All animals are equal

I know this blog is supposed to follow the average life of a student here (namely mine), but sometimes I just think and think and think about something until it nearly drives me mad. And so, I’ve decided to blog it. My mate Jess tells me it’s therapeutic, or something.

In class today, I and a few friends stumbled upon a very peculiar thing being discussed. Conversation is such a funny thing, evolving and fluid, changing topic and course constantly, and very soon our conversation had steered its course onto that of Homosexuals, in particular the homosexual community at Rhodes.

Now, my experience with homosexuals has been nothing but great. Hell, my gaydar (people still say that, right?) is terrible, and so usually (as was the case with two of the first gay guys I met at Rhodes University) I just think that the people in question are very friendly, effeminate guys, until my later embarrassment (because to everyone else it’s apparently SO obvious). The Rhodes Gay community, or at least the little bit that I’ve been exposed to, has been awesome. They’re a fun-loving group, with a lot of them being the Drama Department (a place I have always secretly adored since Innovations last year, where I sang that duet rendition with Spha- one of the aforementioned men whom my gaydar totally missed).

Anyway, these two friends of mine (who, for friendship’s sake, will remain nameless) were discussing quite vehemently a girl they know who gets a little over the top and in-your-face about her lesbian-ness since coming out of the closet. I’ve always thought that whom you choose to love should be like which kind of ice cream you prefer to eat: it should be a personal choice that needs no public airing or explanation. Maybe if people started acting as if gayness was normalness, we wouldn’t need to make being gay a big deal, in both a bad and good sense; hence why I’ve always thought Gay Pride events are a little self-defeating. Ah! But I digress again! So, Friend 1 mentions that there’s a thing called being “an All-Star gay” or a “Gold-Star gay” or something along those lines. Basically what this entails is that the gay in question is an “original gay” ie has never slept with someone of the opposite sex.

This shocked me. Even as a joke (under the ever-popular political justification of “context”), it’s a little stupid. Class distinctions (because that is exactly what that is) are never good. They create an “us – them” Othering mentality, which, even if we think it is harmless, is hugely problematic.

Let us consider Gay Rights. The world has things like Proposition 8 in California of 2008, a constitutional amendment that nullified the previously acceptable gay marriages (following the passing of Propostition 22 of the year 2000). Closer to home, we have massive hate crimes against gay people, especially where so-called “corrective rape” (a fucking nauseating term, if you’ll excuse my French) is concerned.

In light of this, I don’t think anyone should make subclasses or distinguish between different levels of gayness, or even, for that matter, anything-ness. What immediately comes to mind are images from George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. Or maybe I’m just overreacting.

But then this got me thinking: about Rights, primarily. How many rights have we (I use the collective ‘we’ here, to refer to humans in general) fought tooth and nail for, and how many of these rights do we take utterly for granted? I think of all the times I could have voted but claimed to be too busy. I think of all the times I could have gone to lectures, but skipped class.

I think what I’m trying to say is that I think that we all need to be a little more appreciative of the things we can do without being imprisoned, and of the people around us. We should measure the quality of a person by the size of his or her heart, and their his or her overall humanity, and not by some social hierarchy.