human being is a white, Christian, straight, able-bodied man.

You may be exceedingly lucky to be all those things because the Western world is pretty much geared towards rewarding you for these fortunate accidents of nature (and nurture, in the case of religious conviction), but, surprise, surprise, you are not the only ”correct” form of homo sapiens.

To convey, consciously or unconsciously, to your children that you are pretty much the best nature has to offer is disingenuous and embarrassingly unenlightened. If you are conveying this message to your children you are, quite possibly, the most shameful type of homo sapiens to roam the earth: someone who is both arrogant and ignorant.

So if you feel nothing for the stupid­ values you are instilling in your children, perhaps you feel something when I tell you that you are an embarrassment; that you should be filled with shame and guilt, because good people pity you for your stupidity when they hear that your children are spewing unintelligent, unsophisticated insults in the classroom.

I live in hope that one day the insult ”Euughh, that is so gay!” will be replaced with the insult ”Euughh, that is so ignorant”.

Let people be ashamed of their choice to not know, rather than their non-choice to be born homosexual or physically disabled or any shade of off-white.