I was never online yesterday, so I imagine this thread is basically dead. However, in one forum I belonged to and was a moderator in, the biggest offender of cracking gay jokes was a gay man. Some folks in the forum knew he was gay. Others did not. My read on it: The fact that he routinely cracked such jokes there was really about him feeling accepted by those folks in the forum who did know of his sexual orientation. But the fact that he wasn't openly gay to the entire forum caused problems. I got an email once from a gay member of the forum who had searched on this other member's name and found he had a long history of cracking gay jokes. He was all offended and promptly jumped to the conclusion this guy was a homophobe. I was in an awkward position as I could not mention that the guy was gay since that was not generally known. And, apparently, this was not the first incident like that. The guy later "came out of the closet" and began posting as an openly gay member, so that probably stopped that problem.
My point: I tend to get in trouble over stuff like that in part because I'm not a homophobe and not judgmental, so it tends to not occur to me to that cracking such a joke would be (perceived as) a hostile act. And I think the underlying hostility behind so many "jokes" is why people are sensitive to things like that. But I will make a mental note that this forum is apparently not where it initially appeared to me in that regard and tread more lightly.
Thank you for the feedback. As an aside, I don't understand why requests for such feedback get downvoted in this forum. Punishing someone for doing something, then punishing them for asking "What did I do wrong?" and not explaining is an extremely poor de facto policy for helping people behave better and tends to have a chilling effect on conversation.
