Being gay doesn't mean someone is somehow less masculine, which is the heart of what the "homo water" idiot is implying.

Was the British Empire, upon which the sun never set, somehow not masculine enough? One could argue it ran on tea. Morally questionable, absolutely, but not manly enough?

Were the samurai somehow compromised in their masculinity because they drank tea, sometimes in elaborate ceremonies?

And, apart from tea, were the Sacred Band, the elite warriors who died to a man fighting Alexander the Great's dad, somehow less manly because they were all gay?

I bet this colleague of yours also thinks straws are gay in this parlance, as if it's somehow more manly to put one's lips on the same glass rims touched by hundreds of others. I guess hygiene is not masculine or heterosexual.

And the thing is, even my rant here is problematic because it spawns from a lifetime of people equating gay with not being enough of a man, an attitude that infects my own thinking.

Shit, the most feminine of men is more of a man than these idiots if he stands up for his identity unapologetically.