The model I have in mind for the social transformation to a consensus that homophobia is a social pathology comes from feminism and how the conceptualization of rape was transformed in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and subsequently globally. While this is still a rape culture, while most rape still goes unpunished, while many men feel that rape is a privilege and a right, while rape is still a form of entertainment and a strategy of war, there has been a broad transformation in cultural consensus. Rape is now officially wrong. The practice of rape is more pathologized and victims of rape are less stigmatized. There is a legal consensus that rape is wrong. Women are not blamed for being raped with the regularity that we once were. In other words, there is broad cultural agreement that rape is wrong, and this agreement was achieved by a social movement rooted in human experience. This can be an instructive model for the transformation of social codes around familial homophobia. While we can’t always change people’s actions or their beliefs, we can change the cultural consensus, which in turn can both influence some people’s actions and transform their beliefs while providing more support for victims to resist.
The reality is that people with power can never be persuaded to give it up, but they can be forced. Through the creation of a critical mass (a significant sector of the society amassing power for their constituency), certain social transformations can be kick-started or advanced. In this way, by creating a counter-cultural option for social behavior, social change has a chance.
After all, forty years ago if people heard a neighbor being beaten by her husband, they were far less likely to intervene or call the police. It was viewed as a private family matter by both the state and civilians. Now, people know that they are supposed to call the police, and inherent in that understanding is the belief that the police are supposed to pathologize and interrupt this behavior. This is an enormous cultural transformation. It means that, regarding domestic violence, there is now an authority recognized that is larger than the patriarchal family. The same transformation can occur within the realm of familial homophobia. Both for victims and for perpetrators.
CULTURAL CRISIS, NOT PERSONAL PROBLEM
Familial homophobia is something that gay people discuss with each other with a regular, daily urgency. And yet it has not made it into the official public discourse. In some ways, it is our most important story and so it is worth trying to understand why it has remained a secret. Emotionally, the pain is often unbearable, inarticulable, and the solution eludes us. We often speak about it to each other in shorthand. One gay person can meet another in an elevator, make a passing quip about his family, and be perfectly understood. And we also blame each other for it. As distorted as it is for gay people to blame each other for straight people’s homophobia, this common projection shows how embedded this conversation is in our relationships with each other.
On the other hand, dear, close straight friends who have known gay people for years may never be able to fully comprehend the dimensions and impact of the homophobia that their close gay friends face from their families. The gulf in experience is so profound and has so much specificity that its full impact can feel impossible to convey. After all, straight people also have problems with their families and so often cannot differentiate between the degree. It’s the old “white people have problems too” syndrome, in which the dominant person is unable to imagine the burden of prejudice on top of regular human difficulties.
Why begin with the family? In many ways, we can now understand this force we have previously called “society” to actually be the collective interaction of our families. Regarding homosexuality, the word “society” has become a euphemism for our families. Whereas this was always true, albeit unconsciously, now that so many families are aware that they have gay or lesbian members, the family is increasingly the overt building block of homophobia. At this point in cultural awareness, any family in which the alienated, scapegoated party is also the gay party, must interrogate the relationship between the two conditions. How can it be that the only black person in the office is the only person everyone hates? I think it is safe to say that in any family where the only gay person is the alienated person, there is homophobia.
Being heard in opposition to this construction is very difficult because the more integrity queer people have about their homosexuality, the less access they have to mainstream discourse. A very extreme but entertaining example has to do with the exclusion and scapegoating of gay people by Barack Obama during his campaign and in the early days of his presidency. Despite his support for gay marriage in 1996, candidate Obama asserted during the election that “marriage is ordained by God to be between one man and one woman.” Then Rick Warren, the anti-gay, anti-abortion evangelical, was chosen by President Obama to publicly pray at the constitutionally secular but actually Christian inauguration. Warren was interviewed on the television show Dateline by reporter Ann Curry about the fact that his Saddleback Church excludes gays and lesbians from membership. “Our church has done more for people with AIDS than any other church,” said Warren. “Oh, yes,” Curry concurred, “And gay people say that, they love you for it.” Of course, gay people were excluded from this mainstream televised conversation and so the two of them continued to lie without refute. Some days later, Melissa Etheridge, a singer who became famous while in the closet and only then came out as a lesbian who publicly married but donated no money to fight Proposition 8 (the anti-gay ballot measure in California), met with Warren and stated publicly that he is “not a gay hater.” Regardless of how you feel about Etheridge’s music, someone who was in the closet until she was famous is not the person who should be deciding the standard of behavior that benefits lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. The situation with Rick Warren is a classic case of someone very powerful seeing himself as compassionate when in fact he is destructive and then is reinforced by the most gay people’s lack of access to media and their replacement by gay people with histories of self-oppression. The exclusion of LGBT people from the Obama family became uncontestable because the people who could speak to it truthfully were marginalized. Instead gay and lesbian people became dependent on straight people who have privileges we don’t have, like Frank Rich, to take Obama and Warren to task. The president then went on to use the words “straight and gay” in his inauguration speech while appointing no openly gay people to his cabinet. In the end, the straight “pro-gay” commentators are morally elevated; Obama and Warren’s anti-gay exclusion is fulfilled; and LGBT people are kicked out of the family, while some of us are explaining to each other that what is happening isn’t really happening.
I use the word “family” here to define cultural constructions of belonging because the family is the place where most people are first instructed in homophobia. The family is where most gay people experience homophobia for the first time. It is the model for social exclusion, for it is also where most straight people learn to use homophobia to elevate themselves within the family politic, which is the prototype for the broader social politic.
As in the replication of many social dynamics, homophobia originates and is enforced, initially, within the family. This has made family relationships into the primary source of pain and diminishment in the lives of many gay people. We pay an enormously debilitating price for familial homophobia at the same time that heterosexuals within the family learn how to (and have the choice to) use it as currency. And yet the perpetuation of homophobic practice is repeatedly blamed on gay people themselves. We are depicted as being inherently deserving of punishment, even though, in actuality, we have not done anything wrong. After all, homophobia is exclusively a product of heterosexual culture. It is not caused by homosexuals or by gay culture.
Sadly, this paradigm confuses gay people ourselves. Conversely, when we insist on inclusion, full recognition, and access to process, we can get internally pathologized as “militants,” “activists,” and “stalkers,” even by each other. The dangerous exclusion is naturalized as benig
n and the desire for accountability is falsely seen as a threat when it is really life enhancing. To this day, productive individual actions and group efforts that make positive contributions to the culture are still seen as compromising the right to exclude. I recently had a conversation with a young Asian gay male who had graduated from Yale. He was probably born in 1983. He told me, “I have mixed feelings about ACT UP, those confrontational tactics turn people off.” Of course, he is alive today because of ACT UP. Similarly, I was told by Jeremy, a gay man who works at a theater that has never produced a lesbian play, that my desire to have them produce lesbian plays is “too intense.” When I asked him if he thought that Tony Kushner might be intense if his points of view were systematically censored, he did not respond. The basic desire to be acknowledged and included is seen as pathological, while the destructive exclusion of people’s lives becomes the definition of reasonable.
Familial homophobia exists with force and brutality in every ethnic, class, racial, and religious group. The modes of manifestation may be different, but it is always there. So for example, a working-class black rural family can be as devastating in its homophobia as an upper-class suburban white family. A liberal middle-class Jewish family in New York can be as fiercely rejecting as a blue-collar Mennonite farming family in Pennsylvania. A born-again Christian family in Iowa is just as capable of being strong enough to love their gay children as a lefty academic family in Boston. And a white Unitarian feminist theorist in London is just as capable of being homophobic to her gay sister as a South Asian dentist in Detroit. It is really about individual strength of character and the family’s capacity for love.
The capacity for feeling, strong enough to overwhelm social expectation, is at the root of the homosexual identity. This transgression is what coming-out is all about. Without having experienced the coming-out process themselves, straight people often do not have a model for such a fierce level of resistance.
The emotional deprivation of familial homophobia is not as easily accessible to potential straight allies. Inherent in this problem of comprehension is that people who are allowed into their families view many aspects of inclusion in family life as neutral or even as a burden instead of as a privilege. Because they are not aware of these privileges, they can’t understand the loss of them.
At the same time, the perpetrators often misconstrue the exclusion as their “right.” Throughout the history of cruelty to gay people, exclusion has consistently been theorized as a natural unquestioned option. Legally, straight people have long argued that it is their right to not have to rent apartments, give jobs, or serve meals to gay people if they don’t want to. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Sarah Palin all united around their shared belief that gays and lesbians should be excluded from certain legal rights and protections. There was little questioning of this consensus for exclusion. Similarly, families exclude and shun gay members without anyone questioning their behavior. And gay people ourselves take advantage of the lack of inclusion to exclude partners from emotional and material processes that straight people can access through social and legal institutions. There is a consistent model of shunning across the board that implies—in the end—that no one has to be accountable for their negative actions toward gay and lesbian people.
And of course our straight friends may be compromised by their own behavior within their own families toward their own gay family members. After all, one of the most pervasive uses of homophobia within a family is by family members who actually have no inherent prejudices toward gay people but manipulate their family’s prejudices to achieve greater currency internally. It’s like the folks who didn’t really care about Communism but denounced others to the blacklist to win promotion in their fields. They exploit prejudicial systems for their own advancement, even if they are not ideologically committed to those systems. In this confused way, straight people may have gay friends while participating in creating their gay relatives as second-class family members. As someone who has a lot of straight friends, I am no longer surprised to see how many of them allow gay family members to be marginalized, regardless of how progressive they may be. When it comes to their own privileges on the job, in their family, or in the Obama administration, they just don’t want to risk losing currency. What I’ve learned from this, strangely, is that having close personal authentic relationships with gay people may have no impact on whether or not a straight person exploits homophobia in his or her family or other currency circles. Although this seems nonsensical emotionally, our current social structure encourages it by providing no consequence for this kind of duplicitous behavior. Although theoretically it sounds ridiculous, in applied real life terms it’s much easier to love gay people and not stand up for them than to risk your own privileges to have a consistent trajectory of behavior. And this applies to gay people ourselves. We too can betray each other, shun and exclude each other, with more reward than negative consequence.
I have heard straight friends tell me that they have a relative who is gay, or is thought to be gay, who is ostracized or demeaned inside their family. But they don’t think about interrupting the process. When I ask them why, they are often surprised. It was never considered to be a possibility. Never have I found friends in this position who had already thoroughly considered their responsibility to intervene. Often they project that the gay person doesn’t want to be offered help. Or they justify and excuse their inaction based on the feelings of discomfort that arise when they consider diminishing their own precariously established relationships with other family members. Not wanting to feel what their gay family member feels is enough to excuse their own inaction. It’s a clear message that one person’s just treatment can be easily sacrificed for the comfort of another.
Most social movements have been constructed by people who were related: civil rights and labor movements involve multi-generations of rebellion by the same families. Even feminism has tried to be a movement of mothers and daughters. But the gay and lesbian movement, like the disability movement, is made up of people who stand apart from the fate of their family members, and whose most intense oppression experiences may be at the hand of those same relatives. Since most people do not have a capacity for justice strong enough to overcome social expectation, it makes more sense for us to point to social expectation as the proposed site for transformation, rather than on individual heterosexuals and their capacity for original thought.
Unfortunately, without third-party intervention, we each often still are brainwashed into conceptualizing of familial homophobia as our own individual problem. We see it within the specificities of our own families, and we often have to enter those families alone and deal with this problem alone. We can commiserate with others later, but the battle is ours alone. This false privatization of familial homophobia has kept us from acknowledging that it is not a personal problem, but rather a cultural crisis. A change in attitude necessary for this acknowledgment would have many consequences for action.
First, it would mean that transforming standards for how gay people are treated in families would become a public demand of our public political agenda. While we demand changes in material conditions like
•employment protection
•cultural representation, and
•integrating into the larger community as openly gay people
we would also be publicly articulating and demanding changes in how we are treated by our families.
There is some precedence for this, after all, in the feminist movement of the 1970s, which addressed behavior, values, and speech within what is falsely conceptualized of as “the private sphere.” It politicized women’s role and experience in the family and undid the false “naturalization” of social structures that keep women from power.
The second and more important consequence of making familial homophobia a public matter and not a private one is that we would not each be fighting it alone. We would be fighting it together, in the same way t
hat we have faced the AIDS crisis and many other public, communal crises. We would have organizations, events, books, public forums, debates on television, education—all of the tools that we have used in the past to bring a subject out of the shadows and onto the American dinner table adapted of course to the new technologies. Organizations like PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) could be much more effective in publicly stigmatizing homophobia and normalizing homosexuality within the family structure.
In the homophobic family, the logic of good and evil is primordially distorted. There, heterosexuality is awarded and homosexuality is punished, even though there is nothing wrong with homosexuality and nothing right with heterosexuality. The punishment of the homosexual family member has no justification and yet is a primary assumption of heterosexual society. Restated more simply: most people do what they’re told, so tell them something different. Change the social standard of how gay people are supposed to be treated and most people will change their behavior to follow.
If we really believe that homophobia is wrong, we must act that way. Any vision of real justice for gay people must include an understanding that the homophobic family is inherently a corrupt structure because of its homophobia and should not be privileged. The irony is that it pretends that it is neutral, objective, normal, right, and value free, the opposite of its actual social function. In other words, as long as the family is a homophobic institution, the nuclear, extended, birth or adopted, inter-generational family is not a valid institution and should be stripped of its authority. Ironically, the homophobic family lies at the heart of what we are told is the model for loyalty, caring, love, and identity. If the weight of subjectivity could be shifted from this false paradigm, then the ability of the homophobic family to claim goodness would be diminished.
Ties That Bind Page 3
