What is it concerned with who others love? – Diepresse.com

When I was fourteen, I didn’t like homosexuals. Not that I had ever had bad experiences with them: I didn’t know one. Nevertheless, they hunted me afraid: The only idea that a man could touch me in an immoral or even more than I want to trigger panic and feelings of disgust. How a girl « used », that is, to be exposed to passive sex, not only seemed painful and humiliating, but also shameful, I was in the middle of puberty and just creating a self -image as a strong, active man. The fact that I was only a small, weak guy that any fantasy wool could find attractive was still part of the standard repertoire of my fears. Of course, I would never have given thoughts of this kind openly, especially not to formulate against the same age … my classmates made jokes about gays, and I laughed. Homophobia was something « normal » at that time, it was legally and socially accepted like sexism and xenophobia, as long as one did not open to violence. No wonder that I didn’t meet any young people throughout my school days who would have outed himself as a gay.

However, if someone had asked me a few years later – at the age of sixteen or seventeen – if I were to restrict or even pursue homosexual people in any way, I would have denied it. I was no longer afraid of them. Why should it be a problem for me how other people shape their lives, who they love, with whom they live together, how they dress, or what removals they do occasionally? Apparently I had left certain aspects of puberty. I was jammed, compulsive, sometimes paranoid and couldn’t stand myself, a normal youth, so, but at least I knew who I was myself to see people who were different from me as a danger to their own self -image.

I can’t know when honesty stops and adjustment begins

Forty years later, I regularly conduct workshops for young people on the subject of extremism prevention and find out how much and yet how little has changed in the past decades. Sexism, racism, xenophobia can be found in young people as well as in my school days, only that these resentments are better reflected by some, hidden or simply not communicated to the outside world. Hardly any young person will positively evaluate a clearly racist picture or agree with an obviously women -hostile statement – at least not to an adult like me. I cannot know when honesty stops and adjustment begins, but can say with a clear conscience that at least in a country like Austria, a lot has changed for the positive.