Ties That Bind

by Sarah Schulman

  The logical conclusion of such a twist in values would be a general acknowledgment that if people cannot fully love, support, respect, and most importantly, defend and protect their gay or lesbian child, they should not be parents. If they cannot give up their privileges to fully stand with their gay or lesbian siblings or parents, they should lose social approval. In other words, I’m imagining a transformed social value in which homophobia is the action worthy of punishment and exclusion, not homosexuality. Where shunning is punished and resolution praised.

  This statement is both supremely reasonable and yet completely without social context because a standard of ethics regarding homophobia in the family has not yet been articulated. Instead of focusing on the homophobia as the subject of inquiry, the great distortion has been to interrogate the origins of homosexuality. Today there is a national obsession with proving that homosexuality is one thing with one “cause,” which liberals believe is rooted in a biological deficiency or abnormality and Christians believe is rooted in “choice” and subject to conversion. In order to develop a vision of how to eradicate homophobia within the family, we must reject completely any framework that maintains homosexuality as a category of deviance that needs to be explained and instead focus entirely on the origins of and solutions to homophobia. This means focusing on the perpetrators, their motives, consciousness, and actions with the purpose of creating deterrents necessary for gay people to have healthier emotional lives.

  HOMOPHOBIA AS A PLEASURE SYSTEM

  Many natural and unavoidable mistakes have been made as the gay liberation movement tried to first grasp, then understand, then convey the system of cruelty by heterosexuals toward homosexuals. The nature of this cruelty is hard to initially conceptualize because it is simultaneously pervasive, invisible, and deeply painful. The people who are doing it often don’t know that they are doing it or pretend that they do not. The repetition and the dailiness make it seem normal. It is very difficult to try to imagine a life without this constant diminishment. And the depths of its consequences, coupled with its total lack of justification, are alienating to fully realize. The reinscription of these cruelties within our own trusting, loving relationships are difficult to articulate because there is no place to do so.

  When reviewing our errors of understatement, they seem innocent, childlike. How sad that so many of our oversimplifications were caused by our love and trust of other human beings and our consequent inability to understand how they could be so ruthless in exploiting their advantages over us.

  Why, after all, try to explain what exclusion and punishment feel like, and why they are wrong? Somewhere in the choice to communicate lies a profound optimism and pure belief that people don’t want to do evil, and if they realize what they are doing, they will stop it. That fundamentally people are cruel only because they do not know that this is what they are doing. If they had awareness, they would choose otherwise. That cruelty happens by accident.

  Most gay people were born into a family. Usually the parent(s) were heterosexual or appeared to be so. This creates, immediately, the bizarre construction of a closed living system in which the parents enjoy rights (legal, social, and the rights of self-perception) that one or more of their children will never enjoy. We love our parents no matter what. And most parents begin with the best of intentions. And yet the system of supremacy into which straight people are inaugurated is so persuasive, so dominant in its invisibility, and therefore unidentifiable, that parents and siblings and other relatives are often not individual enough to transcend its inherent cruelties. Instead they reinforce them to greater and lesser extents, and because we love our parents, we make excuses or try to help them expand their thinking, often without fully acknowledging the impact of their prejudices on our emotional lives. The greatest of which is to continue their dirty work in our treatment of each other.

  All of this converges on the question of VISIBILITY. Visibility was a construct that the gay and lesbian movement invented to explain and excuse the cruelty we were experiencing. We denied that it was intentional. Instead we invented the idea that it was an inadvertent consequence of heterosexuals having a lack of information about what we are really like. If they would discover how we truly are, they would not want to hurt us. And since they were doing everything imaginable—using every social institution to make it impossible for us to be truly seen—we would have to subject ourselves to extreme violation in order to force a cathartic experience for them that would make them better. This process required shock troops of certain stupendously courageous gay and lesbian individuals to “come out” and be fully subjected to the force of punishment, thereby creating the inevitable social change that we felt would accompany recognition. Some of us forced them to see us, expecting that once they would see us, they would love us, and then realize that our disenfranchisement was morally wrong, and they would then join with us in correcting these structures of exclusion, both emotional and social. The plan was that the vanguard homosexuals, willing to take the punishment, would then make things easier for other, less courageous ones looking on from the wings waiting for this battle to achieve a more equitable field. These others could then enter the process with progressively fewer degrees of loss, but filled with recognition for their brave predecessors, and what we had done for them. Looking back at the way we created the issue of “visibility” as a strategy for change is a painful confrontation with the realization that it was an engagement with magical thinking.

  We believed that straight people hate and hurt us because they don’t know us. If we could have visibility, they would realize that we are fine and would accept us. This theory has been disproven by history. Now we have enormous visibility and the hatred and overt campaigns against us ranging from commodification to constitutional amendments to dehumanizingly false representations in popular culture have intensified and become more deliberate. Clearly ignorance was not the determining factor in what caused homophobia. There is much more volition on the part of homophobes than we ever imagined.

  A second, concurrent theory that we relied on for many years was the idea that heterosexuals experience a “fear” of homosexuals. This was the famous “phobia.” We fantasized that it was rooted both in ignorance but also in some insecurity about their own heterosexuality. Whenever extremely violent behavior emerges, this theory is trotted out again. Repeatedly our proposal is used against us and reshaped so that gay-bashers become repressed homosexuals who cannot accept their own identity. This variation on the “black-on-black crime” theory, in which white people have no role, positions our oppressors as other, unself-acknowledged homosexuals, while the heterosexual majority remains innocent and not responsible.

  It seems obvious, at this point, that neither of these explanations is sufficient. Knowledge of and about homosexuals does not dilute homophobia; it only pushes it into more virulent and in some cases more sophisticated modes of containment and justification.

  Simultaneously, it is clear that the people who benefit from these configurations are not “hidden” homosexuals but rather the heterosexual majority. What is most difficult to face, but increasingly obvious as gay visibility provokes containment, but not equality, is that homophobes enjoy feeling superior, rely on the pleasure of enacting their superiority, and go out of their way to resist change that would deflate their sense of supremacy. Homophobia makes heterosexuals feel better about themselves. It’s not fear—it’s fun.

  We know from photographs of happy picnicking white families laughing underneath the swinging body of a tortured, lynched black man, or giggly white U.S. soldiers leading naked Iraqis on leashes, or terrified humiliated Jews surrounded by laughing smiling Nazis that human beings love being cruel. They enjoy the power, and go far beyond social expectation to carry out the kind of cruelty that makes them feel bigger. In short, homophobia is not a phobia at all. It is a pleasure system.

  On the surface, there are lessons to be learned by theories of totalitarianism developed by other groups
in other historical moments that resonate with our condition. Most deceptively appealing is the popularized version of Hannah Arendt’s observation of the “banality of evil.” Translated to our condition, this would be an understanding that people are homophobic because they are expected to be. That there is a great deal of conformity involved in the practice, and it is not exceptional. The common understanding of this idea is that people are homophobic because they have been told to be and are trained to be. As a result, they become so fearful of the repercussions of dissension that they cannot act independently. They are being controlled by a broad, yet invisible, social force. Their own need for approval and the material privileges that approval accompanies, supersedes their love and acceptance of their family members and their sense of justice. In many ways, this is an appealing theory. It separates homophobia from the individuals who enact it. It implies that the great social punishment that awaits detractors is so menacing that they will do anything to avoid it. After all, we know what homophobia feels like and can sympathize with straight people’s desire to avoid its consequences at all costs. Most interestingly, at the basis of this analysis is the recognition, though usually unarticulated, that to dissolve homophobia in the family means that straight people would lose things that they now have. However, that process is more complex than we have previously understood.

  While it is true that if straight people wish to join the fight to end homophobia, they must give up certain material privileges in the interim, the losses to them are actually more long term than we have previously understood. For the time being, I believe that the most ethical position for straight people, in the age of homophobia, is to relinquish all their privileges until we have them too. It is the sexuality version of boycotting grapes. If a critical mass of straight people withdraw from discriminatory social institutions until they are available to gay people, those institutions will cease to have social currency. They will not be able to function until homophobia is eradicated. If a gay person is not allowed to babysit a same-sex niece or nephew, then the straight people in the family should refuse to do so as well. The deprivation of resources will force the homophobes, in most cases, to reassess their behavior or be alienated.

  But this protest fantasy has been conceptualized as a temporary condition while it is actually a permanent one. Implicit in this vision is the understanding that once the homophobic behavior has been removed, everything can get back to normal. If, to give a benign example, homophobic Uncle Arthur organizes Christmas dinner around the schedules of the heterosexual couples in the family and the homosexual partner’s schedule is not considered, then no one should participate in Christmas dinner. Since the originating Arthur may decide that something is better than nothing, the social consensus created by the other straight family members will force the homosexual partner’s needs to be fully and equally considered. Of course, for this to be organized currently depends on the gay members actively agitating for supportive action on the part of straights. But if there were a broad cultural agreement that heterosexual non-participation was the expected mode of behavior, the burden would be off the individual gay people in the family.

  But what about once the accommodation is made? Then what happens? Can everyone live happily ever after, with the gay people having the same access as the straights? Probably not. Here’s why.

  On the bulletin board at The Jerusalem Women’s Center, I noticed a posted saying clipped from a magazine: “Equality is not when the female Einstein gets promoted to Assistant Professor, but when female mediocrities can climb as quickly as male mediocrities.” I thought long and hard about this statement. The first part is recognizable, familiar to any woman of outstanding ability or accomplishment. But the second part increasingly disturbed me. If male mediocrities can move forward, how can female mediocrities join them? By definition, the rapid rise of mediocre men means that caste, not ability, is the measure. Their presence in positions of authority and power are stand-ins for other people of greater ability whose caste profile excludes them from access. It would be technically impossible for female mediocrities to rise as long as male mediocrities still hold the power. There are just a limited number of places.

  Inherent in this conundrum is one of the fundamental problems that keep us from honestly facing the phenomenon of familial homophobia. This is the problem of a false discourse of tolerance. This discourse states that people who have been unfairly excluded from fully expressing themselves, fully participating in their families, i.e., their societies, can be painlessly included without anyone else’s position having to be adjusted.

  The truth, however, is that there will never be equality for women until male mediocrities can no longer rise. Women of ability will be able to take their rightful spot only when mediocre men are removed from power. If success means opportunity at one’s level of merit, those now falsely inflated would be removed from the category of “successful.” This necessary equation, one that no one wants to admit to, reveals the frightening truth. Oppressed people, people unfairly excluded from full participation, cannot have their rightful place until the people who exclude them experience a diminishment of their own access and power. No matter how much we pretend otherwise, one cannot happen without the other.

  Similarly, gay people will never have a full and fair place in the family structure until straight people have less currency, less entitlement, and less power than they currently hold. In other words, until the family structure is re-imagined to serve gay people more, and thereby, service straight people less. To pretend that straight people can keep all their advantages while gay people can be allowed to access them is preposterous. Gay people’s exclusion is predicated on straight people’s privileges. Only if they have fewer privileges will there be less exclusion.

  So what is in it for them?

  Nothing.

  As history has shown us, when black people can sit in the front of the bus, more white people have to stand. When jobs open up for women, they become more competitive for men. In the attempt to shift from a caste-based system of privilege and access to a democratic family, social world, and workplace, opportunity becomes increasingly based on merit, ability, and appropriateness and less on gender, race, or sexuality. So, people whose power resides in oppressive systems get demoted. Once we understand that process, we can have a clearer idea of what is at stake in familial homophobia and what will change by dismantling it.

  Homophobia in the family functions along the lines of traditional forms of scapegoating. There is currency. It can be emotional, in particular familial approval, love, and interest. It can also be material and financial across a broad spectrum of classes and economic situations. If your brother gives your lover a pair of socks for Christmas, that is one less pair of socks you will have to buy. If your cousin invites you for Thanksgiving dinner, that is one Thanksgiving dinner you won’t have to pay for. But for many of us the emotional support and love that a family can provide can have a much higher value than any possible financial support they can provide. And conversely, not being allowed to return love, to participate in family decisions, to care for children, etc., is accompanied by a high emotional cost. Monetarily, if your family has the resources but refuses to lend you money for an emergency because they have pathologized you, then the currency can actually mean the difference between life and death, home and homelessness, education and underdevelopment, safety and danger, food and starvation.

  In other words, homophobia within a family means that some members will experience emotional and material deprivation because they are homosexual. Or because the gay person manifests consequences of the other’s originating homophobic behavior, which implicates the homophobe and inspires a retaliatory smoke screen of false accusation; for example, “It’s not because you’re gay, it’s because you’re angry.” But not asking, why are you angry? Frankly, I often find that the myth of the angry lesbian/angry woman/angry black man is really the rage of the dominant culture person at being asked to look at themsel
ves. They are so furious that they see other people’s productive positive actions for change as threatening. Regardless of who they really are in the world, whether or not they are socially contributive or parasitic, within the family the heterosexuals are higher for one reason only—they are straight. Many people unconsciously rely on this elevation based on heterosexuality, marriage, and parenthood to feel comfortable and loved. If the contrast was not there with homosexual family members and these were not the grounds for love and approval, they would be in the same boat within the family that they are in the larger social world. It is a desperate need that cannot be filled by anything else in life. Why would straight people ever give it up?

  Understanding what is at stake for them makes participation in familial homophobia far less benign than a simple conformity or blind imitation. Given that the rewards for heterosexuality within the family are so great, it is far more likely that the ways in which each straight person enacts, profits from, and replicates homophobia within the family are proactive. Each person makes decisions, on some level, about which forms of homophobia to participate in, which forms to instigate, which forms are too dramatic. They are constantly selecting and deciding.

  As we look for a more sophisticated and realistic assessment of the functions and construction of homophobia, I recommend the work of Dr. Martin Kantor, a psychiatrist and the author of Homophobia: Description, Development and Dynamics of Gay Bashing (Praeger, 1998). Dr. Kantor clearly articulates the selection process involved in the implementation of homophobia and the deliberate choice of tactics to achieve self-elevation by diminishing the gay person:

  Homophobes abuse gays and lesbians for different reasons in different ways and to different degrees, each reflecting underlying personality problems. . . . Homophobes with a psychopathic antisocial personality disorder bash gays and lesbians for personal gain. . . . Psychopathic homophobes are guiltless people who shamelessly externalize blame so that they can get the good things to which they feel entitled. . . . They can diminish the standing of others to increase their chances of getting something . . . and being manipulative by nature they know how to cleverly excuse their gay bashing with various tricks of logic, to convince themselves and others that their mission is admirable. . . . Perversely dependant homophobes even want their victims to love them. . . . Sadistic homophobes prosper and thrive best when their competition is wounded and crippled. . . . Passive aggressive homophobes withhold. . . . They remain unavailable in time of need. . . . Passive aggressives install glass ceilings. . . . This rational, subtle and indirect hostility is actually the most dangerous and destructive kind because it is the most difficult to identify. . . . Narcissism gives homophobes the sense of self-importance they need to feel comfortable and personally entitled. . . . It helps them suppress their own often considerable and considerably obvious defects. Feeling superior to their victims, they can proceed to persecute them comfortably and without qualms.