Pro-gay bus ads.

My imaginary pro-gay bus ad: "Thank you for supporting gay equality."

We are all human beings in a state of transition. Many of us have held and expressed prejudiced views in our past that we are now embarrassed about and regard as in error. Such views need to be challenged, but it also needs to be acknowledged that they arise from specific causes and conditions, such as social programming, a rigid belief structure, a lack of exposure to counter-evidence, or difficulties in processing evidence and thinking logically. 

When people are locked in to prejudiced mindsets, they themselves will benefit from liberation, as well as the people they wrongly denigrate. Challenging their beliefs, and making them feel uncomfortable about their beliefs, should be a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Yet so often, political activists write off the offender, and are satisfied with causing him depression, anger, humiliation, or some other kind of disadvantage, as the end in itself, apparently without any concern as to whether a different approach might be more likely to change his mind, or whether it might accord with the generosity of spirit with which we would all like to be treated when we make mistakes about our interpretation of the world that lead to undeserved suffering by others. We all have something in our lives - even if it is in the distant past - to match the ignorant callousness of the homophobes. Who is to say we would not have the same views they hold if we had been born with the same genes, into the same families, and had their life experience?

The person who has shifted to the bleakest part of the moral spectrum is not the ignoramus, but the hypocrite: this person expresses or acts in accordance with a view he knows to be false and to cause suffering, for the sake of personal advantage. This person secretly commits actions that are in the same general category as those he condemns, and includes those who condemn equal marriage yet have affairs. The hypocrite is joined in this acrid moral sludge by those who are simply venomous and sadistic: those who gain satisfaction simply by trying to cause other people unhappiness and by denigrating minority groups they regard as fair game. Even here, none of us knows how many of the venomous and sadistic are simply sociopaths who lack the empathy that informs the moral insights of the vast majority.

When I first saw the Stonewall bus advertisements saying, "Some people are gay. Get over it!" I felt gratified about this very public challenge to homophobic attitudes. But before long, the slogan started to jar with me, and although it had stark appeal to what remains psychologically of the radical gay activism of my early 20s, I came to the view that the advertisement was ill-considered.

Many people do brave and determined battle with their homophobic social programming, especially when they have been raised to respect the tenets of their parents' dogmatic religion. It can take a long time before they have processed the cognitive and affective obstacles to the liberalism and fairness that the deepest part of their psyches wants to embrace. Barking "Get over it!" at such people does not seem to me to do justice to their good will and their own personal struggle in this respect.

There are also, in my view, many people whose aversion to homosexuality, or to expressing publicly a liberal attitude towards it, derives from their own homosexual feelings that, because of the prejudiced society or parental home in which they grew up, they find themselves unable to come to terms with. Exclaiming "Get over it!" to such people seems a little akin to telling someone with clinical depression, "Pull yourself together!" or "Snap out of it!" Perhaps the slightly less abrasive approach that reflects the circumstances beyond their control that led to their personal predicament, that may well have involved quite a lot of suffering over the years, is the one that will best help them on their journey.

Of course, there was an attempt by a Christian group to retaliate by running a bus advertisement that very misleadingly implied homosexuality could be cured. The "Not gay! Post-gay, ex-gay and proud. Get over it!" posters were rightly banned by Transport for London, chaired by Boris Johnson. This advertisement could have contributed to psychological harm suffered by lesbian and gay young people who are exposed to the false messages that their sexuality is something defective that needs to be cured, and that it is possible for their sexual orientation to be changed. I wrote an article for Pink News about how such religious homophobia caused me to develop a serious clinical depression in my teens.

The ban on the Christian advertisement was followed by the inevitable protests from dogmatic religious adherents that people of faith should have the right to criticise homosexuality. What these protesters did not grasp is that Transport for London should equally have the right to deny them a platform for their ideas. Person/ organisation A having a right to "freedom of speech" does not entail that person/organisation B has any obligation to provide a platform for it.

Quite apart from my view that the Stonewall bus ad is juvenile and badly crafted, I have to say that I don't regard the side of buses as a good place for any advertising that could be considered contentious: and that includes pro-gay or anti-gay advertisements, and advertisements for religious conventions. A thought should perhaps be given to the feelings of the people who drive the buses all day. Someone who is strongly opposed to fundamentalist Christianity might feel very uncomfortable driving a bus advertising an Evangelical festival. A gay or pro-gay driver might feel similarly about driving a bus with an ad suggesting that being LGBT is something that needs to be cured, and can be cured. A driver who has religious misgivings about homosexuality (as misguided and unfortunate as they may be) might similarly have a crisis of conscience about driving a bus with the Stonewall advertisements. In fact, there is at least one documented case of this happening.

There is a sense in which bus drivers are agents for the dissemination of the advertising on bus posters. I don't think it is fair to force them to choose between losing their job or suffering the discomfort of promoting ideas with which they might strongly disagree. In addition to the discomfort caused to the drivers, forcing a homophobic person to help advertise the acceptability of homosexuality on pain of losing his job, is hardly likely to make him or her feel less resentful towards LGBT people: on the contrary. There are plenty of other places where contentious advertising can be located instead.

Changing hearts and minds is a subtle business, and although using blunt instruments might feel very satisfying to those who wield them, we need to remember that we are supposed to be trying to make friends of the people who are about to be clobbered. Winning over a homophobic person, rather than being satisfied with simply telling him he is a jerk, might make a great difference to the life experience of any gay or lesbian children or grandchildren that former homophobe might have.

As stated above, I do not regard the sides of buses as appropriate places for pro-gay or anti-gay advertisements, any more than I regard them as appropriage places for pro-religion or anti-religion advertisements. But if there are to be pro-LGBT advertisements on buses, let's have one that does more than bark at anti-gay people. Let's have one that speaks to far more people, and that carries a positive and optimistic message. 

Something along the lines of, "Thanks for supporting gay equality."
 

© Gary Powell, 2013