Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2003 18:32:03 -0400
From: sthomas at fsa.com
Reply-To: johnny at charm.net
To: johnny at charm.net
Subject: Homophobia

Someone asked about homophobia.  Here's my attempt at an answer.  It
comes in several sections.

Definition.

The definition of "homophobia" is pretty simple, really.  Homophobia is
anti-gay bigotry.  (In today's more politically correct terms, it is
anti-GLBT bigotry, where GLBT stands for "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgendered".)  This is what it has come to mean today.

Like most of the terms used in connection with discussions of sexual
orientation, the term has a history which is somewhat complex.  By its
Greek constituent parts, one might imagine that it should mean "fear of the
same" (whatever that might mean).  It was invented, I believe, in the mid
60s by a psychologist or psychiatrist named Gordon Alport (this is all from
memory) in a context which is not generally considered relevant today.
Alport held that anti-gay bigotry was itself a personality disorder
stemming from fear of one's own homosexuality, which is what he named
"homophobia".  I don't think that this view is very widely held today, and
the term has come to denote the bigotry itself rather than a putative (and
controversial) cause of the bigotry.

Homophobia in its manifestations is almost exactly analogous to racism.
Like racism it can be virulent or subtle, and there are degrees and nuances
which make it a highly complex phenomenon.  Unlike racism, however,
homophobia is not thoroughly discredited in our society.  I think that some
of what I mean by homophobia will be better comprehended through a
discussion of racism in the 1950s and 1960s.  I will accordingly offer a
parable.

The Parable.

I was born in Texas in 1952 and did all of my growing up there.  Because my
parents were mid-Westerners rather than Southerners, I escaped being raised
as a racist, but most of my friends were and racism permeated the place.  I
can recall seeing segregated facilities when we went downtown; in the
neighborhood where I lived, of course, there was no need for segregated
facilities since black people were not allowed there.  As late as 1966,
Lubbock, Texas maintained segregated schools; when the black junior high
football team played our team, the students from the other school were
bussed in and kept away from us.  I never spoke to a black person until I
was in high school (in Arlington, Texas).

I present in this parable one Mrs. Fudd (name lifted shamelessly from Mr.
Goldsmith), who will incorporate the character of a number of women who I
knew while growing up.  Mrs. Fudd is exceptionally kind and genteel.  She
is active in her church and its charities, and always has a polite word for
those who cross her path.  She is careful not to speak an unkind word
against anyone.

Ms. Fudd also has the following sincerely held beliefs.  She believes that
black people are a separate and inferior race.  She thinks that it is in
the best interest of black people to be ruled by benevolent white people.
She believes that these relations are divinely ordained (and the preacher
at the Baptist Church she attends tells her that this is indeed so), and
that those who are trying to desegregate the South are attempting to do
something with is contrary to nature and to God's law.  Mixing of the races
would, she believes, be an unmitigated disaster, bringing ruination upon
both the black and the white races.  The blacks who are agitating for those
so-called civil rights are to be pitied, since they have been stirred up by
outside agitators.  Left to themselves, the darkies would never have
aspired to go beyond their natural place in the world.  If those agitators
and their Negro dupes were to succeed, it would make the blacks worse off
and unhappy, since no one can be happy if they exceed the bounds of nature
decreed by God.

At the same time, Mrs. Fudd is exceptionally sensitive to violence.  Her
heart is pained whenever she sees violence in the civil rights struggle,
much as her heart is pained when she sees or hears of cruelty to animals.
Nevertheless, the Negroes and the outside agitators are primarily
responsible for the violence, since they are attempting to go beyond their
proper station.  Thus, Mrs. Fudd will vote for the politicians who run the
South, even if their duties require using violence to keep the uppity
Negroes out of lunch- counters.  But she endorses the violence reluctantly
and regretfully, and in fact tries not to think about such things.

Mrs. Fudd grew up knowing a number of Negroes, and she employs them
herself.  She sends her washing to be done by a Negro washerwoman and has a
Negro handyman.  She is unfailingly polite to them, and is in fact proud of
her good relations with them.  They prove to her that she is a good person,
with a good and kindly heart, who treats Negroes well *when they know their
place*.

She rarely encounters other Negroes, since they are kept in the Negro areas
for the most part, but she is polite to them as well when she does
encounter them, unless they are uppity, of course.  When she encounters an
uppity Negro, her manner becomes quite frosty.  And politeness with respect
to these other Negroes is mainly a matter of pretending that they are not
there.  For example, at the car wash, there are some black "boys" (Negro
men in their thirties) who do the polishing.  She sees them, of course, but
never feels the need to talk to them.  They wouldn't be comfortable, she
reasons, so she treats them as if they weren't there.  And when the "boys"
have overlooked a spot, or not done an adequate job, she complains to their
white supervisor, since the "boys" really can't be expected to do the right
job unless supervised by a white man.  They're like children, you see, and
need supervision for their own good as well.

In raising her children, Mrs. Fudd tries to impart her own sense of
decency.  She never lets them utter the word "nigger" in her presence,
since it is an ugly word.  Of course, "Negro" is generally pronounced
"Nigra" in the South, so the distinction is often a subtle one.  When they
were young, her children sometimes made to drink in a fountain that a black
child had used, or play with a toy that a black child had touched, and Mrs.
Fudd had to rush to ensure that her children didn't touch those "dirty"
things.  (Negroes don't wash very often, you see, and you can't tell when
they get dirt on themselves.)

Mrs. Fudd is often perplexed by the fuss that Northerners make over things.
For instance, the Northerners made a big to-do about the incident in Las
Vegas when a hotel pool was drained after Lena Horne's daughter took a dip
in it.  "Why of course they had to do that!"  Mrs. Fudd tells one of her
friends.  "No white person would want to go into a pool where Negroes had
been.  Of course, it was the hotel's fault; they should not have let that
little black girl into the pool in the first place."  (Mrs. Fudd  is also a
little baffled by why this Lena Horne person is such a big deal in the
first place, since she has never seen a movie with Horne in it.  MGM, which
had Horne under contract used her either in all-black films, which wouldn't
even play in the white movie theaters in the South, or in segments of
anthology films, where the Horne segments could be removed from the prints
sent to the South.  The pool draining incident is true, by the way.)

Perhaps the worst time Mrs. Fudd had was when she went up to Chicago to
attend the wedding of a nephew.  Her sister, the groom's mother, had warned
her that one of the relatives of the bride had actually married a black
woman!  And what was worse, they were coming to the wedding!  "Well, I
never!" said Mrs. Fudd.  "That's legal up there?"  Her sister confirms the
shocking state of affairs, and begs Mrs. Fudd not to "make a scene" for the
sake of the groom.  Mrs. Fudd hopes that no one will expect her to be
introduced to the interracial couple, but she vows not to make a scene, no
matter what the price.

When she gets to the wedding, the worst does occur.  She finds herself
being introduced to a white man with his black wife.  Reaching deep into
her character, Mrs. Fudd smiles and acts as politely as she can.  She is
quite proud of herself, at the end of the day, as she has shown that a
Southern woman can rise to the almost unnatural challenge of being polite
to an uppity black person.

Of course, what Mrs. Fudd thinks was exquisite politeness was in fact the
frostiest of pleasantries.  Her entire body language was signaling
constantly that her politeness was the merest sham, that micrometers
beneath the sheen of pleasant social interaction was deep disgust at the
unnatural people who were forced upon her presence by a Northern system
which had let loose of the bounds of propriety.  And whether she intended
it or not, the interracial couple, and probably others in their family,
were fully aware of the depth of Mrs. Fudd's disgust and the shallowness of
her behavior.

Similarly, what Mrs. Fudd thinks are free and easy relations between her
and her washerwoman, are experienced quite differently from the other side.
When Mrs. Fudd compliments her washerwoman on the cuteness of her
pickaninnies, she doesn't realize that this "compliment" comes as a slap to
her washerwoman, even though the children are in fact cute.  Under the
guise of good manners, Mrs. Fudd is reminding her washerwoman of her
subordinate status, of her failure to be a full human being in the view of
society.  Mrs. Fudd doesn't realize that the assumptions of white
superiority which seem so natural to her, which she sincerely believes are
immutable laws laid down by God, accompanied by the power over black people
that Mrs. Fudd simply has as a white woman in the South, are vividly
broadcast in every single interaction she has with a black person, and that
they resent it.

If someone were to point this out to her, she would deny it.  Only those
uppity blacks and their outside agitators worry about that stuff.  And they
don't know what is right and moral, don't understand what is so clear.  And
they deserve what they get.  But for the Negroes who know their place, she
can't imagine that they could have any complaints about her behavior
towards them.  Her heart is pure.

Sincerity and Standing Up for What You Believe in an Unpopular Forum.

Now, Mrs. Fudd sincerely and genuinely believes all that she believes.
While she was up in Chicago for her nephew's wedding, a discussion got
started at the table she was seated at.  (Thank God the Negress and her
husband weren't at that table!)  And it soon became apparent that everyone
else at the table was a Northerner and actually believed in the civil
rights movement!  Now, Mrs. Fudd was a polite person, but she could not let
this go by.  So she told the table, in the politest possible way, of
course, all the truths she sincerely held about the races.  She was quite
proud of her courage that evening, for being brave enough to tell the truth
to a crowd hostile to it.  After all, many people would have just glumly
eaten their rubber chicken and kept silent.

Now here's the question:  given the manifest evil of Mrs. Fudd's views,
ought we to praise her for her sincerity and bravery in expressing them in
a forum where she knew they would be unpopular?  Or should we worry about
the fact that Mrs. Fudd is in many ways complicit in the evil of
segregation and the Southern oppression of African-Americans?  If one of
the people at the table had himself been African-American (with skin the
color of Brian Stokes Mitchell, i.e. light enough to "pass for white" so
that Mrs. Fudd would not have been aware of his race), would you expect him
to patiently and respectfully "agree to disagree" and say nice things about
the sincerity of Mrs. Fudd's views and her bravery in stating them?

My answer to these questions is that the evil of the views she holds, and
the very real damage she causes (the insults to her washerwoman, the subtle
and not-so-subtle disdain she directed at the interracial couple) are not
ameliorated in the slightest by the sincerity with which she holds those
views.  There may have been some cynical politicians who faked racist
views, but the overwhelming majority of Southern racists were absolutely
sincere, completely convinced of the justice of their cause.

In part they accomplished this feat of sincere evil by refusing to treat
African-Americans (and Mexican-Americans, too, and -- ironically in the
context of this discussion -- in most of the South during that period, also
Catholics) as fully human.  The blacks whom they oppressed but who just
took the ill-treatment without visible protest, they assumed were happy.
Those who protested and fought back were assumed to have something wrong
with them.

Skin in the Game.

Now someone with "skin in the game" -- someone who is directly affected by
racism -- is quite likely to have a more pronounced emotional reaction to
the experience of racism and expressions of racism.  This is because all
interactions are permeated by race, if you happen to be black.  If like me
you happen to be white, you have the luxury of pretending that race doesn't
matter most of the time.  It's not something that is in your consciousness
at all times.

And this can sometimes result in the perpetuation of unwitting
insensitivity.  Since I was brought up in the time and place I was, it is
very difficult for me to see always when I am being racially insensitive.
When it happens, I try to rectify the situation:  I will try to convey the
twin thoughts that I did not do it intending to be racially insensitive but
that I also accept responsibility for the fact of the racial insensitivity.
For racial insensitivity is never right, and ignorance is not an excuse
that let's you get away scott free.  (It's like having someone step on your
foot in the subway -- it hurts physically either way, but you're not going
to get really angry if the person who did it shows immediately that he or
she did it inadvertently AND is really sorry.)

Back to Homophobia.

Now while I'm not black, I am gay.  And the same sorts of slights and
subtle or not-so-subtle signals from people that I am despised because of
my sexuality are a more or less constant feature of my experience of the
world.  Unlike most blacks and some really nelly queens, who wear a visible
badge of their minority status, I can easily "pass" -- people in casual
interaction with me do not generally know that I am gay.  But because the
closet is such a stultifying place for gay people, I generally correct
peoples' impressions when they assume that I am straight, which happens
constantly.  And each and every time I do so, I have to face the
possibility that I will encounter a homophobic reaction.  These reactions
can range from over-the-top blatant ("No shit, you're a fag?!"), which is
quite rare, to the more subtle sort that Mrs. Fudd exhibited when
introduced to the interracial couple.

This is a part of my world that is ever present to me, and which is simply
not present to a heterosexual, just as the constant question "will my race
play a role in my interaction with this person" is a constant issue for a
black person but not for a white one.

Evil.

Someone writes that "I don't have any emotional stake in either side of
the argument so I feel I can be dispassionate about my analysis of the
discussion."  I think that this fundamentally misses the nature of the
discussion between me and Ms. Peterson.  It was not an academic discussion
of the Catholic Church's position on sexuality, which I think I could have
in a moderately dispassionate way with someone who is not insulting my
being every step of the way.  Ms. Peterson is homophobic in the sincere,
faith-based way in which Mrs. Fudd is racist.  She does not understand
that she causes damage, but she does.  In the dinner where she sat next to
me and we discussed some of these issues (largely in the context of a
discussion of Mark Jordan, who we both knew in school), she radiated her
homophobia, her absolute conviction that I was a damaged person, in any
number of ways -- sighs, verbal tics, rolling of the eyes -- that made it
perfectly clear that she was expending considerable moral resources to
avoid saying anything overtly homophobic.  I think she thought she was
behaving with exemplary Christian charity, and was genuinely baffled when
I reported that I had found her homophobic.  Like Mrs. Fudd, she knew her
heart to be pure.

Then in her post, she did say some overtly homophobic, wounding things.
The point of her posts as experienced by me was (although she may not
consciously know it, and others without a history with her or a particular
sensitivity to the subtle ways in which homophobia is generally expressed
may not have understood it) to put me in my place, as damaged goods, as
someone less than a full member of the human race.  In short, as a queer.

As I've said, I have to put up with that shit with distressing frequency,
even though I live in Greenwich Village, where no one even notices if two
men or two women walk down the street holding hands.  And I don't intend to
put up with that shit on the list.  For those of you who thought I was
needlessly insulting a defenseless and sincere woman, ask yourselves what
you would demand of a black person vis a vis Mrs. Fudd.  I think that
homophobia that wounds is an objective evil, and should be fought.  (Of
course, one needs to pick one's battle, and one can be wrong in those
choices.  Perhaps I was wrong to pick this battle, or waged it
counterproductively.)

Love.

Ms. Peterson mentioned her husband's lesbian sister, with the words "His
little sister, whom he loves a lot, is a lesbian."  I must say that from
the two repellant posts he sent to the list, which were skewered
respectively by Ms. Leighton and Ms. Kaplan, it is not at all apparent that
Ms. Peterson's characterization of her husband's attitude is correct.  I am
not doubting that Ms. Peterson, and perhaps even Mr. Peterson, believe that
love is there.  But I am willing to wager that the sister, whose partner is
referred to by Mr. Peterson as a "friend" in quotation marks, does not
experience her interactions with him as in any way loving.  I know many
people who put up with homophobic relatives, and they simply develop
defenses for the behavior of the homophobe who constantly demeans any GLBT
person in range.  (In the all too frequent cases of homophobic parents, of
course, the damage is even greater.)

I suggested earlier in the thread that homophobia was a form of refusing to
be open to others.  One of the ways in which that failure of openness can
be thought of, and this seems to me to be a Christian way of expression, is
as a failure of love.  Not romantic love, of course, since no one has a
right to romantic love from everyone, but the love of one's neighbor that
Christians are enjoined to express.  Love in this way is not a feeling that
one has *to* another, but a relationship that one has *with* another.  The
inability of Mrs. Fudd to have such a relationship to African-Americans,
the inability to treat them *as* neighbors -- as fellow human beings with
full autonomous rights -- is the great moral failing that her sincere
beliefs and tender heart cannot excuse, and does not ameliorate.

Such a failure is all too evident in Mr. Peterson, but I believe it is
evident (though in more subtle ways) in Ms. Peterson, at any rate in her
interactions with me.

Being Called a Homophobe.

Being called a racist is extremely unpleasant; it has happened to me.  It
is unpleasant because it suggests that one is in the grip of a great moral
failing, a failing for which there is no excuse.  And one's initial
response is often defensiveness.  But because being called a racist is so
highly charged, I have tried to understand why the charge was being made,
rather then trying to rely entirely upon my blameless heart.  And
sometimes, indeed, I was making a racially insensitive remark out of
ignorance or a failure to think something true.  (Of course, sometimes such
charges are also just unjustified name-calling.)

I infer from Someone's question that Someone is worried that I might
call you a homophobe due to your asking a question, perhaps a question
which reveals an ignorance that is not necessarily culpable, or making a
statement with which I disagree.  I hope that would not be the case.
Although I am not noted for my patience, I do try to be somewhat patient
with people asking questions, when such questions come out of the sort of
attempt at openness to others that is missing in virulent homophobia (and
other bigotries as well).

At any rate, if you have questions or want to explore views, I have noted
in your posts an attempt to be reasonable, even where we disagree (and
disagreements are frequent), so there is no history which would impel me to
quick anger.  And I do not think that I have detected, as I did in Ms.
Peterson's posts, the half-hidden shards of various strains of anti-gay
propaganda which are probably less visible to those who have not read such
screeds with interest, albeit horror.

Well, this was a long answer, but I do hope it was responsive to the
question.

Steve Thomas SF'74