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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Your examples are ‘gyms, blue collar unions, sales teams, and bars’. None of those are existential, although it does make certain career opportunities more uncomfortable. You have every ability to either pick a different career- of which there are many-, deal with discomfort, or simply not tell your coworkers.

Society fundamentally does not exist to make deviant lifestyle decisions seem normal and accommodated. If you or one of your gay friends actually want to be a plumber, then deal with the low level hostility until you learn to follow social norms among plumbers.

And yes, straight men have more to fear in terms of sexual harassment from gay men than gay men do from straight men. The evidence for that is ‘duh’. Whether anti-gay hate crimes are as common as they’re made out to be by the LGBT persecution narrative is neither here nor there; you are free to be wary of blue collar men if you’d like, it’s no skin off of our backs because we don’t insist on being welcomed into your spaces and affirmed in them for things that have nothing to do with the places we came to.

It's actually not as easy to be selectively closeted as you seem to think. People ask you questions about your life, and you are then given the options to either refuse to answer, in which case you are unfriendly, lie, in which case you are untrustworthy, or tell the truth, in which case you are provocative.

You have no claim to blue collar professions nor the right to establish them as safe spaces for gay hatred.

I have a fourth option, which is to advocate against your arbitrary definition of deviancy, which conveniently includes being gay, but not premarital sex, drinking, swearing, and hostility towards gay and trans people.

The idea that gay hatred in blue collar professions is justified because of a fear of sexual harassment is silly. I am sure straight men sexually harass each other, and gay men, far more than gay men might sexually harass straight men. Your ability to dismiss the fear of harassment that gay men experience while at the same time demanding gay men deal with constant "low level" hostility is evidence I am correct and you are not.

I would guess you simply just sympathize more with a straight man who experiences the presence of a gay man as intrinsically sexual harassment, whereas you see low level hostility towards gay men as justified because you think gay men are deviants.