The gayness of you

Cong Corrales .

“BAYOT.” It is, to me, one of the most versatile words in Bisaya. It is used as a noun, an adjective, adverb, verb, and expletive by people who have no idea how courageous it is to be openly gay in a patriarchal society such as ours.

But nobody is born a bigot. You pick it up as you grow. People older than you tend to hand down their own prejudices to younger people. I remember being told not to be a “bayot” whenever I was on the verge of tears. Somebody at some time has been told by someone “ayaw pagbinayot” when they were about to walk away from a fistfight.

I’m not trying to pull a “holier than thou” here. That, I am not. I admit. I’ve have had my share of gay bashing before, innocuous as it seemed. Like most middle-aged Ateneans in the city, I spent 12 years of my life in an exclusive boys school. My “gaydar” hasn’t failed me before. I can spot one from out of a crowd. I’ve heard gay classmates cry in the toilet after a particularly difficult day of constant teasing from other boys. I don’t know about you but high school can be really brutal.

As easy as it was to be “downloaded” to my psyche that gay bashing is just friendly banter, I soon realized that friendly banter is very different from gay bashing. I realized that like heterosexuals, our sexual orientations do not define people’s personality and capabilities.

For instance, I realized it wasn’t friendly banter anymore when I once bashed a classmate verbally for being gay when in reality I was just frustrated because he had a higher score in a pop quiz. His being gay wasn’t the reason why I was second. He was just more prepared than I was.

Once, I realized that in introspection, my petty prejudice against gays slowly began to dissipate. There are smart and dumb homosexuals just as there are smart and dumb heterosexuals. As early as high school, I’ve never referred to myself as “straight” because that would mean that gay people are “crooked.”

Going to the point I was making, people are people no matter what their sexual orientations are. I realized these when I was in high school. So, it came as a shock to me when last week, a city councilor cum radio anchor dismissed an information officer’s explanation on air because he “sounded gay.”

This guy is well in his 60s. You would think, this guy has better things to discuss on air than to bash a another person’s gayness on air. But then again, people will be people no matter what.

That incident piqued my curiosity on why some people hang on to prejudices unwittingly handed down to them when they were young. It had awoken the Curious George in me.

According to Jeanna Bryner, a managing editor at Live Science, studies have found that homophobes are most hostile toward gays and hold strong anti-gay views because they themselves have same-sex desires, albeit undercover ones, meaning latent homosexuality. Hmmm, that’s a curious assumption.

Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, posited that homosexual urges, when repressed out of shame or fear, can be expressed as homophobia.

“Freud famously called this process a ‘reaction formation’ — the angry battle against the outward symbol of feelings that are inwardly being stifled,” Ryan’s study reads in part.

The articles I’ve read on the subject may not categorically call homophobes as latent homosexuals but at least some who feel strongly against homosexuals are likely to be persons struggling against parts of themselves. They, being victims of repression and fear of rejection themselves.

So maybe, just maybe, some people have to look into themselves once in while just to see if what we think is friendly banter against gays are not in fact repressed feelings of wanting to be like them — happy and gay.