Quite some time ago, I decided to try out a housing agency. (Melbourne in the late 1980s.) I had no experience of one. So I paid my $50 and filled in the various forms. They suggested a house in Collingwood. The men, I am guessing were gay, though I do not think that this was an issue at the time. I decided I did not like the house itself for a few reasons, it was very cold, as old terraces sometimes are, but mostly because it smelled of mildew. I think it had a major rising damp problem. When the woman asked why I did not like the house, I said that it was because it was smelly. I am guessing that this is the source of this strange story.
After that there were stories that I did not like gay people. Which at first I just ignored as it was plainly wrong. But they persisted for quite some time.
When I came back to Melbourne in 1992, a man in a pub on Exhibition Street and a Telstra employee, made a big deal once of smelling the seat of a woman who had just left.
Fast forward. When I arrived in Sydney in 1997, people made all sorts of comments about not liking smelly people. At first I just thought that this was some bizarre way the people in Sydney think. There are plenty of others, but then I have never really fitted into Australia. Though that is another story. People would say thinks like, we disliked so and so because he was smelly. Even my sister joined in on the act. She thinks that people in the CES who were queuing were a problem because they were smelly. Even last week, someone said, I (that is the person speaking) am ok, I am not smelly.
So, what these people (that is people who are not me) think by smelly and what I think by smelly are not the same think and I am very dismayed at the mountain that people have made out of a mole hill. But I have to say that it is typical of this line of thought and this is not the only thing that falls into this category.
As I said some years back, take what they say and know it is wrong. Take the opposite of what they say and know that it is also wrong. I do not like or dislike people because they are smelly, though I would object if someone had not been having a shower. The smelliest people I ever met were some hitch hikers on the south island of NZ. They had been hiking for a week and I gave them a lift back to a near by town. They had not had a shower in a week. They reeked. But it was not offensive, just a bit overpowering.