Sensitivity

Today, I was confronted with something I had not experienced before. I was picking up trash at my work and from above I hear "hey homo." I looked up and saw a large crowd of teens on a raised walkway. I kept walking then I heard it again followed by something flying by me. I never saw what it was but I figured it was trash or spit. This incident angered me, but not enough to do something about it. I am not sure what I could of done since I didn't see the person or people who actually yelled. But I was definitely irritated. I can't believe someone would be that insensitive. I kept walking from where I was and as I walked I thought more about it. I began to wonder if I would have been more offended if I was straight. As a gay person, I was disturbed that someone would just yell hey homo; if I were straight I probably would have been bothered by the fact that someone called me gay. I would have to say I would have been equally offended either way. What really got me is that these kids just threw that word out there and meant in a derogatory way. It was no big deal to them to just yell and possibly spit at another human being. I forget how taboo being gay is when you are in your early teens. Most often it is looked down upon, especially by boys. So they feel the need to throw words like homo, gay, fag, etc. to make other people feel bad. I've never really been offended before by the phrase "That's so gay." It has become a part of the vernacular of most teens to twenty-somethings. But now I have a different perspective. It took time for me to realize that this term is just plain rude. I'm not going to preach about it though because I even catch myself saying it sometimes; however, it is almost always in reference to something stereotypically gay a lesbian friend of mine does or says. I don't want to sound hypocritical. I just want to explain both sides of that issue. Kids these days are raised with such different standards than I was. I would have never called someone a homo publicly, even if I was thinking it. It seems odd to me because I was their age only seven years ago. Could the world have really changed that much in seven years? Apparently so. Part of the problem is that kids aren't raised to know any better. A lot of adults in the south and homophobic or at least anti-gay and that feeling rubs off on their kids. This creates environments of hate and teaches kids it's okay to be discriminatory. I guess it is the die hard patriot in me that still believes in the land of the free.