I'm gonna throw up in my mouth a little doing this, but to be fair to Labelle, compulsory heterosexuality is a real thing.
tl;dr It's not compulsory. It's the default, which is very different. Acting like it's compulsory leads you to presume troon-like levels of victimhood and paranoia. If you find yourself siding with Billy, always double-check.
No, it's not. It's not compulsory. It's just the assumed default. That's not without its own share of issues, a few of which you mentioned, but calling it 'compulsory' is saying it's demanded, not that it's just presumed.
People presume other people around them are straight because that's the default. Just like people presume a baby is cis, and so on. Sure, it can cause damage, dissonance and other difficulties. But you're catastrophising the impact on, say, gay people, and accepting the framing of it as 'compulsory' is part of the problem.
LGBT people are a deviation from the norm. Even if they're 1 in 10 of the population, that's still not the norm. Now, when you're a kid, especially a teenager, pretty much the main thing you want to be in the world is normal; even if not in a mainstream way, you still want to fit in, even if it's just with other members of your subculture - eg every teen movie and their tour of the various lunch table cliques. So not being normal, not feeling like you fit in, is usually painful - and not restricted to LGB teens, but certainly they experience it on that visceral level of sex, something teens are rather known for being obsessed with.
But as you get older, you
should learn that being an individual, your differences, what makes you stand out are what differentiates you from the world. Hell, it's the moral of half the media aimed at teens, that though they might want to be normal, that they're different, and that's not just OK, but should be accepted and/or celebrated. It's the combination of learning to recognise the importance of individuality while still maintaining a teenaged mindset which gets us things like troons and Tumblrites and NPCs. They all argue for their special snowflake status as whatever gender, kin, diagnoses and so on that they want, while wanting to surround themselves with a bubble of their like-minded fellows where they all act alike and sound the same.
So, yes, the parallel to being in a foreign country is appropriate; unless you give off the signals of difference, you will presumed to be straight, to speak the local language, to be part of the norm. You will be presumed to be hearing, to be sane, to be numerous other things that are the default for that area. Most people have something that is outside the norm, be the minority in some way, and that will impact how other people deal with them. The trick then becomes accepting that rather than constantly railing against it - acknowledge that yes, you will go through the world with a little more friction in the areas where you don't conform, but that's exactly the sort of thing most people experience, just for different reasons. And at least with being gay, it's getting more and more common, at least in large swathes of the Western world, for that to
not be a big deal, for it not to get you persecuted, vilified and killed. That's certainly not true everywhere, but there's definitely places, lots of places, where it's accepted.
So when you start going on about how gay people should be treated as part of the norm, increasingly, they are. But they aren't the default, nor should they be. And while culture is changing to reduce the friction between gay and straight - increase of the use of 'partner', acceptance of gay marriage, etc. - some will always exist, and that's never, ever going to change, and that's not a bad thing either.
And at least gay people are acting from a position of sanity, unlike troons who are attempting to suicide-bait the world to get the 99.99% of the world to accept their delusions as the new reality.
