On Sunday, I wrote about my surprise in front of a gay couple, holding each other’s thighs, in the subway. That blog drew many reactions. Well, two reactions at least.

Sof: maybe […] they think, as I do, that keeping on hiding won’t help things get better.
And Daria: If those guys you’ve seen don’t live in the same world as you do, I wonder in which world you live?

I’m not a proponent of hiding from the straight people’s eyes. Or I wouldn’t post here, and on gayattitude, pictures of gay prides, and I wouldn’t have marched there several times (when I was young and I had people to go with—I’m not gonna get all prettied up and march all by myself, that’s against my nature). I just find it great that two guys would hold hands in the subway, I admire them. Ok, that’s too strong a word, but I praise them. What they do is great. But.

But the problem is, precisely, the world I live in. A world where, four or five years ago, as I was young, pure and innocent, I tried walking through Paris, hand in hand with my boyfriend. A world where I spent a couple hours meeting disapproving looks from a fair share of the people we walked by. A world that led me to promise myself I’d never use my couple again for militant purposes, because that’s not what it’s meant for. That’s precisely why I appreciate the courage they need, deep within them, to show off in the subway, absent-mindedly, in such a natural way. Because that’s what has struck me: they weren’t a couple of shaved-head militants with Act-up t-shirts, but just two forty-somethings just like any couple, except they were both male.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those two comments are from heterosexual women. Because most straight male are more embarrassed by this subject than women. And because gay readers probably understand what I’m writing about (or maybe they’ve left to laugh at me from a distance and they’ll never come back—either way, I header nothing from them, including those on my ICQ contact-list). And I don’t think the situation could have changed that much in just a couple of years. I’ve already had this discussion with Daria: it’s hard to realize what minorities go through, when you’re not faced to what they have to bear everyday.

I’ll have to remember that, next time I have an opinion on the evolution of racism or the other nice constructs of our society.