“Let’s make some money!”
One of my business partners called me on Monday. He sounded excited.
“Hey man,” he said, “have I ever told you about the time I sold coconuts at a festival in Australia?”
My business partner has traveled all over the world, and he has had some whimsical experiences that he shares from time to time. I thought that this was just going to be another one of those stories.
When he was in Australia, someone offered to give him free tickets to a New Years festival in exchange for his help at a vendor’s stand. They placed him with some strangers who were cracking the tops off of coconuts, selling the water, and then turning it into a dessert if you brought it back to them.
He had a blast, due in large part to the incredible amount of money they made that weekend.
“Dude,” he continued over the phone, “the KC Pride Fest is this weekend, and I want to sell coconuts. You in?”
Of course I was in.
He drove down from Kansas City to Houston to get coconuts.
There literally weren’t enough coconuts in Kansas City for us. We paid the vendor fee, pieced together a booth, rented a 24-foot refrigerator truck, and opened up shop.
Friday was slow, but the next two days weren’t.
My business partner, a sneaker-entrepreneur friend, and I hustled our butts off until midnight to sell these things. And we had a blast doing it.
Although I conceptually supported the positive stance against discrimination, uneasiness, and violence against my lovely LGBTQIA friends, I had never been to a celebration designed specifically for my LGBTQIA friends. This was definitely a first.
And I was very, very excited.
A quick disclaimer before diving in.
I’ve never written about this topic, and I’ve hardly talked about it in depth. So please forgive me for any slip-ups in language. I guess you can classify me as one of the many cisgendered, heterosexual men who’s trying his best to understand and support their LGBTQIA friends, all while not really having a clue as to how to talk about it!
That’s one reason why I wanted to write this piece: to show that I’m trying.
Ok, moving on.
I expected to make money, but I didn’t expect to re-learn some life lessons that weekend.
I knew it’d be fun. I knew I’d meet some crazy people in flamboyant outfits. I knew we’d make money.
But I wasn’t fully prepared to walk away from the weekend with a fuller perspective on the LGBTQIA community and the people in it.
1. I was a guest in someone else’s house.
When I would go to a friend’s house as a kid for a sleep over, my stomach would turn into a knot as I approached their front door. On the way to the front door, I didn’t dare to step on their lawn. My dad would’ve killed me.
I was so scared to go to a friend’s house for the first time because I didn’t know how to respect their house, no matter how many times their mom told me to “make yourself at home.”
Was I supposed to take my shoes off at the front door? Which rooms could I absolutely not enter? What was I supposed to do with my plate after I was finished eating?
Those customs seem like such small things to worry about, but those were the things I worried about.
And that’s what KC PrideFest felt like. Appropriately so, by the way.
It made me wonder:Â Is this what it feels like to be LGBTQIA in everyday life?
Constantly having to navigate the norms and customs of a predominantly straight culture?
If so, then I want to do my very best to actually make my friends truly “make themselves at home.”
2. Gay people can be assholes too (and that’s not a bad thing).
Very early on in the festival we had a lesbian couple who had never tried coconut water.
They were excited to try some, though. So they ordered two.
A few minutes later, they came back to demand their $14 back. They were adamant. When we asked them why they were returning their drinks, they got kind of nasty with us. At the end of the day, they didn’t like the way it tasted. That was the only thing.
Anyone who has ever worked in the food industry has had an experience like this.
It’s one thing to return a food product if it’s rotten, not cooked to order, or if the package was opened before you bought it. But it’s another thing entirely if you want a refund because you simply don’t like the taste of something.
Regardless, we returned their money.
My business partner and I turned to each other after the couple walked away, and we just laughed. It was nice to know that anyone could be rude.
I know this seems like such a simple thing to understand, but try to understand where I’m coming from.
It’s very easy to paint groups of people with broad strokes. That’s default for humans, and we have to rely on our brains and our experiences to add fine lines to the broad strokes. Naively, one of my “broad strokes” of gay people was that they were all bubbly and nice all the time because my gay friends are bubbly and nice pretty much all the time.
That thought put me on edge, in a way.
It was nice to know that people are people, regardless of who they prefer to have sex with. Pretty simple, right?
3. Very good friends and very good people will still give you hell for loving up on your LGBTQIA friends and family.
I didn’t tell any of my friends and family that we were going to sell coconuts at PrideFest, but not because I was ashamed. I just rarely tell anyone about my business moves until I’ve made them. So nothing new with that approach.
But the response from my friends and family afterwards was slightly different.
My lovely trans cousin and her wife were really excited that I did. My mother asked (again) if I’m gay, because she just wants to know if her grandkids will be blood or come from somewhere else. Then she playfully hit me–like asian moms tend to do to their sons–because I didn’t bring her any coconuts. That was justified. I should have brought mom some coconuts.
And a couple friends made fun of me, which was expected but hard to actually accept.
I’ve got thick skin and can take a joke, especially good Asian jokes. I don’t need safe spaces and all that. But their jokes still didn’t sit right with me, and I think I just figured out why: because their “jokes” weren’t really jokes. Their “jokes” were actually their way of masking their real thoughts.
This “homophobia lite” is pretty common, I think.
It’s not the blatant “gay people are going to hell” type of homophobia. And it’s not even the more subversive “don’t share our bathroom” type of homophobia.
Homophobia lite is the “I support gay marriage but kinda really hope my kid isn’t gay” type of thing. Or the “sure, be gay and stuff but I’ll still point it out to my friends when you’re kissing in public” type of thing.
Or, for example, the “you sold coconuts at a gay festival, that’s cool and all but I bet you saw weird stuff” type of thing.
That’s homophobia lite. And it’s dangerous, because it’s toughest to fight what you can’t see.
But when you see it, call it out.
4. Being LGBTQIA can–and should–become a non-issue.
I had no problem selling coconuts at a Pride festival. I didn’t think about the fact that it was Pride before the event, and I barely thought about it during the event either.
The absolute truth of the matter was that I rarely knew if I was serving a gay person.
And it wouldn’t have mattered.
Actually, it didn’t matter.
It was a non-issue.
5. Until it’s a non-issue, it needs to remain a huge issue.
Here’s something that we know is true: it’s still dangerous to be gay.
There’s still a ton of inequality when it comes to gay rights. There’s still a long way to go, and I’m just talking about here in the US.
It’s one of those things that can be challenging for a straight, privileged dude like me to approach. In many ways, this issue is similar to other social inequalities, such as women in the workplace and relationships among people of different races and ethnicities.
I operate in such a way that those things that others discriminate against are things I just don’t consider, until I notice the inequality happening.
A very smart professional woman helped me understand what she needed in the workplace when it came to gender inequality: “Don’t treat me any different than a man, until you see others treating me differently than a man.”
I think that can apply to so many situations, including the fight for my LGBTQIA friends.
Until it’s totally a non-issue to be any of those things, it’s a huge issue.
And you’ve got my support.
In the meantime, coconuts anyone?
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Photo: Flickr/Esther Vargas
