Imagining not needed.
I posted "The clue" to mean that that was what I realized was missing from my earlier post: Like the last piece of a puzzle. Sorry to confuse you into guessing what I might have meant. I didn't intend you to do that.
I was taught at a young age that homosexual proclivities was bad, but not taught how to separate this out from a person who might otherwise be perfectly fine. But then, that is hard to teach and always has been. I later learnt how to do this myself in quite a different context.
Living in white middle-class suburbia did not teach me much about sexuality. Again, that was learnt largely on my own and quite a bit of the most useful parts was during and after a failed marriage. I'm definitely not gay, BTW. I had cause to ask this of myself and found an answer.
But before then, my strongest emotion over images of the Sydney Gay And Lesbian Mardi Gras was one of confusion: the girls were usually good to look at, but the guys were not (to me) and the guys dressing up as girls didn't make sense, either, and the majority on display were in the last two groups. Much of the early movement around that that I saw and remembered did not have a totally clear message. There was a lot of invective on both sides. I know now that they were just asking for acceptance, but there was a lot of corner-painting going on in both directions. That "You might be gay" line was spouted as an insult far too often: the implication was that the person being anti-gay was being a hypocrite. Eventually, it was hard to *not* see it as an insult. Remember, too, that Australia was in the forefront of promoting safe-sex decades ago because of the rise of HIV and the biggest problem with HIV was in the gay community. So.
In any case, it is only relatively recent that I even knew any gay people that I knew were gay.
Our laws about free speech do differ both substantially and subtly from yours. We don't have a bill of rights; instead a lot of things like that are in common law and sometimes actual case law. We do have groups who would decry support for gay-friendly activities, but they don't advocate violence. Or if they do, the media carefully looks the other way. Our different history, and particularly lack of a war of secession means we have a substantially different outlook on patriotic fervour. This means people who would lead by demonisation discover it tends to not work, particularly in the court of public appeal, or at worst only works for a short time. In recent years, we'd rather vilify racial differences, anyway.
I personally think Australia is somewhere between a few years and a few decades away from recognising gay marriages in law. But I think there is still a lot of difficult road between now and then.
Wade.
