For the sake of gay people, let's all put an end to this nonsense about their abnormality

Sometimes, public health education becomes wearisome for the health professional. Because, as any person working on behavioral and attitude change will tell you, the information has to be repeated in novel ways until it becomes common knowledge.

As a mental health professional, I'd always thought that information that has been in the scientific mainstream for 40 years and relates to something as common as homosexuality would be common sense by now.

I refer of course to the scientific consensus that being lesbian or gay or bisexual is a normal human variation. For the sake of completion, I shall say that there is an emerging consensus that being transgender is also a normal human variation. But I will not discuss issues of transgender people here, having written on this already. Instead, I shall focus on lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

So this is the mental health information that people really need to understand: being gay is normal.

Some people are heterosexual and some are gay or lesbian or bisexual. Some people are short and some are tall. Some people are plump and some thin. In other words human beings vary in many ways both physically and psychologically. One of the ways they vary is to whom they are sexually attracted.

Therefore there is no such thing as "too gay."

Paint their hands back

I refer, of course, to the billboards of a local fashion company which show different loving duos: a grandmother and her grandson, a heterosexual couple, a lesbian couple and a gay couple. It seems someone (initially announced as members of the Ads Standards Council but later denied by them) thought that a billboard of two men, fully clothed and very subtly holding hands, was "too gay." The billboards had to be revised, defaced actually, because the hands were very badly painted over in black.

Originally posted here:
Love all kinds of love: Paint the science back