So anyway, the other day, I was driving to work and listening to Madge Weinstein on Yeast Radio and she played a clip from another amazing podcaster (and super HOT HOT guy), Ragan Fox performing a poem he wrote titled Heterophobia.

I have enclosed the complete text of the poem, but rather than read it, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, listen to it performed by Ragan. It’s far more powerful than the words written down. It gave me chills and goosebumps up and down my arms. I cried a little as I thought back to the tragedy that is and forever will haunt me as a gay man, Matthew Sheppard. Read on… and LISTEN…

Heterophobia

Each year, my 80 year old PoPs
ponders why I’ve “chosen” to be gay.

He asks, “Have you ever slept with a woman?”
I say, “No.”
Then, as if he’s figured out the great conundrum of the century
he exclaims, “Then how can you really know?”

To which I reply, “Dad, have you ever slept with a guy?”

Oh, this little game we play is never stopping brother topping, under the rug mopping, hetero-cropping, biscuit sopping HOURS
ripped and ribbed for my pleasure
and it would be too easy to ask all of you to consider the discourse of homophobia;
instead, I implore you all to gallantly gallop into a world of heterophobia.

In this world, your gay roommate asks you to “butch it down,”
Monday Night Football is replaced with Friday Night Live Theater,
and after people find out you fornicate with members of the opposite sex
they say things like, “No no nonononono! I’m cool with it!
I have a straight uncle!
What’s it like being straight?
Is it like being gay, just different?”

Imagine straight is a term so derogatory
gay people call each other “straight”
and mean it as the lowest of insults,
the bottom of the barrel,
the harshest of blows.

Imagine waking up one day and innocently turning on the T.V.
and hearing the news of a 5’5” 18 year old straight boy in Laramie, Wyoming
who was tied
no, not tied
CRUCIFIED to a fence
and pistol whipped, whacked and cracked so severely
his skull was nearly turned into fine powder
and the last words he heard were,
“You fucking straight piece of shit! You are nothing!”

Thru this lens, doesn’t the “choice” to be straight
sound so ex/o/tic

But as it stands Matthew Shepard was gay
and the last words he heard were, “You fucking faggot.”
just as I heard each day walking thru the halls of high school
and it’s not straight people’s parents asking them year in and year out
why they’re straight;
it’s my dad asking me, “If you’ve never been with a woman, how can you know?”

I know;
this much I know