Call me twisted but whenever I see out-and-out gays and lesbians, I see embodiments of courage. You see, these brethren of ours could just have hidden in the closet; but, no, they would rather suffer ostracism and bigotry for being who they really are rather than cower behind their zones of comfort and safety. They could just as easily have acted out a different persona, pass themselves off as what they are not (magkunwari) in order to be easily assimilated into our intolerant society and be just like everybody else. But then again, they chose to “walk proudly in the light than die a slow death”. That’s courage.

Courage in the face of existing dogma and paradigms is the link to our eventual progress and success as humans—quite a grandiose claim but I believe it is true.

Remember the many instances of courage in history and in our society without which we wouldn’t have propelled forward.

Galileo and Nicolaus Copernicus had courage. They espoused ideas at a time when the prevailing mindset would have considered their ideas crazy and heretic. Without them we would still have maintained our paradigm of celestial hegemony—that is, that we are at the center of the vast universe. What humbugs we could all have been! Without them, we would have limited our desire for discovery to—literally—the corners of our world. We would not have acknowledged that we are just a tiny speck of dust and that there is so much more to see, explore, and discover out there.

Fighting for your ideas not knowing if you are right, and despite colossal opposition—that’s courage.

Einstein, too, had courage. He shook the scientific community when he challenged the then-prevailing Newtonian physics as a way to explain the expanding universe. His idea of a time-space continuum, as opposed to Newton’s law of gravitation, is much better at explaining the celestial workings of the universe.

Columbus was also the epitome of courage. When everybody else believed that the world was flat and unimaginable monsters inhabited the oceans, he went out to circumnavigate the world and discovered the New World.

Rosa Parks had courage. At a time when Blacks were discriminated and treated as slaves, she didn’t give up her bus seat for a white man— asserting that everybody should be treated equally. For a Black, and a woman at that, that was courage personified! Without her and all the others that was inspired by her (e.g. Martin Luther King/MLK who organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott after Parks’ act of protest), we would all still be slaves (pun intended) to the idea that slavery is acceptable and that some groups of people are destined to be subservient to others.

So how are the above examples connected to my assertion that out-and-out gays and lesbians are courage personified?

The inference should not be missed. These gender-benders are examples of people who refused to be shackled by societal norms, expectations and conventions. So did Galileo, Copernicus, Einstein, Columbus, Parks, and MLK.

Okay, the comparison is a wee bit incredulous.

But we don’t really know the roots of lesbianism or homosexuality, so why would we be quick to judge and dismiss it as something that has to be curtailed just because it challenges society’s standard of normalcy?

Conversely, the presence of fear is what courage is not: fear of the unknown, fear of the “different”, fear of the unconventional, “fear” of people who may not necessarily be like you or me in terms of orientation, sexuality, beliefs, color, etc. This kind of fear breeds intolerance; intolerance breeds disrespect; disrespect breeds subjugation.

Courage is two sides of the same coin. Courage makes people assert their diversity. The other side of that same courage can also make us accept that diversity.

So next time you see gays and lesbians, have the courage (and tolerance) to accept such difference and diversity. Just like those courageous people in history who were originally seen as “different”, they might just lead us to positive surprises just around the corner in the byways of our development and progress as humans. You’ll never know.

Happy Pride month!

By: Terence Eyre B. Belangoy

             (The author has written for The Philippine Star from 2002-2006; has co-published a book titled “100 Essays: Voices of the Tamaraws” published by FEU Press; has won 2^nd prize in the national competition, Palanca Peace Essays, in 2006. This column Justified first ran in The Mindanao Observer from 2008-2012. Its first appearance in the DepEd Dipolog Newsletter was in the Vol. 10-2018 print issue.)