When people are put on the receiving end of a cruelty that they do not deserve, that is injustice. An intervention that makes perpetrators justify what they are doing can usually end that behavior. An intervention shows perpetrators that someone cares about their victim, about how she is treated and what becomes of her. It is undeniable that people only scapegoat the powerless. Those with power would never be falsely blamed; there would be consequences. For this reason, third party intervention is the most effective way of ending shunning. To intervene is to realign power. The bully can easily find another victim whom no one cares about. Why bother hurting someone who either has enough currency to fight back or an ally to fight back for them?
What makes gay people so ideal as the scapegoat in a family is that they are there alone. Sometimes no one else inside the family is like them or identifies with them. They become a projection screen, the dumping ground for everyone else’s inadequacies and resentments. In addition, no one else is watching. No one from the outside will intervene because of the perception that family matters are private and untouchable. The family structure and its untouchability predominates. Then, because gay people do not have the full support of their families, they in turn become an ideal social scapegoat. For, in society, just as in the family, no one will intervene. Society will not intervene in the family, and the family will not intervene in society. It’s a dialogic relationship of oppression.
Consider another example. A lesbian’s brother gets married. His parents are pathologically homophobic. He has manipulated this prejudice all his life to make up for his own feelings of inadequacy in relationship to his sister who, while disparaged within the family, is far more accomplished than he is within the world. He organizes the entire family to travel thousands of miles to his wedding but excludes his sister. No one in the family will say anything about this to him, nor will they call her to see how she feels. Everyone decides that because it is his WEDDING, his heterosexuality makes his feelings more important than hers. That he is human and she is not. And so they collude with excluding her, causing her great pain. If they approached the brother as a group and told him that they would not be manipulated into scapegoating the sister, he would not be able to carry out his plan. But it doesn’t occur to them. It’s a wedding after all. When the sister tries to read a novel or see a movie or play expressing this experience, there aren’t any. If she tries to create one, she is told by the publisher that it’s beautifully written but that it is special interest, not for the general public. The arts and entertainment industry—the producers of popular culture—reinforce the cruelty by actively keeping it unrepresented. In this way, the perpetrators remain unaccountable. It’s a dynamic system of perpetuation of domination through censorship of human experience.
This multiply reinforced exclusion is powerful and devastating to gay people because it defies the typical private/public dichotomy on which society’s safety net depends. Usually the family is a refuge from the cruelties of the culture. Or, if the family is a source of cruelty, the larger society is a refuge from the family. But when the family and the larger society enact the identical structures of exclusion and diminishment, the individual has no place of escape. Especially when the institutions of representation ALSO don’t allow the experience and subsequent feelings to be expressed.
Since gay people face false accusations and shunning every day and in every arena of life, our behavior and state of mind can be deeply affected by either withstanding the assaults, or desperately trying to avoid them. Either way the active oppression of shunning and false accusation manipulates and controls gay people’s lives to varying degrees. The repetition and ease with which both exclusion and distortion are imposed make it seem regular, daily, and even, in fact, not happening. It becomes “just how things are,” a falsely naturalized state, when it is actually designed and imposed by force.
Historically, gay people have tried to protect themselves by retreating into subculture and/or relationships. But even these structures are often not able to resist particularly venomous onslaughts by family and society. Gay subculture in particular is extremely vulnerable to scapegoating—especially when rooted in interlocking difference between genders, races, and classes. The subculture and the romantic relationship itself can therefore become an instrument of the larger structures of cruelty particularly when there is no accountability and no one to be accountable to. As long as no one cares how she is treated, the discarded homosexual becomes a convenient target for the cruelty of others, whether that cruelty is rooted in heterosexual privilege or in other oppressed people’s trauma.
I am reminded here of Yvonne Welbon’s brilliant short film Monique, in which the African American filmmaker tells the story of her first-grade-classroom enemy, Monique. How much they hated each other, how much they hurt each other, how much they displayed their hatred for others to see. Then, at the end of the film, Welbon shows the old group photo from first grade, and we suddenly realize that she and Monique were the only blacks in the class. You see this all the time. Other gay people are encouraged and rewarded by state, family, power cliques—by individuals and institutions—to not identify with each other, to not help each other, to not stand up for each other. And when the betrayals take place, they get rewarded. Whether it’s a successful lesbian producer who never develops a lesbian play, gay republicans, a man who violates his lover and receives the approval of his homophobic family for doing so, or a woman who uses the prejudicial courts to deny her lover custody and wins the support of the state. In every case, they extend the hand of scapegoating.
In short, once we can accept that just because one person wants to exclude another, it doesn’t give them the right to do so, we have to look at the moral implications of this realization for action. When a family cuts off a child because she is a lesbian, that refusal, that silence, is morally wrong, even though the society and laws endorse it.
We have to understand by extension that when one gay person cuts off his/her lover/friend as a consequence of that person’s powerlessness (powerlessness created by her homosexuality), that refusal, that silence is also morally wrong. It is the same action. And when a gay man runs a theater and develops young gay male writers while humiliating and ignoring women, it is an extension of the same action. He does it because he can. Human beings deserve, by virtue of being born, acknowledgment, recognition, interactivity, and negotiation. To deprive people of that because they have no supporting institution insisting on their rights is unjust. To do it to a daughter, sister, lover, or colleague is the same injustice. If one would have to go to a court of law, recite the entire pattern, beginning with the originating action, and show the consequential chain of events, would an unbiased jury be persuaded that to shun this person was justified? Similarly, if we could bring a class-action suit against all of the main-stage theaters in the United States to show cause why there is no lesbian play in the American canon, I assure you that the only reason that would emerge is that there is cultural hegemony among the selectors. That there is no inherently justifiable principle maintaining this exclusion and its consequential humiliations and diminishments.
I am trying to articulate, for the first time, the nature and long term consequences of familial homophobia on the gay individual and the broader culture. I am trying to quantify something that is persistent and yet invisible. And then I hope to make overt and conscious the human obligation to enact third party intervention. The purpose of this book is to open up a new category of thought and to explore and discuss, not define, it. To disagree with its precisions is to enter into the dialogue and to finally acknowledge what is already there.
“THE OPPRESSED WILL ALWAYS BELIEVE THE WORST ABOUT THEMSELVES”
—Frantz Fanon
The betrayal of gay people by their heterosexual family members is as effective as it is undeserved. This confusing combination leaves us with a lifetime burden of having to try to come to terms with and understand the experience. One coping mechanism is to prete
nd that nothing is happening. Many gay people will say that their families are “fine.” But when you ask for details, this means, basically, that the gay person has not been completely excluded from family events. Or that their partner, if they have one, is allowed in the house. Very few experience their personhood, lives, and feelings to be actively understood as equal to the heterosexual family members. Often parents or siblings keep the person’s homosexuality secret from others, or euphemize it. They vote for politicians who hurt gay people; they contribute to religious organizations that humiliate gay people; they patronize cultural products that depict gay people as pathological. They speak and act in ways that reinforce the idea of gay people as “special interest.” In many ways the message is clear that the gay person is not fully human. But because many gay people know others who have been more severely punished by their family’s prejudices, they look on their own continued compromised inclusion to be miraculously positive and a product of their own correct behavior.
Let’s face it—most people are average and cannot conceptualize beyond what has already been articulated, especially if it is an official point of view. Gay people are no different. Women are no different. Poor people are no different. I teach in a working-class school, a branch of the City University of New York. About a third of my students are working-class Italian and Irish kids with questionable economic futures. Eighty percent of my students have a friend, acquaintance, or family member who has been in Iraq. Many of these students voted for George Bush twice, and Staten Island was the only borough of New York City to vote for John McCain. I have had many students who supported the war even though they and their friends are the cannon fodder. They vote for politicians who cut funding for the City University while they sit in over-crowded classrooms without adequate course offerings, counseling, financial aid, library, and computer services. They identify with rich people, who they think, got that way because they are smart. Every day I hear them defend people who are hurting them; I see them supporting systems that oppress them. And when their friends and relatives kill and are killed in Iraq, they justify the pain. In our classes together, we discuss this over and over again: where do they get their information? From television, which they watch uncritically.
Many of my students find analysis and critical thinking to be emotionally upsetting. It makes them feel disloyal to their parents and their church and their government. They would rather not know that what is said on television is often not true. The consequences of this knowledge are too disruptive, even if the ignorance keeps them from reaching their life goals of having interesting, financially stable jobs.
For gay people, the same tropes are in place. Many gay people believe that Ellen DeGeneres was the first openly lesbian performer. They don’t realize that she achieved success while in the closet and then came out. That if she had in fact been out all along—like comics Marga Gomez or Kate Clinton—she never would have achieved that level of success. They think that Dorothy Allison writes novels with lesbian protagonists, not realizing that if she did, they might never have heard of her or her books. They think that the movies are now representing lesbian characters because Charlize Theron won an Oscar for playing a lesbian murderer and Hilary Swank for playing a queer who was murdered. But they can’t find lesbian protagonists in non-pathologized or non-punished roles. Most people don’t have the ability to decode these systems, and so they believe they are being represented, being given opportunities to succeed, being rewarded, and having their stories told—even though none of these things are actually happening. This observation is not to minimize the gifts of any of the above individuals, nor to criticize them in any way. Their successes are stupendous personal achievements for them as individuals, but these events do not hold the meaning for lesbian life that they are often mistakenly said to have. In some cases, this recognition is actually a reflection of how oppression operates, not the reverse as is sometimes claimed or thought.
Because gay people are forced to have a high awareness about heterosexual cruelty in order to try to avoid it, we know an enormous amount about the structures and functions of homophobia and about the manifestations of the homophobic variant in a wide spectrum of individual heterosexual types. However, heterosexuals spend almost no time thinking about how their behavior is homophobic, what its impact is on the society and, most importantly, they do not consider its impact on us personally. They retain a false sense of supremacy by not being accountable. Not thinking is one of their privileges. After all, in every system of domination, the dominant group knows only about themselves, while the members of the subordinate group know about their own lives as well as the lives of the dominant group members. So, those with the most power have the least information about how other people live. If straight people were forced to think about and be accountable for their behavior toward us, they would have to justify their actions. And that would be pretty hard to do.
In order for us to come to a cultural agreement that homophobia within the family is wrong, we need one basic shared assumption: homophobia is not the fault of gay people. Homophobia is not caused by gay people. There is nothing that a gay person can ever do to justify it. Homophobia is a pathological manifestation of heterosexual culture. As a pure prejudice, it is wrong and as social currency within and outside of the family, it is despicable. If a straight person does not like a gay person or is competing with a gay person, whether in the marketplace or in sibling rivalry, it is never appropriate to use homophobia as a leveler.
The manifestations of familial homophobia can take many forms:
•Some families entirely and thoroughly exclude gay and lesbian members through outright ban.
•Some allow them a partial participation provided that the person never shows or discusses his or her own life.
•Some allow a lover to be present as long as that person is not fully acknowledged in his or her actual role.
•Some allow full physical participation by the gay person and their lover but constantly enforce a clear message that they are not as important as the heterosexuals in the family and/or that their relationship is lesser than heterosexual relationships or the consequence of pathology.
•Some rely on repeated humiliations and diminishments.
•Some enforce the above with more degrees of subtlety.
None of these possibilities are acceptable or reasonable. All have long-term destructive effects on the gay person as their diminishment is regularly reinforced. That gay people have to tolerate this or be complicit with it in order to be loved is very distorting. And many of these diminishments are played out later by gay people on each other. All of these options have long term destructive effects on the lives of homosexuals within the family because they reinforce the heterosexuals’ own investment in homophobia. In the end, the family is the training ground and model for other social institutions in which homosexuals are expected to acquiesce.
Familial homophobia begins at the beginning of the gay family member’s life. It usually starts as a false set of standards by which the gay person’s behaviors and emotions are pathologized. That is, things that are good and true about them are treated as bad and wrong. The gay person has a number of possible reactions to this pathologization, all of which are ultimately punishing and destructive to their lives:
•They can obscure their homosexuality in order to avoid being punished when they have done nothing wrong, but this is a brutal form of punishment in itself.
•They can continue to behave as though nothing is happening, while being consistently subjected to diminishment.
•They can object to the distorted behavior of the homophobes in question.
Unfortunately, this last option, which is the most appropriate response, is the one that will ultimately cause them the most punishment. Homophobia as a system does not tolerate opposition. Gay people are expected to capitulate. And to be grateful for crumbs. When they are not, it is seen as even more of an example of how troubled they are, how mentally il
l, how maladjusted, bad, angry, and wrong. When the originating action of homophobia has the consequence of making them angry or upset, they then get blamed for being angry or upset and that result gets repositioned as the justification or cause for their oppression. The more they take the noble, responsible, and mature action of resisting homophobia, the more they are viewed as troublesome, inappropriate, and detrimental.
The reason that the existence of homophobia and the practice of homophobes are able to render good, honest, caring, productive, dignified people as pathological is because homophobia itself is the pathology. It is an anti-social condition that causes violence and destroys families. It not only makes society punish and exclude people, but it punishes these same people for trying to restore the larger society to sanity. The perpetrators, who are the destructive ones, are described as the neutral standard of behavior, while the people, who are not only victimized but have the decency to fight back (which is the most beautiful model of social responsibility), are described as expendable and undesirable. The final ironic twist is that whenever a situation does arise in which homophobia is pointed to as being socially destructive or personally wrong, the homophobe tends to actually blame his own behavior on gay people themselves. And there are always gay people willing to point the same finger, gay people who have been persuaded that tolerating or being complicit with prejudice in order to be “loved” is love.
I believe in, am committed to, and am working toward a cultural agreement that homophobia is a social pathology and that society’s best interest is served by any program or practice that mitigates homophobia. The family is the best place to start because the family is where people first learn its power. That is why the commitment to eradicating homophobia must begin with the family.
Ties That Bind Page 2
