Too often we take for granted at what’s being presented to us in face value. The logic behind that intuition is easily explained in that we like looking at pretty things. A young wife would rather choose a vibrant, floral themed wall paper instead of the other choice of a dull, brown dark. A successful businessman loves to sport his newly purchased Jaguar rather than driving around in an uninteresting Spectra. Subconsciously, we have the tendency to engage in anything that has to do with the word “beautiful.” In fact, this phenomenon was studied with a group of babies where they were presented with a series of human faces and almost unanimously, the “beautiful” faces received much higher reactions to those that were judged otherwise. Psychologist Dr Alan Slater of University of Exeter concluded that, “this inbuilt notion of beauty persists with us throughout life: not only babies, but children, adolescents, and adults.” If this theory is true, then there is reason to believe that our gay community has fantastically magnified this basic human instinct to a whole new level. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Equality, a word that led generations of debates, movements, and wars, has been the single true foundation of what our gay community has been fighting for during the past half a century. The matter isn’t merely about rights, freedom, or embracement, but only the desire to be treated as equals as the rest of the lawful citizens of the world. But if one takes a more amplified look into our society, specifically in the dating scene, it’s shocking to observe the oxymoronic circumstances that are being displayed right in our very own backyard.
Our preferences limit our full enjoyment in life, and there’s nothing truer than when a guy asks another guy out on a date based on a detail out of his initial checklist: Race. A UC Irvine study confirms that, “Race is one of the main selection criteria for daters — which express racial preferences even more commonly than religious or educational preferences.” Surely one can see the cascading negative effects this has on our gay society given the fact that we are supposed to be the premier group to champion the essence of equality.
Let’s do a little experiment.
If you take a moment and close your eyes to observe your environment, you sense air. Air provides us one of the basic ingredients of life as we greedily inhale its presence in its pure grandeur. It has no color, taste, form, or shape. You are doing nothing special here but simply grasping a feel of what’s in front of you. Let’s take another moment to feel something else in front of you by using your hands, this time a person. With your eyes closed, you begin to feel his face. His skin is smooth on the cheek, but scruffy by the jaw line, yet warm to the touch. He has a very sturdy nose and strong thick lips. His ears are slightly inward, covered by his long soft hair. You don’t know what he looks like, but you grow fond of him simply because you made a connection with him through your hands. Studies have shown that touching communicates distinct emotions such as love, happiness, and intimacy*. This romantic power of touching creeps its way to your brain from the sensors of your finger tips, materializing in a vision of someone of whom you fantasize him to become. Alas, you open your eyes, and he is black. Or Asian. Or white. Or Latino. Or whichever race you have on your checklist of don’ts and you become disappointed. From there on, you close the door on yourself at endless possibilities of a future with this person. Within our eyes, love should be blind and unlimited. Within our eyes, we are but the same beings who bleed the same color of blood, cry the same salty tears, and yell the same loud screams in search for the ultimate truth.
But we like what we like. That’s the truth. Thus, we choose to see what we want to see, and we choose to be blind to those we wish not to see.
So, are we still babies? Maybe as a society, we have some growing up to do. Having said that, it’s not hard to see how it would take someone with a tremendous command of persuasion, a keen sense of understanding, and an infinite gauge of patience to change the way we are because baby, we were born this way.
*Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006
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