Homophobia: The Past: Them "When I heard it was over, that Germany had surrendered, it was as if the world had ended," they would all say. "I didn't think it was possible for Germany to lose. With years of Nazi propaganda about German invincibility and German superiority, I could not accept the reality of defeat and surrender. It was as if the world I knew so well was gone. Everything I had believed was not only wrong, it had vanished. I felt my life was over. I continued to live only because my body lived. And then I slowly began to construct a new world of beliefs. It took a long time." An old story, really, this business of a forced encounter with a reality which shatters one's beliefs, but no less painful for being so common in human experience. We've all had similar trauma, though perhaps not often with the intensity described by the survivors of Nazi Germany. Other examples abound throughout history. Two large-scale examples probably match the German experience. In the United States, both slave owners and former slaves experienced total cognitive dissonance with the defeat of the South and the end of legal slavery. America still struggles, 150 years later, still copes with the dangerous institutional and emotional remnants of that trauma. Jung Chang's remarkable novel, Wild Swans, a three-generation story of China in the 20th century, puts the reader in the gripping, vivid, and terrifying reality of surging hope followed by bottomless despair as the whole country was repeatedly swept by change, growth, collapse, change, growth collapse. Recovery from such trauma comes in stages: 1. Despair: My world has vanished. What do I
do now? The Present: Us Lucky us. We affluent developed societies consider ourselves fortunate (and we are). Afloat on a sea of education, money, and good luck, we dangerously see ourselves relatively free of taint. Dangerously? Dangerously because we unconsciously have set ourselves up for yet another big fall, another "defeat" which will render old beliefs useless and new, healthy beliefs very hard to acquire. One group still qualifies around the world as the hated Other, more or less freely subject to rejection ranging from jeers to beatings to murders. Homosexuals continue, despite small areas of progress, to be the Truly Loathed, the Despicably Queer, the Artsy-fartsy Fairies. Homophobia is the last remaining hate that is so deep, so pervasive that it can poison everything. The reasons for this are many, and gruesomely fascinating, but are not my point here. My point is this: the continuing unexamined acceptance of homosexual hate is, because it is profoundly and totally irrational, as much a threat to present society as racism and sexism once were. Easy to say, but what's the proof? The proof is in your reaction to:
Germans under the Nazis had a hard time seeing Jews as people. American southerners had a hard time seeing slaves as people. Even large parts of the developed world today have a hard time seeing queers as people. Why? Because homosexuals do to other men what men historically did to women: 1. Objectify, and 2. Penetrate. Sexist men see women as objects, things, to be admired, possessed, and used. Sexist men desire, for their own pleasure, to penetrate the bodies of these objects. Sexist men (and "their" women who have bought into and "thrived" from the system) irrationally fear homosexual men because they fear that homosexual men will do the same two things to them and, of course, "their" children. The foolishness of their assumptions is exceeded only by the intensity of their irrationality. As Rusty puts it in Myra Breckinridge, "'Normal' is balling chicks." It's a warped mindset whose fragile foundation is equal to that of other violent, warping ideologies from the past. Harder times is acomin' unless we get our act together. Unlucky us. END We love to get mail
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