With Friends Like These.

 The past few weeks I have been reading a lot of stories about LGBTQ people experiencing negative situations, from being called names to physical assault. A lot I feel, has to do with what happened in the last American election. It gave the homo-bigoted a sense of "our time is now". I hate using the word homophobia because those people don't have a fear of gay people, they know exactly who we are and they have an agenda of repression and hate. They should be described as homo-bigoted or homo-prejudice because they hate us and see us as some sort of damaged people who should just keep quiet and pretend to be straight.

 I'm lucky however, I live in Canada and I find that things are slowly getting better all the time. I was thinking back to something that happened to my ex boyfriend over ten years ago. He was at work and asked an employee to redo something they had been working on. The guy walked away angry and said out loud something like "I hate working with a big fruit or big queer like him" words along those lines. The ex was humiliated, not everyone knew yet that he was gay. He said nothing and just let it go like gay people have often done for years.

 A day later the ex was pulled into the main office. The boss had heard what happened, and was horrified. He found out because the other workers loved my ex and went en masse to have the other guy fired, they were outraged, they were behind their friend. Later my ex received a note from the guy that was fired, it was an apology letter and he felt it was sincere.

 I was thinking about myself, the beautiful thing is, if I was eating lunch at work with my usual group and some dumbass came up to torment me saying, "hey heard you're a big queer, you certainly look like a fag". That guy would have a group come down on him like a hammer. He probably would get threatened physically and he definitely would have his ass fired in 1.2 seconds. It's hard to believe at times when I think back, twenty five years ago the table would have been against me, now it's the opposite. Yes we are used to having to stand up for ourselves but it's nice when you realize we are not always alone.