The Tolerance of Discrimination: Homophobia and Homosexuality

    When I was a kid, the boys around the neighborhood would always get together in somebody’s backyard and play games. Tag, touch football, soccer, baseball, play-sword fighting, cops and robbers, and any other variation involving good guys and bad. The theme of the game wasn’t as important as the playing of it, and we rarely had any sort of concrete ideologies about rules or whether or not something rang realistic. It was mostly just as you probably are imagining it: out of breath yelling, endless bursts of running, laughing so hard it hurts, and lots of prepubescent ego. One of these games stands out more than others as I look back, however. The one where one of the smaller boys ran around with a football, and all the rest of the neighborhood kids chased after him, trying to tackle him to the ground. They called it “Smear the Queer”, but it wasn’t long before some of the kids were simply yelling ‘f****t’ at whoever was ‘it’.
    “Get the f****t! Smear the queer!”
    We’ve all witnessed homophobia in society at some point in our lives. Especially if you’re a male in America, you can almost certainly remember a time in the locker room or at the schoolyard where someone was being taunted for supposedly being gay. Whether from a threatened masculinity, fear of another’s sexuality, or other more abstract factors, tracing homophobia’s sources can be tricky, and you have to know where to look.

    The Men and the Boys
    One of the things we hear so often about as we navigate our adolescence is the endless rhetoric of “peer pressure”. We’re warned even before we have a chance to think for ourselves that there are imminent threats in our future, and that we must not fall victim to them. In fact, much of our teen years are spent hearing about all of the things we can’t do instead of all those we can. So already, teenagers are subtly cornered into a position of apprehension around each other.
    Add to this the boundless hormonal surging and increased testosterone in young developing boys, and a catalyst emerges. Most male teens are trying to establish who they are as individuals, and in many cases, also establish their level of dominance in relation to other males. Make the civilized behavior claim all you like, we all know that young boys can be certifiably beast-like with each other at times. Taunting and demeaning one another becomes part of this, and can even help to build up a “thick skin” as they learn to best the former’s accusation and not take petty comments to heart.
    But what happens when this kind of taunting turns less innocent, and becomes more mean spirited? Making fun of someone in grade school can quickly turn from, “He’s stupid”, to “He’s gay”. And notice how calling someone gay immediately becomes an insult in this fashion. This kind of nonchalance about language can lay a foundation to make it easier to discriminate later in life.
    By the time these kinds of boys get to high school, they may simply view gay as being entirely undesirable because of the social stigma they’ve witnessed all their lives, and subsequently find anyone they meet who is gay undesirable as well, at least at face value. If their family is Christian, and follows the usual tenet that homosexuality is a sin, this will only strengthen their resolve. Now it becomes easier to see homosexual peers as lower and less human than themselves, and also to justify their torment.
    When taunting and bullying cross the line, we get to read about it in the headlines. Most of us can still remember the horrible brutality that befell Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. And while his death was a terrible waste, it stands as an example that represents countless others maimed or killed because of their sexuality. And in some countries, like Nigeria or Somalia, there is even a death penalty for simply being gay.
    
    Homophobes Are Homos
    Most of us have heard the claim that someone who’s homophobic is so because of fear of their own latent homosexuality. They discriminate against and distance themselves from other gays so as not to call attention to the fact that they themselves are gay. This is easy to shrug off, but a study by University of Georgia professors, printed under the title Is Homosexuality Associated with Homosexual Arousal? in the AMA’s Abnormal Psychology Journal of 1996 shows hard evidence to support this.
    In an experiment, Dr’s Henry Adams, Lester Wright, and Bethany Lohr set out to find whether men who were homophobic secretly harbored homosexual desires. Groups of men were screened to determine if they were homophobic by filing out the Kinsey Heterosexual¾Homosexual Rating Scale, the Index of Homophobia, and the Aggression Questionnaire. After determining a group of thirty five males homophobes, and a set of twenty nine heterosexual men to use as a control, groups of five were shown homosexual pornographic images while wearing a plethysmagraph, a device used to measure penile circumference. Both groups were then also shown heterosexual pornography to compare.
    In the homophobic group, when shown the suggestive homosexual material, only twenty percent had no erection. Twenty-six percent had a moderate erection, while an astonishing fifty-four percent had a strong erection while viewing. As comparison, in the heterosexual control, sixty-six percent had no erection, ten percent had a moderate erection, and twenty-four percent had a strong erection.
    What’s more, the homophobic group expressed continued denial of homosexual feelings even while their bodies betrayed that sentiment.
    While this might not be a conclusive test, and certainly not an all encompassing one, the professors at the University of Georgia bring up some excellent points, and at least help in clarifying that homophobia can indeed be caused by a deep self-hatred among latent homosexuals.
    A more dangerous extension of this kind of hypocrisy can be found when homophobes who have concealed and are ashamed of their own sexuality take public office. Outrage, the 2009 documentary by Kirby Dick, explores conservative politicians who lead gay double-lives while helping to stop civil rights polices advantages to the homosexual community. To combat this most supreme form of duplicity, the gay rights group OutRage! has advocated the outings of those in high positions who help to inhibit gay rights, while being gay themselves.
      In many instances, especially in the cases of these heavily religious leaning conservatives, this double-sidedness stems from a fear of one’s own morality, as dictated by religion.

    Thou Shalt Not Be Objective
    An easy argument to use against homosexuality is the one of, “The Bible says it’s wrong”. Countless religious leaders point to this as the most obvious and concrete reason that homosexuality is wrong, and even sinful. But they forget¾or simply do not check up on¾the fact that the Bible has been translated from first Aramaic, to Hebrew, to Greek, to Latin, and so on and so forth long before the words we see in English print were considered infallible. They fail to realize that language can be extremely subjective, with word meanings and connotations changing drastically over time.
    Take the word “gay” for example…
    On top of this, the author who is translating the work, and trying to best appropriate a word from one language for the word of another, makes his own judgments and biases on what word is best. I ran into something like this as I was growing up. I was taught English and German together when I first began to speak, but sometimes had a hard time expressing a word in English in German, because sometimes there simply wasn’t an equivalent. For example, the German word for airplane, “Flugzeug” (Pronounced: Floog-tsoiych) isn’t one that can be literally translated to English, because if you break it down to the two words that make it up, you get Flug(flying), and  Zeug(thing or stuff). So what means “airplane” in German means “flying stuff” in English. Now apply that logic to something as abstract as human sexuality, and you’ll begin to understand what I’m getting at.
    The late Reverend Rembert Truluck spent his life devoted to the translations¾and mistranslations¾of the Bible. He dismisses the two most commonly pointed to passages of Leviticus that seem to forbid homosexuality. The first is Leviticus
18:22: "You shall not lie with a male as those who lie with a female; it is an abomination.", and the second is Leviticus 20:13: "If a man lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination and they shall surely be put to death. “Both of these verses,” Truluck says, “refer not to homosexuals but to heterosexuals who took part in the Baal fertility rituals in order to guarantee good crops and healthy flocks. No hint at sexual orientation or homosexuality is even implied.  The word abomination in Leviticus was used for anything that was considered to be religiously unclean or associated with idol worship."
    Add to this the fact that most other authoritative finger wagging in Leviticus is ignored today, and the argument that homosexuality is condemned in the Bible begins to lose steam. For instance, the long list of animals forbidden to be eaten: rabbits, pigs, shellfish, such as oysters, shrimp, lobsters, crabs, and clams. They are all considered abominations. Or that for a month or two after birth(depending on the sex of the child), a woman is “unclean”, and certain animals must be sacrificed as offerings to cleanse sin. Or how about in Leviticus 19:19, where garments made of two fabrics are forbidden? Guess all your poly-cotton blends are out, huh?
    It might also be pertinent to point out the fact that many of these texts were originally written thousands of years ago. We look at them now through the scope of a scientifically inclined culture, where most people in developed countries have at least a basic understanding of what sexual orientation is. Most passages where the modern word “homosexual” has been quietly, and quite erroneously, inserted have more to do with warnings against having sex with a male Pagan prostitute than with a person’s sane, sexual preference.
    The bottom line here is that the religious right will use and single out these passages for their own means, as they do with much of the Bible, quoting selectively and bending the context to serve their own ends. A person’s ideology will play a strong role in how they interpret the Bible, which is how we can have people like Truluck show us from a logical state how these verses have lost their original meanings, and at the same time have people like Fred Phelps waving signs that says “God Hates F**s” and pointing to Leviticus as justification.
    
    A Virus of Sin
    And from the tail of religion comes one of the more disturbing results of religious homophobia, the so-called “Gay Cure”. An argument that never seems to lose any of its blow-hard steam, is that homosexuality is a disease, and must be cured in those who are infected. In fact, the American Psychological Association had homosexuality on the books as a mental disorder until 1974, and there are still many groups aiming to “cure” it that are still thriving almost forty years later, spreading messages that can confuse, shame, and even harm someone struggling with their sexuality.
    In 1976 Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper were two of the founding members of such a group, a Christian organization called Exodus International with one main purpose¾to cure homosexuals of their “perversion”. They spent years working together to promote Exodus, and took many homosexuals through “Reparative Therapy”(long sessions of psychologist-guided therapy with heavy emphasis on prayer and repentance). But while working together, the pair discovered something quite unexpected had happened: they’d fallen in love with each other.
    The two left the group, and switched their focus to spreading acceptance of gays, becoming celebrated spokesmen for the gay community¾and a bit of a blemish on the success rate of Exodus. The 1993 documentary One Nation Under God focuses on Bussee and Cooper’s story, as well as the “Ex-Gay” movement, and declares that homosexuality cannot be cured simply because it is not a disease. The film also shows its audience the many methods attempted over the years to try and “cure” a homosexual.
    While still ludicrous, many of these techniques have at least become less medieval in today’s age, but are still detrimental to the subject’s development and comfort with their own sexuality. In the days of Aversion Therapy, most popular in the mid sixties, men with homosexual “urges” were shown a series of films or pictures of attractive men. When the subject began to feel aroused by the images he was shown, strong electric shocks would be supplied to him, sometimes directly to the genitals. Not surprisingly, fifty percent of men that went through testing no longer acted on their homosexual urges, but it doesn’t take much of an imagination to realize this was from fear of more “therapy”, not because they were cured.  
    But even in more modern techniques of these curial “therapies”, the effects are still be harmful to the psyche of someone who thinks it’s wrong for to be gay. Interviewees that had gone through the more humane Reparative Therapy at Exodus had deep psychological scars. Ned Lichty found himself becoming more self-destructive, feeling the guilt about who he was and how he couldn’t change it piling up inside himself. Stephani Cort became suicidal from repenting so often and so fervently, until making herself physically ill with stress. One man, left unnamed, became so ashamed of his urges that he slashed his genitals with a razor and poured drain cleaner in the wounds.
    Bussee and Cooper stand as perhaps the most obvious evidence that homosexuality cannot be cured in an individual. The idea is as asinine as trying to cure someone of their predisposition to be left handed, and just as irrelevant. Homosexuality has been documented in numerous other species, including swans, pigeons, ducks, dolphins, elephants, lions, sheep, and even insects. And interestingly, the Bonobo Chimpanzee, our closest genetic relative, has regularly shown that it’s species exhibits not only homosexuality, but also masturbation, prostitution, and even fetishism.
    So homosexuality most definitely is not a disease, but a natural occurrence found in many other species of life on Earth. And any argument for the opposite is usually one formed from ignorance or blatant denial of scientific fact.

    The End of the Rainbow
    What should be implicit by now is the fact that homosexuality is nothing different or more extreme than having brown eyes or being lactose-intolerant. But some sects of our society continue to try and eradicate something which cannot be gotten rid of. Intolerance and hatred for gays can be traced to everything from faulty religious doctrine to fear of one’s own hidden desires, and there’s no shortage of other factors contributing to the continual persecution of gays and lesbians. But while hate mongers like Fred Phelps and the like persist in preaching idiocy, gays and lesbians are making headway in their battle to be recognized as equal citizens with equal rights.
    Many states now recognize same-sex partnerships, with a few having actual legal gay marriage on the books. Homosexual sexual education is also  now being taught in some school districts across the country, including Maryland’s Montgomery county. There is more tolerance for gays in the military, public office, and in the workforce. To completely stamp out homophobia, though, it must be made clear to everyone with animosity and fear towards gays that they are no different than anyone else. The ignorant must learn to accept the fact that homosexuality is not going anywhere; it will never disappear because it’s always been there. And when we can finally stand together, without hate or animosity for one another, we will be as joined and diverse as the colors of a rainbow.

Reviews

[Paul James]

I know this essay was published a year ago, but every bit if it is still relevant, and the world still needs articles like this. I appreciate how you touched on multiple aspects without going into tangents or personal rants, and presented logical arguments with solid contentions. I'll be sure to share this with a few LGB's in need of some support right now.

[Sammie]

Very well written and highly commendable. Much controversy surrounds homosexuality and their rights it's refreshing to read something so honest and in my opinion right.

[Struggler]

I most enjoyed the wit of the paragraph titles and the story in the beginning drawing in the reader.