A few years ago, during my sophomore year of college, I was playing the video game “Halo 2,” with a group of white male mostly able friends. I don’t really know their sexuality, for they continuously “pushed” the lines of “male intimacy,” engaging in acts that, I believe, were to show how gay they weren’t.

These physical and sometimes verbal acts existed alongside a loud and violent homophobia and heterosexism, exhibited through degrading words and blatant policing of gender roles in every aspect of their lives, or at least the times I spent with them.

For example, we had a friend whose friend was an openly gay man. Because our friend spent time with this openly gay man, we openly questioned his heterosexuality. Sometimes he would walk in on this questioning; an atmosphere that visibly made him not only uncomfortable, but also more stringent on proving that he was, in fact, a heterosexual.

But back to my previous example that also scratches the surface of the toxic atmosphere we created. So we were playing Halo 2, (not to mention its violence and the militaristic/colonial/hyper-masculine/ableist messages given to the player), engaging in a multiplayer mini-game in which we tried to kill each other as often as possible. One of my friends shot me and in frustration I called him a, “f—-t.”

I’m not going to go into the possible internal struggles of the people in the room, those feeling stuffed painfully and deeply into ourselves to continue our pursuit of middle class masculinity.

Not to go into us, but more so to the previously mentioned openly gay man that was standing right next to me, his body slightly stiffening at my comment, his body leaving a few seconds later. And me, shoving down yet another slightly uncomfortable feeling and continuing on with my day.

Past the almost immediate urge to say, “I wasn’t talking about you,” or, “but I have so many gay friends,” or “it’s just a word,” lay the truth that in my actions and in that word, I was speaking about every LGBTQ person I’ve ever known or read about. I was speaking from my gut, in words that bypassed my internal filter, words that betrayed me, showing a fuller picture of me, of my hatred and fear of LGBTQ people.

It is a fear given to me by the constant message that to be heterosexual was to be normal and to be any other way was to not be normal; a message solidified by my own actions, my partaking in spreading these messages.

Over the past few years, different experiences and stories and bits of understanding have chipped away at that fear, allowing me to feel more deeply about the LGBTQ struggle, specifically because, while this system of policing and oppression affects LGBTQ people in a way that is unacceptable, a way I’ll never understand, my role in that oppressive system denies me a fuller acceptance and understanding of myself. I am less human, and therefore less able to relate to other human beings.

It is also inhuman to participate in oppressing others, in taking part of a system of thinking (and therefore doing) that ultimately leads to the death of thousands on an annual basis through housing, medical, legal, national, religious and other forms of discrimination alongside the constant subtle and overt bigotry assaulting the psyche, quite literally adding insult to injury.

I, like most other people, know that oppression is unacceptable to some extent. The struggle for me has been realizing and coping with the numbness I’ve developed when it comes to the struggle of non-dominant groups.

Yet this is complicated, because while being mostly heterosexual (I think), I am also a man, a black man, an able man, a lower middle to middle-class man. These are all different parts of me, the “me” lying not at the end of an equation with these identities being the numbers and me the “solution.” I am formed and reformed in the continual intersection of these identities, with each being informed by each: my masculinity informed by my class and sexuality and race, my class and race informed by my ability and class and sexuality, my sexuality informed by my race and gender and class and so on.

The only constant that I’ve seen so far is the meaning of my pain in relation to dominant identities. The hurts that I’ve received from masculinity, from being middle class, from being seen as heterosexual for the most part, from being seen as able, etc., are in no way comparable to the constant hurts experienced by those who have to more consciously deal with systems of oppression.

The pain white people experience under racism, having to conform to whiteness (an identity founded on absence, on genocide, on distortion), is terrible and unacceptable, but that pain is not the same as mine. When a white person walks through the world in which textbooks profess the savagery of those who are not white, in which statistics “prove” the criminality of black people, in which the wars we partake in are still described as the civilized vs. the uncivilized essentially, there is little dissonance due to race. They move through a world in which the mirror they see reflects who they think they are: full, complex, worthy human beings. The world isn’t like that for me. There’s a constant dissonance when I move.

The least I can do is to create that dissonance for heterosexual people. To create spaces in which difference is acknowledged and in that acknowledgement, systems set up to oppress are challenged in a fundamentally altering way, challenging also the systems in me.

Will Syldor is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].