George M. Anderson Doyle

…letely normalized, the sooner homophobic prohibitions against touch will be taken off straight men. As much as gay men have faced the brunt of homophobic violence, straight men have been banished to a desert of physical isolation by these same homophobic fanatics who police lesbians and gays in our society. The result has been a generation of American men who do not hug each other, do not hold hands and can not sit close together without the homophobic litmus test kicking in.

These arguments are fundamentally illegitimate, and unlike most other political arguments, they do not have a counterspeech remedy: trying to speak up against them helps them. This happens for a few reasons.