To be a homophobe in
2014 is, increasingly, to find oneself on the fast track to social scorn. In an
environment of growing acceptance, we condemn homophobic feelings, particularly
in men, because we think they come from inside the individual and are thus his
full responsibility. A man who says hateful things about gays is “backward.”
He’s protecting his social status, or maybe he’s secretly gay himself. He needs
to grow up or come out already.
However, the continued
existence of homophobia—despite the obvious downsides—raises questions about
its basic nature: Do psychological theories like those above really explain why
gayness, specifically, evokes such fear, the kind that can sometimes even lead
to violent speech and action? Do they account for why homophobia is such an
easy bulwark against masculine insecurity? Why does coming out seem so
impossible to some men? The only way to answer these questions is to stop
thinking of homophobia as a personal choice and understand it as the inevitable
and deliberate result of the culture in which American men are raised.
Clearly, men in
America have grown up learning to be scared of gayness. But not only for the
reasons we typically think—not only, in the end, because of religion,
insecurity about their own sexuality, or a visceral aversion to other men’s
penises. The truth is, they’re afraid because heterosexuality is so fragile.
Heterosexuality’s
power lies in perception, not physical truth—as long as people think you’re
exclusively attracted to the right gender, you’re golden. But perception is a
precarious thing; a “zero-tolerance” policy has taught men that the way people
think of them can change permanently with one slip, one little kiss or
too-intimate friendship. And once lost, it can be nearly impossible to reclaim.
Put another way, the
zero-tolerance rule means that if a man makes one “wrong” move—kisses another
man in a moment of drunken fun, say—he is immediately assumed to be gay. Women
have a certain amount of freedom to play with their sexuality (mostly because
society has a hard time believing in lesbian sex at all). Male sexuality, on
the other hand, is understood as unidirectional. Once young men realize they
are gay, they become A Gay Person. We don’t hear about gay men discovering an
interest in women later in life, and we rarely believe men when they say they
are bisexual—the common, if erroneous, wisdom is that any man who says he is bi
is really just gay and hasn’t admitted it yet.
The result of all this
is that men are not allowed “complex” sexualities; once the presumption of
straightness has been shattered, a dude is automatically gay. That narrative
does not allow much freedom to explore even fleeting same-sex attractions
without a permanent commitment. I knew a guy who, straight in high school,
hooked up with dudes for the first semester of college. He was then in a
monogamous relationship with a woman for the rest of college; in the weeks
before graduation, I would still hear people express confusion about the
existence of their relationship.
The zero-tolerance
policy is legitimately scary, then, not just because it sticks you with a
label, but also because it erases a lifetime of straightness. One semester of
experimentation was worth more than every other hook-up and romance of this
guy’s life—both before and afterward.
Indeed, such erasure
is scary even if homosexuality itself isn’t a bad thing. Even if religion and Esquire didn’t teach men to be scared
of each other’s bodies, they would still be afraid of the way a brush with
gayness can so suddenly erase the rest of their sexuality. With so much on the
line, it’s no surprise that men take up the job of policing this boundary
themselves, lest it be policed by someone else, to their detriment.
It’s worth noting that
men confront their fear with brilliant creativity. High-schoolers accuse each
other, their activities, and even objects of being gay with precisely the
zero-tolerance attitude that they themselves are navigating. A popular game in
high school was “fag tag,” where boys slap each other’s packages with the back
of their hands. In college they played chicken, where two guys each slide
their hand up the other one’s inner thigh. Whoever gets freaked out first
loses—or wins, really. These games aren’t just grounded in disgust with homosex;
they are playing out exactly what society has taught men about heterosexuality:
One wrong move, and you’ll be permanently marked.
Homophobia, then, is
precisely a fear, and one that these men are not at all foolish for
entertaining. The behavior it engenders is a perceptive response to a sick
system, rather than a sickness itself. That’s why I don’t hold a grudge against
the kids in high school who said “fag,” or the occasional bartender who makes a
weird comment about my date—they’re understandably more scared of me than I am
of them.
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