Homophobia - Last Test of Tolerance

My view on social ills that the society chooses to turn a blind eye on.

I have struggled to come up with a title for this article. I came up with a couple of ideas from “Taboo Identity,” “Homophobia & Society,” to “It is Healthier to be Gay than Depressed,” but rather chose to go with the more suited title “Homophobia �" Last Test of Tolerance.” (NOTE: The names of the characters have been changed to protect the identities of those personified in this article.) I have had a lot of help from former lecturer of the University of Botswana Leonard Bloom, a professor in Psychology.

...HOMOPHOBIA �" LAST TEST OF TOLERANCE...

I was much upset by the ordeal a young man by the name Sello had to go through. He told me that his father had thrown him out of the family home, “Your behaviour is a disgrace to me and anyone in this family, you shame yourself, you are no son of mine,” he shouted to the boy who had no choice but to leave to seek refuge and shelter away from the only home and family he had known all his life. This young man was wantonly and angrily destroyed, yet his behaviour is without fault.

I have grown to know this young man as responsible; a good son, brother and citizen, gentle and generous. He was cast out by a father who didn’t care whether his sun survived or failed in his young life, only because his son is gay. Sello is brave: he has tumbled into a depression but soon after he picked himself up and began to piece together the fragments of his broken life. I do admire his guts.

Sello is not alone: there are many others just like him out there. Every day in a homophobic community or society gay men and women (and metro-sexual people, being mistaken for homosexuals) are attacked by their families, communities, churches and all sorts of moralistic busy bodies who say or hint that because �" and only because someone is or merely suspected of being gay, lesbian or transgendered, he or she is somehow ‘abnormal’ or ‘corrupt’ or even ‘wicked,’ ‘Gay? They ought to be punished to give up their wrongful ways. Gay? They should be made to undergo medical or social treatment to put right their sick minds. Gay? We who aren’t the tiniest bit gay don’t care if they are forced to live on the edge of society in an imposed psychological ghetto. And if they feel depressed, isolated, wasted and always under suspicion �" of what? I ask �" it’s obvious that it is their fault. They are different and it’s their fault because they are gay.

Note well �" homophobes split humanity into ‘us’ normal people and them ‘them’ gay people, thus gay and lesbian people have to live warily very much like ‘black people’ in a racist ‘white’ society or like women in a prejudiced male dominated society. This heartless habit of sticking labels on people forces gays and lesbians to always be alert to being ill-treated because of their sexuality. How can they safely live as individuals with their own talents, skills and contributions to society if they are treated as outsiders?

Allow me to share an everyday situation; I was with Sello and Kitso in a supermarket when I became of comments at the cash point uttered by the sales representatives. Kitso was in tears of frustration and rage as Sello was trying to get retribution from the store manager, politely but firmly. Kitso had been jeered at and insulted by the two female employees. Why? Kitso is young, gay and mildly effeminate, beautiful and well mannered. The onlookers were silent and showed Kitso neither sympathy nor support, much less did they show indignation against the sales rep’s outrageous behaviour. The manager was sympathetic and apologetic though (which is kind of expected since we were unsatisfied customers). I was angry so I stormed out of the store �" there was little we could do besides comfort Kitso.

FROM VICIOUS NONSENSE TO BETTER SENSE

Let us not forget that some moves towards more civilised laws, practices and attitudes have been fought for and won. As long ago as 1892 at the funeral of the poet Walt Whitman, the orator Robert G. Ingersoll quoted Whitman: “Not until the sun excludes you will I exclude you.” Whitman was and still is the poet of humanity, of sympathy. In April 1935 Sigmund Freud, one of the greatest psychologists, had a letter from a despairing American mother. Her son was homosexual and she begged for Sigmund’s advice. In these days the word ‘gay’ was not commonly used for ‘homosexuality.’ Freud was not shocked, nor did he collapse into Victorian outbursts of disapproval. He replied to reassure her �" and others, gay or straight �" that being gay, ‘is assuredly no advantage, but is not something to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function... Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been or are homosexuals... Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, e.t.c... It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too...‘ In 2010 I would add that homosexuality has as many forms and variations as heterosexuality. Neither can be reduced to crude sexual passion. Freud did not offer a promise for treatment: no illness, no treatment.

Come to 1974 the influential and conservative American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Why? Gay behaviour is a variant of what we would usually call normal sexual behaviour and is not a disorder to be treated. There is no such thing as a gay personality; a gay man or woman can be nice or nasty, bright or stupid, loving or solitary, a thousand things and their opposites just like a non-gay person. Being gay does not involve a psychopathology �" alcoholism is a pathological state and far more trouble to the society and medical profession. There is no way to distinguish gay or lesbian people from the rest of the world: all that distinguishes gay people is their orientation and that is an individual’s lifestyle which might be forced on him or her by a psychological predisposition or by social influences. And anyway an individual’s life style is their own affair. It’s not madness if one is gay.

In the United Kingdom, after three years of debate, the Wolfenden Committee issued its report in 1957 that recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults should no longer be criminal and despite cries from conservative churchmen, politicians and lawyers, the law was changed without further ado. Society did not sink into a morass of immorality as the lawyer Lord Devlin seemed to expect.

And now in 2010 many Christians, like e.g. the Quakers and some major protestant churches in the United States of America (USA), even some otherwise conservative churches in Africa seem to be accepting freely (without falling into wickedness), gay couples and individuals. Even a handful of bishops favour change! But, alas, Islam is obstinately homophobic though I have no reason to believe that believers are exempt from human passions and relations.

 In 2009, in India, the world’s largest democracy, a high court has overturned a law from the colonial past that prohibited homosexual acts �" a law that was a violation of fundamental human rights. Of course the Hindu, Muslim and Christian hurried to denounce the laws; it would, they cried, harm the Indian family and traditional values. Which ones, how and why, was only explained by retreating to traditional prejudices.

South Africa since its liberation in 1994 has abandoned sexually discriminating laws, and most attitudes to gays and lesbians are accepting to differences, tolerant and a far cry from evil laws as the Immorality Acts.

The average homophobic person is often both aggressive yet scared of allowing gays and lesbians to be like any other citizen and the more educated homophobe might agree with Lord Devlin’s nervous views. He wrote in his book Enforcement of Morals in 1979 that, “a recognised morality is as necessary to society’s existence as a recognised government,” (page 13), and continued that, ‘it is then difficult to alter the law without giving the impression that moral judgment is being weakened...’ (Page 81). So never change anything, even evil laws that enforce racism and slavery or that criminalise gay acts or even jail children or flog them. The moral standings of legislatures that abolish homophobic laws or the violence of Sharia law would, I believe, strengthened than weakened. If homophobic laws and practices were abolished people with different orientations could be free and encouraged to learn from childhood to accept ones differences, welcomes each other’s common humanity and work together in the common task of survival.

Unfortunately for national debate homophobia is justified �" rather dubiously �" by referring to Leviticus 20:13, where there is a long list of offences that deserve death. Some guidance this is! Among the items of extreme wickedness are cursing your parents, adultery, working on the Sabbath, marrying a woman and her daughter. And in number 15, a man was stoned to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath and a new bride who could not prove she was a virgin was stoned t death. Amidst those and other offences was a man sleeping with another man. Homosexuality? How many young men/women have to sleep together because they have neither room enough nor beds in Africa and Asia, now and in biblical times? No one knows. Nor should one care or expect that poverty compels the evil or overcrowding, which is the real and urgent social problem.

EVEN THE FAITHFUL GAY

If I go to a church, a chapel, a mosque or synagogue I have no idea if the person praying next to me is gay or straight, nor do I care. Nor should I care. Unlike gays in Nazi concentration camps, gays and lesbians do not wear pink triangles; without these signs how would one have recognised these outcasts? The constitution of South Africa includes a provision of a Bill of Rights, ‘5.10. Human Dignity: everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected. A person’s dignity should be respected, protected and encouraged by society’s laws. Being gay or lesbian is not a sin.

The philosopher, John Macmurrey, was very much concerned with what faith means for the faithful, and like Jesus, he believed that Christianity was not solely for the salvation of Christians but for the whole world. No person was to be excluded, because all people were members of a natural group. Even gay people! He saw Christianity as a revolutionary religion that sought, however imperfectly, for the goal of a world community that respected individuals. It sought to set people free, except those who would not grant freedom to others. Fanatics, fundamentalists, evangelists, set gays free! What is there to fear from homosexuals?

Ask, if anyone’s life is made any better by homophobic laws, fears and practices? Ask, what is real about being gay? What is fancy? Try honestly to grape for what you really fear and expect and ask why you are fearful.

The Quakers have long since accepted gays and lesbians as brothers and sisters because ‘we recognise that many homosexual people play a full part in the life of society, of friends... We hope that our discussions this week (in July 2009) will help us recognise in love, the friend whose experience is not our own and will help us forward in exploring what true equality means.’ God, the Quakers believe, is in everyone.

A dilemma that homosexuals face from homophobic Christian groups or sects is how to oppose the heady emotional attractiveness of fundamentalist religious faiths that deny others their right to have different ways of life �" however harmless these ways �" and that insist it is their God given duty to compel non-believers to believe and change their ways. This anti-freedom has encouraged violence against gays because it gives support to societies to act violently, punitively and rejectingly with a pseudo-approval that is not part of genuine Christianity, Judaism, Islam and/or other discriminating cultures.

A HOMOPHOBIC SOCIETY IS A SICK SOCIETY

When slavery existed in the United States of America it was often said that there were types of mental disorders that were found only among African Americans. If they ran away more than twice they were said to be “insane,” they were affected by ‘an obsessive desire for freedom.’ A society can even now with no shame exist as though some of its members were rejects: either they were bad or mad, hard to understand and therefore hard to live with, or even too dangerous to mingle with freely. Even now in many countries, if you are gay or lesbian, non-gays feel endangered. Gays may be punished or put to death as in Iran, or treated as mentally ill. In either case being openly gay puts a person at risk of going through a rough time.

Also children, women and men are senselessly robbed of a part of their identity �" a part of their self. One is forbidden to live as a true self and has to make-do with a False-Self that may keep one out of harm’s way. This description damages self-esteem and self-confidence. It forces the individual to be unable to rely that their family or community is not going to punish, mock or reject them �" they are treated as less of the human being they are. If one is forced to fear that one’s identity is likely to be stigmatized, misunderstood or insulted then individuals have the right to feel or express their hurt feelings, anger and disappointment, and they may become morbidly defensive.

You do not have to be openly insulted like Kitso nor assaulted like Sello to be made to feel like an outcast. Some time ago on a local radio interview, anti-homophobic sentiments were expressed tactically and moderately by two of the speakers. Yet the radio administrators were so nervous that the usual repeat was abstractly cancelled. The so dangerous topic! What it feels like to be gay, its experiences and challenges.

A homophobic individual, family, community or society lives in a world of imaginary dangers as though disturbed or paranoid and fancies the world is corrupt by wicked fairies and witches. How this world comes about in a disturbed mind is a mystery, not always clear, but characterised in a delusion that this group or this individual is a danger, in some way responsible for ones misfortune. Misfortune? Because of the uncertainties, the blame for what is going wrong is put on any convenient target. The Nazi’s blamed the Jew’s and murdered many of them, and condemned other so called evil plotting groups such as gays. Children seem to rarely have such crazy fears and hates. You have to learn to hate, adults with such crazy fears and hates teach children to be fearful and hateful. Force the stigmatized group to act as a group and there is an obvious target �" Jew’s, gays... there is no shortage of targets to blame for what is feared or has gone wrong. Moreover, religion and politics can always invent new ideas, excuses and encouragements to harm the target group.

I want to live as me, not as a member, whether or not I feel that way, as a gay person, a Jew, a communist, a traditionalist, a sangoma or whatever those with power or authority find convenient to lump me into with others.

For the homophobic individuals and groups within politics or religion, nothing is real. For them the stresses, poverty, inequality, ignorance and intolerance of the real world is side tracked, ignored, and a narrow gaze is fixed into the imaginary issues on whom and what is being gay or lesbian and what can be done about them.

MYTHS THE HOMOPHOBICS BELIEVE

Have you ever heard the myth, the story that Africans were created by God to be slaves �" a myth for Christians who needed to justify the slavery that enriched them? Or the myth that the Jew’s and the communists are mysteriously in control of the world �" a myth that for Nazi racist used to justify mass murder? Or the myth that being gay or lesbian is particularly immoral and will destroy the family?

Human beings, alone or in communities, live by believing myths and not challenging them. We hide from ourselves whatever upsets, scares or disgusts us, and we cling to ideas that we hope might help us to feel protected. Reality is often unpleasant, hard to make sense of and painful to face. However what upsets us does not easily vanish. We often have to make the upsetting vanish and so we live in a dense forest of myths among untrue but comforting beliefs that are without foundation �" we live with dreams and nightmares that have hidden meanings, where figments or inventions, fantasies that a community or family may hold and that offer illusion that we are in control of our world, of our inner troubling feelings.

Let us get some myths out of the way.

 

Firstly: Being gay or lesbian is not ‘unnatural’ any more than being two metres tall is ‘unnatural.’ Unusual, possibly, but is only a problem if sufficient people or the law decides it’s a problem. Human beings are unusual in many ways; Thandiwe is left handed and she has a preference to dating men who are much younger than her.

 

 Sex may be good and appropriate for making babies but that does not mean that non�"procreation sex is unnatural. What’s unnatural at this or that age, in different cultures with their different values depends on what people treasure and decide, however narrow, intolerant, tolerant or accepting it may be. And like everyone else, gays and lesbians make different sexual choices, and among them �" like heterosexuality �" will be companionship, love concern and understanding.

 

Secondly: Being gay is not contrary to family values, indeed they are often anxious to create long lasting families with a child. They, members of the family, of course have their share of adultery, abuse, pornography, abortions, divorce and so forth. HIV & AIDS is now largely a heterosexual danger, has there ever been a community in which families were destroyed by gays and therefore society was seriously damaged? Never!

 

Thirdly: Homosexuals are not willingly locked into a closed and sneaky world of their own. They are no more or less sociable than heterosexuals, but in a homophobic community, society or family have good reason to be wary. Just like heterosexuals, homosexuals are personally different in a thousand ways. Tumie may be quiet and reserved, her brother Prince may be jolly and bouncy �" both may be straight or gay. If society is not homophobic then gays and lesbians will be as open, varied and sociable as anyone else. Like heterosexuals, homosexuals need emotional and social space, security, support and a sane society.

 

Fourthly: Gays do not see the world through gay glasses, unless families and societies force them to in their own defence. If gay people are forced to defend themselves by living within a group for identity, they then have to adopt a second best identity. It’s safer. It’s impoverished and shrivelled. The wider society should be thankful that many gay people manage to be creative, professional, outgoing, live cooperating and loving lives despite their anxieties and stresses they are forced to deal with.

 

The personal is, of course, political! In many societies gay people have united their struggle to be accepted as individuals (for instance, LEGABIBO �" Lesbians Gays and Bisexuals of Botswana) with others who have to fight for their rights. In South Africa, for example in the 1980’s, Simon Nkole was both a gay and an activist and as an active member of the African National Congress, (ANC) he was charged with treason and could have been jailed or hanged. His ‘gay glasses’ sharpened his perception of the evils of apartheid. In the USA, the writer James Baldwin devoted his life to actively opposing racism, homophobia and poverty. He reminds us all that skin colour is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality �" men and women would be leaders who ought to have known better, decide, believe, behave and encourage others to behave as though an individual’s sexual orientation or skin colour describes them so adequately that that is all you need to know about them. There is no reason what-so-ever to suggest heterosexuals are more fitted to make laws and invent gay values than are the Sello’s and Kitso’s out there. If any of my children (if I do chose to have any) grows up to be gay or lesbian I will be completely unworried. I will be happy if they are happy and share their happiness and mine with anyone.

 

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

 

Most important; don’t allow society to force you to accept the lie that being gay is a sin. Apartheid and American racism used education and force to try to get Africans to believe that they were rubbish and always would be. Racism and homophobia are sins!

 

Gays and lesbians carry with them �" like heterosexuals �" questions that only individuals can answer themselves. What are we doing, however small we fear it might be, in our everyday lives to challenge heterosexual attempts to demean, bully, persecute or make gays feel inferior or unworthy? How have we and friends talked about what we can do to counter the homophobic atmosphere in which we live, protest with passion on the streets or elsewhere... As individuals what can we do, what do we do, to make life bearable without timidly acting as though gay people were invisible.

 

Gay people have to be humanists who stand up for their rights, human rights for groups or anyone suffering at the grim of poverty, stigma & discrimination or dispossession of being cast off. The irrationality and sins of homophobia must never be allowed to win argument. Alas, the devil is always eloquent and claims to be a Good Samaritan, but the prophet Martin Luther (not King), some 600 years ago had good advice, “If the devil will not yield to the texts of the scriptures jeer and flaunt him for he cannot bear scorn.” The devilish nonsense of homophobia still needs to be jeered, flaunted and scorned.

Gay people do not beg a homophobic society for love. Gay people ask, with dignity and patience to be trusted and respected as individuals, treated with justice and fairness and welcomed for all that they can do for the betterment of the world like any other heterosexual person. They ask for no more than to be allowed and encouraged to be themselves and to live freely. It is healthier to embrace your true self, a self that does not harm anyone, than to be depressed. Being gay does not spread diseases, it does not affect developments or the economy negatively, it does not create poverty nor does it kill people. It’s time for that move towards change and tolerance.

 

Article by: L. K. Senome