I saw an episode of a talk show in the 80s, - I think it was "Geraldo." The topic for the day was racism and Geraldo had invited a group of black professionals - mental health professionals, academics and so on. It was a great panel. At one point, the panelists were taking questions from the audience. One young white boy stood up and talked about his racism, and how it seemed to have been burned into his brain. He wanted to be free of it, but didn't know how. One of the panelists, respectfully and gently, said to him, "It's not your fault. You're a product of a racist system, you can't help but be racist." In that one interaction, the mechanisms of self-oppression became crystal-clear to me. We are products of a homophobic system - we can't help but be homophobic. Those awful things that gays used to say about each other? We were only saying what we'd been taught to say.