Your LGBTQ ‘Tolerance’ Isn’t a Gift or Favor to Me

If you’re going to condescend over a biological reality, then just pretend I’m not here

Back in my freshman year of high school, I had an awesome social studies teacher named Mr. Boerger. In our World History class we were discussing the horrors of the Holocaust…and he asked what the word “tolerance” meant to us.

I raised my hand. When Mr. Boerger called on me, I said “tolerance” is more of a begrudging obligation than accepting someone for who they are. To tolerate someone, I specified, was to say, “Oh, I guess I’m just going to ‘put up with’ you because I have to!”

Mr. Boerger nodded, acknowledging my description of tolerance. He further elaborated for us:

“There’s a big difference between ‘tolerance’ and ‘acceptance’…and we can talk more about that difference, too.”

You can tolerate something without accepting it, but you cannot accept something without tolerating it.

This was 1997. The so-called Defense of Marriage Act had just passed Congress, which would make same-sex marriage in the United State taboo for another nineteen years. Now, obviously, in class we weren’t talking about gay marriage. As far as this classroom discussion went, Mr. Boerger was linking the concept of “tolerance” (as an alternative) to Hitler’s genocide of the Jewish people and members of other non-Aryan groups.

Of course, homosexual Europeans were also targets of the Nazis. But, back then, scads of local parents might have made angry phone calls to Mr. Boerger if he’d spent instructional time discussing LGBT+ people persecuted in Nazi concentration camps.

In fact, some parents today would still have that bugaboo.

What does tolerance mean?

Dr. Jefferson Fish PhD defines it as “a virtue” and “a pragmatic formula” that embodies The Golden Rule. By contrast, he characterizes acceptance as transcending tolerance. He frames it like this:

If a sign of tolerance is a feeling of “I can live with X (behavior, religion, race, culture, etc.),” then acceptance moves beyond that in the direction of “X is OK.” You can tolerate something without accepting it, but you cannot accept something without tolerating it. For example, when a son or daughter tells a parent about an unwelcome career choice, marital partner, or sexual identity, he or she wants that information not just to be tolerated, but to be accepted.

While Dr. Fish makes a valid distinction about how acceptance is generally preferable to tolerance, I feel that he downplays the trauma so-called tolerance may cause in our lives. If someone were truly practicing The Golden Rule, they would recognize another person for being true to themselves. They would treat that person with kindness and solidarity rather than condescension or annoyance.

Dr. Fish additionally specifies how the concept of understanding can even transcend acceptance, in that understanding someone or something helps the learner attach an accurate context to the subject matter.

If someone tells me they are “putting up with” my homosexuality, they are still essentially telling me I am “less than” something else (in this case, “less than” heterosexuality). And, if that’s their belief, then that’s their belief. But it’s completely unnecessary for them to pummel me with it. If they choose to use it as a cudgel against me, then they are showing me their true colors.

Toxic colors.

Back in late-1999, I began running a male empowerment website called “Dude Power!” It was based on embracing what I refer to as “nutric masculinity” (the antithesis of toxic masculinity). Part of that is accepting LGBT+ people as authentic and worthy of respect — even if one doesn’t understand (with empathy) that person’s sexual orientation itself.

One visitor to my site sent me an email praising me for the work I was doing to raise healthy male consciousness. But he took exception to my pro-LGBT stance, challenging me by asking how I could so easily rule out the notion that my “lifestyle choice” (his words) might be elective or subconscious.

Referring to a queer person’s “lifestyle choice” is one of the most offensive things you can say to a member of the LGBT+ community. Especially when you say it with such glib indifference.

We went back-and-forth for a bit, and he dug in his heels. He characterized himself as “an old-fashioned liberal.” He also used science as a hypothetical defense for his purported “tolerance” toward me — claiming that homosexuality hadn’t yet been scientifically proven as inborn or naturally occurring.

He may have felt he was acting “tolerant” toward me in that he was behaving in a well-spoken and civil manner. But his politeness masked an underlying specter of bigotry that haunts most of us within the LGBT+ community from our youth until our deaths.

Fans of the U.S. reality show Big Brother may remember Nicole Nilson Schaffrich — the runner-up of Season 2. I distinctly recall a time when Nicole had worked hard on preparing a delicious dinner for her housemates. (She was a professional chef.) The juvenile “Chilltown” alliance used that nice meal as an excuse to covertly mock and snicker at houseguests from outside their alliance.

Nicole expressed how she’d prefer seeing them say “Fuck you!” and throw the meal in her face — rather than pretending to be cordial while guffawing behind her back.

I related to Nicole quite often during that season. The way she felt about Chilltown’s behavior was the same way I felt about that “old-fashioned liberal” guy who’d corresponded with me after visiting my “Dude Power!” website.

Tolerance can be demoralizing

In a Huffington Post piece, Brynn Tannehill shines a light on how so-called tolerance can actually be quite demoralizing. As she frames it:

Living someplace that is merely tolerant without acceptance is like an existence within a sensory deprivation chamber. It won’t directly kill you, but it exacts a toll. Living in a tolerant but not accepting workplace means walking on eggshells, talking around your history, and being surrounded by people who keep conversations and relationships strictly professional. No one has a mean word to say, but then again, no one has a word to say. A nod in the hall as you glide by is the level of interaction you have come to expect. You eat alone, and no one bothers you while you do.

Proponents of tolerance often regurgitate the cliché of agreeing-to-disagree. They pride themselves on being “peacemakers.” They think they are creating a neutral bridge as a way of “meeting people where they are.”

I don’t have a problem meeting people where they are. But, once I’ve met them, I prefer to invite them onto my yacht.

Me being sexually-attracted to other men isn’t equivalent to me scratching up somebody’s car with a pair of keys.

Our freshman World History class never did delve into the distinction between tolerance and acceptance with great depth. But I suspect Mr. Boerger, as an educator and as a human being, would be a staunch straight ally to our LGBT+ community.

If we devalue tolerance, what’s the alternative?

Short of war and annihilation, there are very few opportunities remaining. Tolerance is actually overrated, as it’s merely window dressing, a way for avoidant people to convince themselves they’ve somehow reached a magnanimous resolution.

Institutional separatism isn’t a viable option. Subtle attempts at indoctrination rarely work, either. And outright subjugation is just begging for bad trouble.

So let’s start with the premise that there are people who insist on believing homosexuality is immoral. No matter what anybody says or does, they’re never going to alter that “sincerely-held” (ha!) belief of theirs.

Fair enough. But then…where do we go from there?

How about we start with a few basic treaty articles:

• Don’t legislatively or judicially take away my secular right to marry someone of the same sex. This is nonnegotiable.
• If you express your disapproval of my sexual orientation in public, please know that I’m not going to back down. Ever. I can’t force you to think certain beliefs, but I’m also not going to be a shrinking violet when asserting my right to be here as a healthy contributor to society…same-sex lover and all!
• You are not going to use my tax dollars to push your idealized oasis of a heteronormative nuclear family. You have your church or house-of-worship. You have private foundations and faith-based charitable organizations available to you. You can homeschool your kids or send them to a private, charter, or parochial school. But you don’t get to make that decision for everybody else.

If you can’t deal with those very basic realities…then maybe you’re simply not fit to interact with the rest of society? Perhaps you should go live on a remote island — where you can form a self-contained society full of people who wear chastity belts, dig bunkers to vainly wait out the apocalypse, and chat long-distance with Sarah Palin using a homemade coconut phone that you’d carved from that biblically-sharpened machete?

Or how about this…

Just stay the fuck away from me! I won’t go near your kids; but you’re setting them up for failure by training them to view any romance or passion other than opposite-sex attraction as “abnormal.” You are teaching them malevolent “values” antithetical to the notion that a sense of community involves listening to one another and respecting your neighbor’s sovereignty.

Wait…WHY am I even talking with you, if you’re going to be so willfully ignorant as to disbelieve the premise that I know myself sexually? If you’re hell-bent on dictating when, where, and how often I get to experience domestic bliss…then doesn’t that really just make you a little bit of a dictatorial psychopath?

Stay the fuck away from me.