The Reality of a Kiss, I support Gays but Don’t want to see them kiss?

May 21, 2014

The Reality of a Kiss, I support Gays but Don’t want to see them kiss?

“I kiss a boy and I liked it” To understand the headline above you need to just think about someone saying blacks have the same equal rights as everyone else I just don’t want to see them kiss a white women. Peculiar questions of touchy issues within an issue clarify for us how far and deep people’s commitment are and how much they understand the issue. If a gay man can marry, but it can’t publicly kiss like straights do, then you either don’t understand the issue or your just not the sharpest tool on the shed. When people are entitled to freedom it entails all freedoms within the law and one needs to get use to seeing that and the best way to desensitized one’s being is to see everything we find objectionable and see lots of it.

Adam Gonzalez, Publisher

My partner and I are coming up on year four of our relationship, and I am closer to him than I ever thought I could be to another person. Yet, I can probably count on my fingers how many times we’ve kissed in public. I’d need to involve my toes to guess the number of times we’ve held hands on the street, but if we were scraping the twenty mark I’d be surprised.

To be fair, neither of us is overly fond of public displays of affection and regardless of mood, we’d never be caught vacuuming each other’s faces in public. Yet sometimes, when we’re out with friends and enjoying a wonderful night, I look at him and I, well, I start doing math. The calculations are exacting. What location are we in? Is this a gay-friendly area? What is the crowd like? How brightly is the room/street lit? The sums are different depending on the setting and, sometimes, just how confident we are feeling. There are bold nights when love makes you invincible, and there are cold nights when fear makes you small.

These are calculations our straight friends never have to make. If they want to kiss, they kiss. If they want to touch, they touch.

Speaking of math: a new poll by YouGov together with the Huffington Post shows that a plurality of Americans support there being openly gay athletes in their favorite major league sports teams (60% approve or strongly approve). All good so far. Then the questions turn to the recent signing of Michael Sam by the St Louis Rams and that now iconic kiss. Did America approve of seeing it? I’m afraid not:

Michael Sam and his boyfriend kissed after finding out he was drafted. Do you think it was appropriate or inappropriate for networks broadcasting the draft to show this kiss?
Appropriate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36%
Inappropriate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47%
Not sure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17%

The breakdown is interesting. A majority of self-identifying Democrats approved (53% to 32%), but independents (45%-36%) and Republicans (69%-16%) said showing the kiss was inappropriate. If America is really becoming more gay friendly, and most polls would suggest there’s a sharp upward trend even among Republicans, what is going on here?

First, a note about the question because I think the terminology is important. The question actually puts the emphasis on whether the networks should have broadcast the kiss, not whether the kiss itself was appropriate or inappropriate. We could be charitable and say that some people felt this should have been a private moment, and that is why they answered in the negative or weren’t sure.

That said, we can’t deny that the question does give ample cover so respondents can say whether they’re comfortable with a same-sex kiss or not. Many of the comments from more moderate voices opposed to the kiss have been uniformly, in fact infuriatingly, passive aggressive. “It’s just not appropriate for any sports star to do that,” or “No matter their sexual preference, a kiss like that shouldn’t be on TV,” and my personal favorite “Sports teams should be sexual orientation neutral.” Best have a word with the heterosexual sports stars too, then.

When in the past sports stars have kissed their girlfriends or wives on television and the networks have let that filter into American homes, the reaction has been, well, no reaction at all. In fact, hugging cheerleaders and kissing reporters who happen to be wives or girlfriends appears to provoke celebration and, curiously, even praise.

Again, there was no calculation made about those kisses. No forethought on whether a kiss might earn condemnation or even threaten their physical safety. That’s the heterosexual privilege. So, what those voices are really saying when they condemn the Michael Sam kiss, is that Michael Sam should have done the math. He should have known better. An unadulterated moment of pure joy, and sharing that joy with someone he presumably loves: all fine, but do it behind closed doors because we don’t want to see it.

When we test it like this, that weight, that terrible under the thumb pressure, the anti-gay feeling begins to make itself visible. This is the difference between tolerance and acceptance. In fact, this is the difference between being tolerated and being free.

Sharing a kiss in public without feeling forced to first add up the risk is something that we’ve sadly still not wholly achieved, and the hand-wringing over Michael Sam’s kiss (which by most standards was fairly chaste) is a sad reminder of that fact.