Suppose You Were Left-Handed

What is this about “choosing to be heterosexual or homosexual”? – Think instead of being right handed or left-handed. But, being left handed, always acting right-handed - as awkward and as uncomfortable as that might be at times. Maintained always in public and often, by so much repetition and practice, in private as well. What if being left-handed drew attention, derision, ridicule, exclusion, taunting, rejection, inequality - and unequal access to civil rights and privileges? What if you spent your life acting right handed such that even your best friends or your family or your coworkers would never suspect? Perhaps you’d even flaunt your practiced right-handed penmanship to bolster you right-handed subterfuge? What if you cried at night from the effort and energy and pain of the constant lying – such that you become confused as to who you are or what you had done to be born this way?

Suppose it meant that you were exclusively attracted to left handed people – OK, once in a while to a really hot right-handed person or someone who was ambidextrous – but if you saw a right-handed person walking down the street with a left handed person – you would find yourself focused in on the left-handed person.

Because society taught you that left-handedness was evil, sinful, immoral, corrupt, such that one of the worst epithets one could call another was, “hey you lefty’”. “Yeah, lefty, why don’t you go off and pee with your left hand, pervert”.

And if lefties would somehow be quicker to sense the subtle uncomfortableness and awkwardness of the masquerade, and through glances and innuendo acknowledge each other one to the other.

Or they could in some places meet late in the night at desolate and out of the way venues where few rightees, or at least few rightwing rightees, might be encountered. And there they would meet all the lefties – toasting to each other, glasses held high by proud left hands.

But then, being left-handed is so different from being homosexual.
Or is it?

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