c20H25N3o said:
Gay's are lobbying people who 'feel' that homosexuality is disgusting. How are you going to convince them that homosexuals will do them no harm? How will you convince them that homosexuality is a really positive thing for society? Because in my view, I do not think concessions will be made until homosexuality can be portrayed as a really positive beneficial thing.
To the people who feel that homosexuality is disgusting, I can only say that this is the purpose of the idea of "tolerance". Americans tolerate nearly
anything that falls between "slightly detrimental" and "neutral". Why break that trend? We smoke, commute single-occupancy, don't know quite what to do with nuclear waste, opt toward a mixed economy most clearly defined by capitalism. We eat Twinkies, MSG, and bacon. We tolerate smelly street people to a degree because it's easier than doing anything else.
So gays shouldn't have to even prove themselves "neutral". Being a minor detriment to society is acceptable, as indicated by the clear majority of deadbeat dads who are heterosexual. We tolerate crooked businesses; I once called the Better Business Bureau to inquire about a scam running through the University of Oregon and the man I spoke with confirmed that, by the sound of it, what I was describing was illegal; he confessed that he had a five-year backlog on his desk, though. Down at the Bureau they
love the clear-cut, but everything must come in its due order. They're so impotent and understaffed that they're barely a formal demonstration of a proper and valid social concern. We accept detriment if it makes money. If it makes us feel better for the time being. I mean, look at these 11 ballot measures challenging the U.S. Constitution that passed this month. Eleven states with enough people who feel it acceptable to waste time, money, life, and liberty just to feel better about that shiver that runs through them at the thought of same-gender sexual contact, whose hearts and lunches lurch at the thought that two people of the same gender can love one another so.
In the Tulia disaster, which orphaned 16% of the black community's children, the guy who received the highest sentence was actually white--and married to a black woman. I mention it because interracial marriage had to prove itself to a double-standard that accommodated the cold shiver that ran through some folks at the thought of a black man touching a white woman. And that lurch when they stop to think she
likes it. Even
loves it.
When it comes to sex issues, it's an perception that phallocentrism is challenged. Black men were lynched for having consensual sex with white women. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was president. Go figure.
"Feeble masculinity" is what is at issue here--Billy's feeble masculinity (the product of a divorced family), the feeble masculinity of divorced men who can't keep their families, the feeble masculinity of men whose prerogatives within the family are not what they once were, and, perhaps, the feeble masculinity of depleted and economically abandoned Oregon mill towns . . . .
Elsewhere in her discussion of Helms's legislation, Butler delineates the same slide from homosexuality to pedophilia to sadomasochism that informs Measure 9:
"The exploitation of children" comes [immediately after sadomasochism in the text of Helms's legislation], at which point I begin to wonder: what reasons are there for grouping these three categories together? Do they lead to each other, as if the breaking of one taboo necessitates a virtual riot of perversion? Or is there, implicit in the sequencing and syntax of this legal text, a figure of the homosexual, apparently male, who practices sadomasochism and preys on young boys, or who practices sadomasochism with young boys, a homosexuality which is perhaps defined as sadomasochism and the exploitation of children? Perhaps this is an effort to define restrictively the sexual exploiter of children as the sadomasochistic male homosexual in order, quite conveniently, to locate the source of child sexual abuse outside the home, safeguarding the family as the unregulated sexual property of the father? (Butler 116)
Clearly, this construction of the family has a long history in the American New Right. To take Butler's interpretation a bit further, the family may be said to be consolidated, if not constituted, by this very fantasy. Indeed, the "ideological rearguard action" (Watney 43) which is the family in late twentieth-century America can be seen as the product of a series of similar fabrications. The discourse of "Family Values" rarely articulates what these values might be, but spends a great deal of time asserting that various people or social formations (homosexuals, feminism, single motherhood) are a threat to them.
(
Kent)
The article quoted above also notes the "sufficiently invisible lesbian", and points out a statistical issue that suggests the entire fight in Oregon is not about same-sex contact in general, but that cold shiver that comes at the thought of two
men enjoying one another's bodies.
For a people so conditioned to consider heterosexuality nature's uniform way--it's
not--homosexuality can be a source of confusion, even if one is not gay. Traditional, comfortable identity expectations are upended, hence the cold shiver. And for many, though not all, who feel that cold shiver, much of it is reflective. A man might look at his gay son and be unable to cope with the thought that his boy likes to be penetrated and pounded. This is in part because the father in this case is comfortable in his own sexual role but recognizes some reflection of the same disrespect in the way he does his wife. I've watched a heterosexual man obsess over the detail of his unborn daughter's future sex life: at some point, you actually have to stop these guys and say, "Yes, yes, boys are scum if you have a daughter, but do you realize how much time you've spent this week thinking about your daughter having sex, and she's not even
born yet?" I mean, it's not quite a cold shiver for me, but
damn it was creepy. Sure, the customary, "I'll kick his ass," is fine, but I'm glad I got to witness it before I had one on the way because it actually reiterated some ineffable that I'd been wondering about since I saw it the first time.
It's all a tightly-knit loop. One of the things that many women deal with after sexual abuse is a cycle of blame that comes from believing arbitrary standards about sexuality. If we conceptually demonize sex, there will be a natural feedback loop. The anxieties about homosexuality come from a basic distrust of other people that reflects one's own attitudes about self and sex and identity. People invent or suffer these anxieties about almost everyone they meet, but it's really easy to latch onto something like homosexuality.
The shiver runs deep, but the reality is that it's entirely self-involved. How to convince the homophobes? Some days it seems you can't. You can only lay out the facts and ask for fair consideration, but even that's too much to ask of people. Hell, their lives get simpler when they let go of the obsession that comes from that shiver, but somehow it's unkind to help people not be afraid.
In the meantime, we are born, we die, and the waves roll on. And as long as it's someone else suffering the results of one's injustice, one apparently has no reason to care.
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