The Complexity Within Equivalence

The Complexity Within Equivalence 

2014

Homosexual people hold the unique position within society of being the only minority group to be born into communities who do not share that minority status. In an ideal world we, the gay community would follow the trajectory of all civil rights movements, and seek total equal status within society, but how realistic of a goal is this? And is equivalence to an apparently resistant force really what we want? After all equality is an extremely conservative aim.

If Ireland passes the proposed same-sex legislation and allows homosexual couples to marry, will this change the situation for gay people at all? A shift in political antipathy does not necessarily mean that societal change will follow.

The complexity contained within passing a same-sex marriage bill and yet maintaining an undercurrent of homophobic discriminatory rhetoric to go unchecked within society, especially in terms of political debate, is that it trickles down through societal structures and begins to, as with all such rhetoric, change the way the wider community view gay people. The fact remains that our ‘fight’ for same sex marriage is a fallacy, a smoke-screen for the fact that on a fundamental level gay people will may never be equal. Until there is a societal, political and representational shift in the way we are presented and the way we are allowed to view ourselves.

This void between who we are and how we are allowed to be viewed creates a space in which the homosexual individual becomes completely separate from the society in which they exist. Despite being expected to contribute to that society in every other way, financially socially and politically.

Whosoever defines it homophobia does exist and takes many different forms. From the increase of homosexual assaults in urban areas to the casual homophobia within the media and the negative cultural semantics in the language used to describe gay people, this consistent negativity changes the way gay people are viewed and how they view themselves within society. It would be nascent for any minority group to allow themselves to be defined through the eyes who have not experienced a life within that group. Yet we have allowed ourselves to be superficially represented through the media as promiscuous, vacuous and in many cases simply two dimensional. There is a lack of any real representation and when gay people are represented on television or in other media they are somehow expected to speak for every one of us.

In Ireland in 2014 we have collectively made the assumption that because the gay community have certain rights and are tolerated that we are in some way exempt from the backlash rising against us in other countries. What except for potential EU sanctions and the permissive nature of certain aspects of our society would stop Ireland in following the legislative trajectory of countries such as Russia or Uganda in the re-criminalisation of homosexual people? Taking note of the fact that Russia decriminalised homosexuality in the same year as Ireland. The truth is our elected freedoms hang on a precarious thread, one which will not necessarily be strengthened by marriage.

The very fact that organisations and individuals are openly allowed (I restrain from typing encouraged) to speak publically on a meritocratic forum, in a manner which actively seeks to discriminate or treat gay people differently from their straight counterparts shows just how ingrained this level of homophobia has become within our society. There seems to be a willingness on the part of our media to provide an open platform for those who seek to treat us differently from everyone else. When we try to do the same we are hit with regulations and a physical ‘glass-ceiling’ that clearly does not apply to our heterosexual counterparts. Allowing for religious or faux political ideology to influence national debate, generates enormous confusion about the issue being debated.

In order to overcome this confusion we have to be able to separate the idea that differences between hetero and homosexual individuals being the only way to relate to one another. The differences between two heterosexual individuals or two homosexual individuals are far greater than the differences between the two groups as a whole.

Yet we as a community are, after all this time, still negotiating from a place of weakness, gay people are still committing suicide, institutional homophobia is ever present, physical attacks and assaults on gay people are consistently rising and despite the huge strides in our liberation as Irish gay people, there are still people who will never be able to come out and disclose their sexuality to anyone.  At what point will the same sex marriage debate that will pervade over our consciousness in the coming months, deal with these issues? And more importantly, when will we be equal?

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