In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with the George Washington Bridge.

You’d be surprised how often ‘str8 bros’ write in to tell us how ‘wrong’ we are in our assertions that this or that is homophobic, that we really shouldn’t be offended by something that’s ‘not that offensive,’ that we’re actually hurting the ‘gay community,’ or that our anger is ‘misplaced.’ More than once we’ve been told that we ‘need help.’

It kind of reminds us of 100 or so years ago when various people with whom our relations had soured encouraged us to go to therapy because we were ‘so angry.’ What they couldn’t have predicted was how this process — i.e., therapy — made us understand more clearly than ever how justified our anger was, given — and here’s the irony — the offensive actions of those who had encouraged us to go.

So listen up, str8 bros: if you’re going to make a prostate-exam joke for laffs, develop an ad campaign based on the negative connotations of a man’s face in another man’s crotch (or any other similar non-heterosexual innuendo), or whatever other bullshit joke you want to make at a fggt’s expense, be our guest.

Just don’t ‘get upset’ when we call it homophobic or more-stupid-than-funny, or tell us that we have to laugh at it, or ‘understand where you’re coming from.’ And when you have failed to convince us, please don’t write to tell us your life story and how gr8 you are because you ‘have gay friends,’ or that your prostate exam made you feel as if you had been ‘kicked rlly hard in the ballz’ or had ‘the wind knocked out of you.’ Finally, please don’t encourage us to write to Andrew Sullivan to ‘see what he thinks,’ as if he were the god of all things geigh.

A question to our str8 lady friends: how do you put up with obnoxious bros who try to ‘tell you how to feel’ after they’ve insulted you?

Because mostly we want to direct these bros to the George Washington Bridge, where they can jump off and never be missed.