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This professor tried to show how annoying the questions you ask gay people are

Picture:
Picture:
Twitter / @sincerelyelise

Today marks 50 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales.

On 27 July 1967 the Sexual Offences Act was changed and legalised sex in private between two men.

Despite this being a huge milestone for the LGBT community we still have an enormous way to go when it comes to true equality.

Trans rights are under threat in the US following Donald Trump's decision to bar them from the US military, while here in the UK more than four in 10 Britons still believe gay sex is "unnatural" - According to new polling from YouGov.

So it's no surprise that people are doing whatever they can to create safe spaces for the LGBTQI community.

One such college professor is doing just that, by expertly schooling her students on stereotypes.

The professor teaches a human sexuality course, and was lecturing on early sexual orientation.

She wanted to address the misconceptions held about gay and bisexual people, and the infuriating questions LGBTQ people often face about their sexuality.

So she put up a slide that turned those questions onto the straight students, taken from Martin Rochlin's 1972 'Heterosexual Questionnaire'.

College junior Elise posted this picture on Twitter in February:

  • What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
  • When did you decide you were a heterosexual? 
  • Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase that you may grow out of?
  • Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality? Why can’t you just be what you are and keep quiet about it? 
  • Why do you heterosexuals feel compelled to seduce others into your lifestyle? 
  • Have you considered therapy to change your heterosexual tendencies?

Elise, 20, told BuzzFeed News that the slide was intended "to show how hard these questions are to answer".

The slide is supposed to be funny, but she made us really think about why it was so funny.

A lot of people in the class had probably never been asked these questions before, so I think she was trying to show them what it would be like, but in a humorous way.

The picture quickly went viral back in February, with more than 19,000 retweets and 31,000 likes.

Predictably, not everybody responded quite so well.

And most bizarrely...

Elise said that she had also received insults, comments about getting the professor fired, and even death threats.

"I think that a lot of straight people feel victimised by these questions," she said:

I don’t think that’s the purpose of the questions at all.

But I do think it’s silly that someone would be offended by these questions to straight people but not appalled at the way the LGBTQ community is treated.

I know things are getting better, but seeing how people responded to this tweet has really showed me that we have a while to go.

HT BuzzFeed

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