Hello and welcome to the first episode of 2026 and our 34th overall. I have been struggling a bit on what this first episode of the year should be and waffling among a few different topics until something happened last week that crystalized things for me. What I’m about to relate is an event that I experienced. I’m not going to include any names, but the contents of the emails will be verbatim except for redacting any names and personal email addresses.

You may be wondering why you are seeing pictures of space next to me. Amateur astronomy is a hobby of mine, really more of a passion. While astronomy as a broad subject is interesting, much of my attention gets focused on astrophotography. For the last seven years, it’s been a big part of my life. During that time my skills have improved and I’ve become pretty good at it. A big part of that is because a friend, let’s call him A, made equipment available to me that I’d never own on my own. Over the last five years, he’s become a good friend and if there is ever anything I can do for him, I’m happy to.

A few weeks ago, he asked if I would be willing to to help someone he knew test out a remote telescope setup. I didn’t know this person whom we’ll call B but I was happy to help. I then forgot about it because life has been very busy and the world has been exceptionally crazy.

Then, last week, A wrote to connect me with B and asked about my availability. At this point, I vaguely remembered the conversation but not the details so this was my response:

I should be available next week except for Monday during the day and Tuesday at night. I’m a little vague on what we’re planning to look at. I recall A asking me if I could help but my poor brain cell has lost what it was supposed to help with. Between crazy weather, trying to catch up on processing and general craziness in the world right now, I’ve totally lost the details so my apologies. I’m happy to help but I need a reminder on exactly what :)

Linda

—————————–

Linda Thomas-Fowler

she / her

[personal email redacted]

spectrumpodcasthost@gmail.com

A wrote back with a reminder about the topic and then I responded from my iPad with this:

That rings a bell. Thanks!

typos courtesy of iPad

You can see two things here. One is that the signatures on email I send from my computer and iPad are different. The one from the computer contains links to the two websites I maintain, one on astronomy and one for The Spectrum podcast along with contact info while the iPad signature is just a one line bit of text poking fun at autocorrect.

The next morning I was surprised to see this in my email:

Dear Linda,

Thank you very much for your email and for your generous offer to donate your time and expertise to test my remote telescope. I truly appreciate your willingness to help a fellow enthusiast in the astronomy community.

After some reflection, I have decided to decline your offer and will not be moving forward with the testing at this time.

I want to be transparent with you regarding my decision. While I was already aware of our differing political views and your personal background, I was initially very eager to work with you based on your technical skills. However, I found the inclusion of political links and gender pronouns in your professional signature to be unexpected and, in my view, out of place for a technical collaboration between strangers.

Because I strive to interact with others in a way that is both polite and focused on our shared interests, I feel it is best to avoid a situation where our vastly different worldviews might distract from the task at hand or lead to unnecessary friction.

I wish you the very best in your celestial pursuits and thank you again for the kindness you showed in offering to help.

Sincerely,

B

This was the first homophobia directed personally at me in I don’t know how long. I have to admit, it got me pretty angry. My first impulse was to send a simple, “Your loss” as a response but as I thought about it, I realized I needed to say more. B’s homophobia might be dressed up in polite language but it’s still homophobia and it needed a real response, equally polite.

B may be the first person to even read my email signature. Most people’s eyes, including mine, glide over email signatures without ever actually reading them. Second, I don’t believe that he was eager to work with me. I think he was gritting his teeth knowing he was accepting help from a lesbian and was only willing to do it because he needed help. I think my email signature gave him the excuse he could use to back out and act like he was the injured party.

Here was my response:

B,

My signature is not “professional”. It is my personal email and I include links to the things that I work on. The Spectrum podcast is not political in nature though it does touch on political topics.  I do not apologize for including pronouns. It is simply polite to let people know who they are dealing with. After all, people come from different cultures and languages and not everyone recognizes the gender of a person from a name. Providing that is simply a way to let people know who they are communicating with. 

Obviously, I don’t know you and knew nothing of your own views. A reached out to me to ask if I would help and I said yes. There was nothing political or, gasp, gendered in that. If the fact that I apparently have political views that differ from your own makes me too toxic to accept help from, well, that seems like a pretty narrow world view to me, but, it’s your world and you get it live in it. But, it seems a sad, narrow world when one can’t even engage with people that hold differing views. I actually enjoy interacting with people who hold differing views from my own. It is through such interactions that growth occurs. I’m sorry we won’t have the opportunity.

In closing, it is extremely unlikely that anything other than astronomy would have taken place  in our interaction. But, if the mere knowledge that you were accepting help from a woman who is married to a woman is too challenging for you then I guess it is for the best. I wouldn’t want to be the cause for your mental distress.

I’ve looped A back in so he is aware this won’t be happening.

Regards,

Linda

she/her

typos courtesy of iPad

I was aiming for politely harsh. One person who I showed it to described it as masterfully passive-aggressive. I think it was a complement. It probably is fairly passive-aggressive but that’s kind of the nature of being harsh and polite at the same time. 

You might be thinking that this isn’t homophobia, it’s political. He’s hyper-conservative and doesn’t want to engage with anyone even remotely progressive in their views. But, though he called it political, it isn’t the root cause. LGBTQ rights are only political because hyper conservative voices keep opposing them. He’s upset with the fact that he had to even see something LGBTQ related (though granted he had to actively follow a link to do that). To me, that’s not political difference, it’s homophobia. Could I be wrong? Sure, but I don’t think I am.

My point in sharing this isn’t to point fingers at B specifically. It’s to point out that being polite about homophobia doesn’t make it any less bad. This guy is so hung up that he won’t even accept help from someone who had no agenda other than to offer help when asked by a friend. Is this the face of so-called conservatism today? To pretend that LGBTQ people don’t exist by not interacting with them? Certainly, the people running the federal government are trying to make transgender people officially invisible. Maybe B is just applying this more generally.

In many ways, B is like the baker who won’t sell a wedding cake to a gay couple but B takes it further and won’t even interact.

My friend A and I talked about this after the fact. I wanted to reassure him that B’s actions did not reflect on him or affect our friendship. A didn’t do anything wrong (except perhaps underestimate how messed up B was). B’s actions are on him alone and all he did was postpone getting any help he needed.

I will admit that even though B’s actions really didn’t hurt me, talking about this brings the anger it made me feel to the surface. But, the truth is, my email just gave him the excuse he wanted to avoid the interaction. It’s clear that A mentioned that I was married to a woman to him knowing B’s background. I’m sure A told him I wasn’t going to show up having donned my “gay apparel”. I’m sure A told him I was pretty good at problem solving and had created an automated system to run a remote telescope and was willing to share that work and help someone get it running.

Ultimately, it was more important for B to avoid any challenges to his world view. That’s what is really sad about this. One of my sister’s is the same way. She’s always polite but refuses to ever truly engage with me. Maybe that’s why B’s action set me off so strongly. I suspect they both subconsciously know their views are so brittle that they can’t survive any real challenges and so go out of their way to avoid them.

Now, in the grand scheme of things, If this is the worst homophobic encounter I personally experience, I’m in pretty good shape compared to most LGBTQ people. I know straight, cisgender people who’ve experienced worst homophobia than that. I wasn’t hurt physically or emotionally. I probably got a bunch of time back that I would have used to help someone. But, stupid actions, and I can’t find another way to describe it, annoy me. I really do love talking and working on astronomy projects with people and I suspect this would have been an interesting one to work on. And, maybe in time, he would have seen he was worried about nothing but he was so afraid now that he couldn’t take that chance.

If you have an interaction you want to share, positive or negative, please contact me at spectrumpodcasthost@gmail.com. The purpose of this podcast is to humanize the lives of LGBTQ people for the wider public. I think the best way we can do that is to share our stories. If you need to share your story anonymously, that can be done.

Until next time, take care.