As most of you are probably aware, a group of anti-gay bigots recently held a so-called "straight pride" rally in Boston. This stunt could not be more transparent: it wasn’t about “pride,” it was about demeaning LGBT people and their allies. It was a gleefully hateful concept, meant to draw bigots out in force to send a hateful message to a group of people who already have reason to fear for their safety.
While many people spoke out about the event and counter-protesters outnumbered the bigots, there was still a lot of commentary that simply made jokes about the bigots. Mockery may sometimes be an effective form of shutting someone down, but it’s not at all effective in the face of hate.
But there was something even more troubling to me about this. I’ve been speaking out about this tendency for a while, but I decided today to write more in-depth about this because I think it’s important.
There is no other type of bigotry that we make jokes like this about. We don’t think the KKK is a laughing matter. No one found humor in the Charlottesville tragedy. We are horrified by how immigrants (and even brown-skinned citizens) are being treated, rounded up, or detained. Most of us are holding our breath as anti-abortionwwoman legislation makes it way out of backwards statehouses and slogs towards the Supreme Court. None of this is a laughing matter. We've all been anxious and scared for a while now.
Yet when it comes to anti-gay bigotry, there’s a tendency to crack jokes that perpetuate homophobia and/or misogyny. I have been guilty of this myself in the past, but one day earlier this year I started noticing that almost all the comments in a diary about a homophobic person somehow managed to insinuate the homophobe was a closeted/latent gay. This is probably the most common reaction to homophobia.
This didn’t come out of the blue. It is true that we have many examples of outspoken homophobes later being caught in a gay sex scandal or worse. And research does exist that shows one source of homophobia could be latent or repressed homosexuality.
But it doesn’t account for all of it, and that’s where we get into dangerous territory when that’s our initial and/or only reaction to anti-gay bigots.
First, it feels a lot like blaming the victim, but consider what message it sends to people who are questioning their sexuality or afraid to come out of the closet. We already get so many messages that gay is wrong or shameful, and then on top of it, the people we’re most afraid are so rotten it proves they must be gay.
None of us here would use the term “gay” to describe something bad. “Dude, jazz music is so gay,” would be hidden immediately. But “wow, look how pathetic that organizer is, he’s obviously gay*” is recommended.
But more importantly, it downplays the very real bigotry that lives inside most of these people and we have to reckon with that just as we have to reckon with racism, sexism, xenophobia, and everything else. We can’t treat homophobia as nothing more than a sad denial of one’s true self, because that describes the very people that are most targeted by homophobia, not the perpetrators of the same.
Anti-gay bigots are, at their core, dangerous. The same way that a racist is dangerous, the same way that a sexist is dangerous, the same way that people who chant “build the wall” are dangerous, so are anti-gay bigots. They are denying us housing. They are making our employment precarious. They are KILLING us.
If you haven’t yet read sfbob’s diary about the slippery slope of anti-gay bigots, please do so now.
The people we make fun of for refusing to bake a cake for a same sex couple are the very same people who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Their hate is not benign. It never has been. While a small subset of them might be acting out of a fear of their own sexuality, every single one of them is also acting out of malice and hate.
We understand that racism and sexism is taught and learned, and that it is also systemic and usually implicit. We have to start recognizing homophobia in the same way, because the people who are teaching racism and sexism are also teaching homophobia, and people are still learning it.
Understand that this is most often the case. Instead of viewing a homophobe through the lens of “oh, he’s probaby gay,” view them instead as who they present themselves to be. Odds are they probably are simply hateful and repugnant human beings who hate everyone that doesn’t look exactly like them.
*This isn’t a direct quote. I have decided against quoting or linking to any specific comments because my intent here is not to shame anyone or tell them they’re wrong, rather I’d just like a little more awareness before we toss out these jokes.