I’m Fed Up With “Casual” Homophobia

Hi, gay. I’m really trying to open on a positive note, but I’m a little worn down by the discourse this week; in all honesty, I’m quite fed up. It’s been a huge week for online gays, with equal measures of controversy, sass, and snark (I’m thinking explicitly of the “demon twink” saga), but the most recent breaking news has left a bad taste in my mouth. Often, I’m just minding my own damn business when ye olde homophobia comes galloping into view.

When was the last time you said “faggot”? For Matt Damon, it’s apparently been mere months, having only recently retired the word from his lexicon after an impassioned treatise from his daughter. In a rather benign interview for The Sunday Times, Damon offered this spicy anecdote: A few months ago he used the f-word in a joke and his daughter got upset, retreated to her bedroom, returned later with a damning parchment, and Damon agreed to retire the term. The story was presented as a sort of beautiful learning experience, a charming moment of child-to-parent growth, forgetting that nobody in the year of our Lord 2021 is saying “faggot” in polite company. Like, ever. Twitter erupted, as Twitter is wont to do. Damon, we all reminded each other, is a Hollywood leading man who’s played some rather notable gays, including the talented Tom Ripley and Liberace’s lover. And, in the grand tradition of celebrity damage limitation, Damon swiftly offered clarification, stating, “I do not use slurs of any kind”—which is all well and good, but also the exact opposite of his original story.

Meanwhile, onstage in Miami, rapper DaBaby asked his audience to flash their phones, but not if they had HIV or were gay men who had sex in parking lots. He also suggested, inaccurately, that HIV can kill you in two or three weeks. I don’t think I’m alone in asking: What the actual fuck, DaBaby? Are both these men stuck in the Dark Ages? How could they be so straight-up dumb? It’s alarming that we’re only a few weeks out from Pride month and my feed is homophobic as hell. It’s disheartening that famous men are platforming these views, or colloquial homophobia. I don’t really want to get into the amount of time in months it’s been since Matt Damon used a gay slur; I do not want to give more airtime to DaBaby, whose gigs are being canceled across the board. But both of these acts are a timely reminder of the widespread intolerance to homosexuality, the casual homophobia in society alongside the active hate. There’s still a staggering amount of misinformation around HIV and AIDS, and miseducation around which words can cause harm. (It does honestly seem incredible that Damon only recently woke up to the corrosive power of the “f-slur.”)

And I guess there’s never a good time for homophobia to gallop onto the feed, for me to be reminded how long it takes for attitudes to change, for language to adapt. Even as we move forward—to adoption rights, marriage equality, generally living freely—we haven’t necessarily moved from allowance to acceptance. There are still people out there calling us faggots. But a reminder of the prejudice is a reminder to challenge homophobia in all its forms, every goddamn time. It’s a sobering memo that within this comfortable bubble—a call-out climate where we all have the right to reply—there’s work still yet to be done.