Since I am being falsely accused of homophobia, I will try to explain where I'm coming from. I should have done that to begin with to prevent knee-jerk assumptions that I dislike gay people. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Prior to the 1980s, gay people were relegated to the closet, shamed by society for their sexual preferences. In that decade, gay people began trying to take charge of their own narrative and becoming open and public. Gay people began flocking to places like the bath houses on Castro Street in San Francisco and the French Quarter in New Orleans. Risky sexual behavior among gays increased. HIV and Aids were just being discovered in the gay communities and homosexual men began dying in droves. The medical community did not know what Aids was and there was no cure or treatment, only palliative care at end stages. In 1984, one of my best college friends from San Francisco visited me in New Orleans while on his final trip around the world before he died of Aids. He knew death was inevitable and came to say goodbye. He expressed regret for having lived a promiscuous lifestyle in SF where he thought he contracted Aids, with multiple partners every night. It was going to cost him his life.
During that era, as homosexuals became more open, some also became emboldened to show their gayness publicly, as a statement of defiance to society's repression. In New Orleans, where I lived, throngs of gay men began congregating in the Quarter. They partied hard, drinking and drugging, they stripped down to virtually no clothing or they wore sexually suggestive clothing to attract others, they hung out on the balconies that lined the streets in the quarters and shouted things at tourists and others who were passing down the streets. They blatantly did "bump and grind" movements against each other on those balconies and in the streets in full view of tourists and children. Some apparently enjoyed being exhibitionists. They wolf-whistled at passing men whom they thought attractive even though they did not know if the passersby were gay or straight. They aggressively flaunted their homosexuality for the first time in history just because they could. They had no respect for other people's sensibilities and boundaries. Their behavior was deliberate and intended to tell the world that they were gay and proud of it.
Their out-of-control public behavior alienated tourists and locals alike. I don't care what people's sexual preferences are, but I don't want their preferences shoved in my face where I have to look at them or listen to them, regardless of whether they are straight, gay or something else altogether. I don't want to watch a heterosexual couple pawing all over each other, either. Some things need to kept private, discrete and respectful of others.
The city of New Orleans began experiencing a backlash and bad publicity from people who were offended by what was going on in the Quarter. The city wanted those tourist dollars, they wanted to attract tourists and promote a more family-oriented atmosphere than existed, and therefore began cleaning up the Quarter by ticketing aggressive and nearly naked homosexual men for breach of peace and public indecency to discourage that kind of aggressive behavior. It worked, things settled down, tourists and locals stopped complaining so much about the public conduct of gays.
The Quarter has a large gay population today. It is valued by the city and brings in a lot of gay tourists. But no one bumps and grinds on each other half naked except during the annual gay pride parade which tourists and their children can avoid if they wish, or shouts sexual slurs at passersby because it is not tolerated anymore.
So, back to the OP's request for help here, about being harassed by homosexuals and in response to the few posters who flatly deny that such a thing could happen or insist that the OP did something to deserve the harassment, I responded with my experience with living in New Orleans and witnessing what was going on. You can call me, Suzanne, and other posters here who expressed comprehension and personal experiences with aggressive gay men liars and homophobes but it does not change what we have seen ourselves.
But I do know when engaging with people like that is a complete waste of time. I feel like the more outrageously rude and ignorant and inhumane the comment, (the types of things that make you think, "Did this troglodyte just crawl out from a swamp after a 500-year nap?") the more unreachable and unteachable that person is.
