How the west was won

Wisconsin was the first place that I encountered homophobic slurs in bathroom scrawl. I had encountered bathroom scrawl before, mostly in mens washrooms, but it was mostly of a more banal variety. I mean, some of it was sexist, most of it was idiotic, but it was rarely, if ever scary. At the med school in Davis, CA, I remember finding a note that said "I should have gone to Stanford instead," and after thinking about the long hours of thankless studying and demoralizing institutional culture, I sympathized with his feelings of learning later that an important choice was poorly met.

It's not what you're saying, it's what I'm hearing

One of the first times I was at the UW Milwaukee campus, a group of us were in the bathrooms in the Union, only to discover such uplifting commentary as "Die AIDS faggots". I was shocked. Somehow I just couldn't understand where the author was coming from. Was he a jilted lover, infected and left to suffer the consequences? Was he a right wing soapboxer? A closet case? Are we still trapped in the 1980's preconceptions of AIDS as a 'gay' disease? Does he somehow think a virus is going to morally differentiate between the virgin mary homo and the straight cum dumpster of tinsel town? What is he so afraid of, that he needs to share his opinions in this way?

Last week I had seen something in one of the stalls at work about somebody or other being a faggot. I didn't recognize the name, and it wasn't until today that I realized that all of the stalls in that bathroom were scrawled with "Nate Higgins is a faggot". And the more I sat and stared at the nondescript hand writing, the more I realized the less I knew. Who was this Nate? And did the author mean this literally, or was it some kind of slur against his masculinity? Is it fair to ask clarifying questions in this semipublic forum?

Ten minutes at the computer offered up the insight that this 'Nate' probably was not a co-worker or student in the building, but rather a hockey coach in the upper midwest college hockey circuit.

Which leads me to question of how to respond. Leaving it there seems to endorse the homophobia that it engenders. And yet removing it is censorship. After thinking about it for a while, I decided the best response was something that both calls this issue out into the open and obfuscates it by invoking other stereotypes of masculinity, colonialism and sexuality:

"Hey honey, there ain't nothing wrong with a little buttlove, it's how the west was won."