Systemic Homophobia: A Comparison
“You know, Don, everyone is basically gay.”
Well after my slow evolution from bizarre, religious homophobe to generally better human being, my friend was all-in to convince me that I was subversively gay. I suspect part of it was that we were very close and always played that faux flirting thing, making jokes about he and I, and part of it was his own deep belief that, in fact, everyone heterosexual was simply in the closet and didn’t know it. He associated gay with being free and unencumbered by the restrictions society places upon us.
“Or at least everyone is bisexual. Just because you choose to present as a hetero doesn’t mean you aren’t gay. It just means you haven’t acknowledged it yet. Don’t worry. You will. And I’ll be right here to help you through it.”
“Why can’t you be gay and I be straight and we both be OK about it?”
I have had what some might call plenty of sex and others might call a degenerate amount of sexual activity in my life. Tried BDSM (wasn’t my thing), certain fetish-play (nope), and experimented a bit with a guy once (didn’t even make the chub move) and I’m quite certain of what gets me off and what does not. When I was twenty-five, sex was the thing constantly on my mind. At fifty-four (and with apologies to my forty year old horny wife) sex is just less important on a day-to-day basis than it used to be.
My friend’s assertion, when I was thirty or so, was fun at first but soon became a “cause”.
“You know, Don, that America is fundamentally homophobic. From the laws against sodomy, to the lynchings of gay men and lesbian women, to the angry resistance to trans folks, homophobia is seeped into the fabric of the character of America. It’s because everyone is basically gay but society is set up in such a way that admitting that fact is a guarantee of exile.
The founding fathers were probably gay — I mean, I know Lincoln was gay — but they were also Christian and so they based the entire Constitution as a method to prevent gay people from ascending. The Revolutionary War was fought to keep gays hidden. I mean, the Boston Tea Party? They dressed up in leather and feathers!”
Whenever he’d go on a rant, I’d laugh. He was increasingly serious about this worldview and my laughter was a sign to him that I was somehow against him. That I was still a homophobic bigot.
“You know, Don, you’re the problem. You can’t just admit that you’re gay-ish and do the work necessary to atone for it in some meaningful way. You seem defensive and I call that ‘straight fragility.’ Until you can acknowledge your complicity in the hundreds of years of gaybashing maybe you should just stick to your own kind.”
“My own kind?”
“Straights who haven’t openly admitted to being gay.”
“Man, it seems like you’re getting obsessed about, well, being gay. I know you’re gay but that’s not the lede, right? You are a lot more than your sexual desires, I think, as am I. I’m pretty certain the country wasn’t founded in anti-gayness and I’m pretty certain...”
“What can you know? You haven’t even admitted you are gay. Your straight privilege is showing. The systemic homophobia is in everything! SATs are directed at straights, hiring practices favor straights, journalistic objectivity is in and of itself a homophobic act! And Hollywood? Only a black person can play a black character but anyone can ‘act’ like they’re gay!”
He just threw out things he had determined were homophobic without anything but his saying so as evidence. It was like he had a dartboard of society, tossed a dart, and whatever it landed on was that day’s new homophobic thing. He called this “anti-homophobia” and stated that anyone not in agreement was obviously homophobic.
He wrote a book about it and parlayed it’s success into a career teaching corporations how homophobic they all were. He made a ton of money.
Eventually my friend was no longer my friend. He chalked it up to my latent self-loathing and inability to accept my gayness. I chalked it up to him devolving into a zealot convinced of a worldview that was both unrealistic and hopelessly self centered. He made sure to blast me as a homophobe on every social media platform he could.
It would be easier to simply cave. Broadcast that I had seen the (flesh)light and was actually gay and was complicit in the hundreds of years of anti-gay rhetoric, personal destruction, and hate. It would be easier but false.
Better to get new friends.
