Let’s call him Joe. That is not his real name but he seemed an Honest Joe. He worked in a local government frontline job and I met him covering the opioid epidemic in Ohio. It was a fascinating assignment – partly because the scale of the crisis is so mind-blowingly acute (see The Feed for more), and partly because this was one of the key swing states that handed the White House to Donald Trump.
So I had chance to chat at length to several voters who shifted to the populist billionaire Republican. They included a senior public official who, when I talked about visiting Damascus and reporting on the refugee crisis, asked me what Syrians were really like; he had obviously overdosed on Fox TV. But for all their myopic hostility to some outsiders and hatred of distant elites, these were decent people living in often-distressed communities that felt a long way from Washington.
I talked to Joe about his support for Trump, about serving in the Marines, about the opioid crisis, about life in his home town. He was warm and well-informed, still supportive of the president but wishing Trump would shut up on social media. Then the subject of gay rights came up. Joe admitted that he used to joke with his buddies when he saw ‘faggots’ in the street, having been brought up in a world that viewed homosexuality as an aberration like so many in Middle America. This is, remember, a far more religious country than our own.
Joe told me that about six years ago, a family member invited him to a civil union with her partner. He recoiled at the idea and refused to attend such an diabolical event. But then he began to talk more with her and to hang out with a gay man at his workplace. ‘This guy was the funniest guy I ever met and so good at his job,’ he said of his colleague. Slowly but surely, his hardline views shifted as he saw there was nothing to fear from people with differing sexuality to his own. That they were just ordinary men and women.
So much so that when his relative invited him recently to her same-sex wedding following a change in the law, he was happy to attend. So what would he do if he heard someone make a homophobic comment now? ‘I guess I would shrug it off at work, maybe mention it, maybe not – but if it was to my relative’s face I’d punch them,’ he replied. By the end of our conversation he confessed to having even been to a drag show, smiling as he told how his wife was so amused by the star flirting with him to his squirming discomfort.
Joe’s story in many ways underlines the march of gay and lesbian equality. It may have felt frustratingly slow for campaigners as they struggled against bile and bigotry. Yet in societal terms, change has come astonishingly quickly. I remember the hideous jokes made on this subject in my childhood playgrounds, the crass caricatures deemed acceptable on prime time television comedies, the tabloid newspaper coverage when an Aids epidemic exploded, the ban on ‘promotion’ of homosexuality as ‘a pretend family relationship’1.
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