[content warning: slurs]
Homophobia has a tremendous effect on the lives of many heterosexual people.
In a lot of our culture, being gay is really really bad. Fortunately, we have become compassionate; even social conservatives, more often than not, will express some pity for the struggle that ‘same-sex-attracted’ people go through. But while people disagree about how this compassion ought to be expressed, there is a general consensus among straight people than gayness is a bad thing to be.
How that consensus negatively affects gay, lesbian, and bisexual people is obvious. But it also hurts straight people!
Fear of being gay is a powerful tool to police people into social conformity. I highly recommend the ethnography Dude, You’re A Fag, which is about how fear of being seen as gay is used to police boys into gender role conformity in a high-school context. Caring about clothes, failing to express appropriate attraction to women, not being interested in or good at sports, and caring too much about other men are all policed through the ‘fag’ discourse. (Seriously, though, read it, my summary doesn’t do it justice.)
One of the things I want to point out about the fag discourse is that the boys who use the word ‘fag’ articulate an anti-homophobia position. (This is true to my experience of high school as well.)
Jabes, a Filipino senior, told me, “I actually say it [fag] quite a lot, except for when I’m in the company of an actual homosexual person. Then I try not to say it at all. But when I’m just hanging out with my friends I’ll be like, ‘Shut up, I don’t want you hear you any more, you stupid fag.’ ” Similarly J. L. compared homosexuality to a disability, saying there was “no way” he’d call an actually gay guy a fag because “there’s people who are the retarded people who nobody wants to associate with. I’ll be so nice to those guys, and I hate it when people make fun of them. It’s like, ‘Bro do you realize that they can’t help that?’ And then there’s gay people. They were born that way.”
The thought process here is something like “being gay is bad (as intellectual disability is bad) and it is bad to be like gay people. Actual gay people can’t help it, so you should be nice to them and not rub it in their faces. But for you, a straight person, to be like a gay person is the worst thing.”
I do not think this thought process is reserved only for such homophobic environments as the average high school. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, I notice this thought process. There are many straight people who would never be so gauche as to call someone a fag, but they still think, in their heart of hearts, that becoming gay would be a disaster.
I notice as well many straight people who legitimately don’t seem to think that way: they are only attracted to people of a certain gender, which is fine, and other people are attracted to people of a different gender or all genders or to no one at all, which is also fine, and if they happened to join a different category it might be inconvenient (for instance, if they were married), but it wouldn’t be in and of itself a bad thing. (That is different from being “secure in your heterosexuality”: being secure in your heterosexuality means being so sure you’re straight that you can do gay things, while these people simply don’t care whether they’re gay or not.) And I think that those people are, frankly, a lot happier.
For the most obvious example, not worrying about whether you’re gay or not opens up a lot of sexual horizons. I don’t just mean “you can hook up with boys if you happen to find a boy you’re attracted to,” either. It makes it a lot easier to date trans people, because straight men don’t have to worry that being attracted to a trans woman means they’re secretly gay, or that being attracted to a trans man also means they’re secretly gay, but in a different way this time. And they don’t have to have the long tedious freakout about whether pegging means they’re gay.
But I also feel like it opens up a lot of tremendous freedom to be gender-non-conforming. If you want, your wardrobe can contain eyeliner and skirts and bright colors! It is totally possible! (This is naturally an intersection with transmisogyny, but I’m sort of eliding transmisogyny in this post– people with a gender identity have a perfectly good reason to care whether or not they’re trans that has absolutely nothing to do with transmisogyny.)
Most important, I think, is expanding the ability of men to be friends with each other. A lot of straight men have a hard time having a deep, emotional connection with other men, because that would be gay; they have relatively shallow friendships which mostly revolve around shared hobbies, and they receive emotional support from their girlfriends or wives. Of course, if you like relatively shallow friendships, that’s fine. But a lot of men are quite lonely, and even the men that aren’t lonely are in a very fragile situation. What happens if your wife dies? What happens if your wife divorces you? All too often, that means they lose not only their closest friendship but also the only friendship in which they could talk about their feelings or process the experience of loss.
However, if you don’t care whether you’re gay or not, it doesn’t matter that having a close, intimate relationship with another man might be perceived as gay, because you don’t care about whether or not you’re gay. It just doesn’t come up as an issue. And then you have more capacity for friendship.
I want to make it clear that I don’t think that that sort of mindset is possible for most people outside of a supportive social environment. In practice, all straight people I have met who don’t care whether or not they’re straight have been in communities that are at least a quarter queer. I do not intend to blame the victim here. It is quite natural to avoid behavior that is seen as bad and punished by your community; those who manage not to internalize those attitudes are extraordinarily self-reliant and strong-willed. And if you know people will harass you for being gay, of course you’re going to avoid things that will make you be seen as gay.
I just want to point out that straight people should totally be on board with the project of ending homophobia. It helps them as much as it helps us.
Thing of Things 
The masculine gender role is more than “Not being gay” and “Not being a woman”, and I think as long as you keep trying to frame the problems men have in terms of “It’s really hatred of X, deep down”, you’re failing to address more fundamental issues men face.
You know how feminists used to sometimes complain about the feminine gender role being defined in terms of being a weak man, as being whatever masculinity isn’t?
This is the same thing in reverse. The -problems- men face must be defined in terms of the problems (marginalized group X) faces, rather than being considered in terms of a problem that men, as men, face.
Given the society we actually live in, men can’t live as emotional beings. This isn’t because emotions are for women, or because emotional connections with other men are gay – it’s because men have to prove their value before their emotions even matter, and emotions get in the way of proving your value. Emotions are a weakness – women get to have them, not because emotions are a weakness, but because women are expected to be weak, so it’s socially acceptable for women to show weakness, and it is additionally socially unacceptable for anybody to use it against them.
Men don’t get to show weakness because we don’t get the same kind of social protections. A “weak” man, taken advantage of, earned the treatment by being weak.
LikeLiked by 7 people
Whoa. Not sure I get this completely, but it seems important.
LikeLike
Stoic masculinity is a fairly recent development somewhat in reaction to the development of the other demographics, though. Men were allowed to have DEEP EMOTIONFUL FRIENDSHIPS in the past, many heroes were mythologized for them, when women and homos were non-threatening non-presences. No need for ‘no homo’ when the homos are out of sight, out of mind.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Stoic masculinity predates both modern feminism and the concept of sexual orientation as a distinct concept from either sex or gender. It’s been the norm in the West for a long time now. The sole -exception- to the expectation of stoicism in men is a more modern change, as men are no longer expected to be stoic with respect to sexual urges (the idea that men are more horny than women is actually quite modern, the conventional wisdom used to be that women had greater sexual desire), but there’s still considerable social backlash on the one exception.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Stoic masculinity overall predates a current understanding of sexual orientation, but that stoicism was not broadened so far as to keep men from caring about each other until more recently. Camaraderie was a big part of the male ideal. But now I don’t think the biggest obstacle to close friendships for men or women is homophobia, but rather technology and the abundance of distraction it supplies.
LikeLike
@itsabeast
Your last claim confuses me. I use technology *for* my close friendships!
LikeLike
I’m going to say an associated problem is amatonormativity; if an emotionally deep and close relationship can only be seen in the context of sexual/romantic attraction, it doesn’t much matter if it’s “Dude, you’re gay!” That of course is very damaging, but it doesn’t make it much better to go “Dude, it’s perfectly fine to be gay, nobody cares, in fact come out of the closet and admit you want to bang your dearest friend!” if the relationship does not, in fact, contain sexual/romantic attraction.
It also contributes to the “men and women can never be friends because as soon as the relationship develops beyond the shallow, sex/romance will become involved”.
And even “women beware women” because women can never really be friends because they’re all competing for the attention of (marriageable) available men. Doesn’t much help either there if you broaden the categories to “competing for the attention of women as well as men.”
So basically I’m waving the flag of “Hey, you know what? You can have deep attachments without sex or romance! Gay, straight, other – it doesn’t matter because that’s not what the relationship is about! Hug your friend regardless of what gender or orientation either of you are because hugging doesn’t mean you want to get into their pants!” for asexuals/aromantics 🙂
LikeLiked by 10 people
There are many straight people who would never be so gauche as to call someone a fag, but they still think, in their heart of hearts, that becoming gay would be a disaster.
My sexuality is part of my identity: not in an indirect “my rank in the sexual-orientation hierarchy affects the way other people treat me, so in that respect it shapes my life” way, but directly, in itself and for its own sake. I like it the way it is and would be pretty upset if I found it changing on me. I think I have the right to feel that level of attachment towards it, and if I have that right I can’t think of any reason why straight people wouldn’t have it too.
(I also have the right to not consider it important to me, as with your straight people who don’t care whether they’re gay; I simply don’t make use of that right in this case.)
LikeLiked by 7 people
I’m curious about this. Could you describe what you find important to you about your sexuality?
I guess I have this like a little bit but since I’m bi and also pretty inexperienced it’s more like “if I turn out to be straight this will be upsetting because it means I don’t know myself very well / then the people who doubted me when I came out in high school will have been right” and also “if it turns out I do have a gender filter on attraction that closes off lots of possibilities for me and that’s sad”, neither of which really applies to straight people.
LikeLike
@tcheasdfjkl
Your question wasn’t directed at me, but I feel much the same way as Brin. I think of sexuality as being somewhat similar to extreme fandom. Imagine taking the most rabid Star Wars fan you can find, and giving them a pill that removed their love of Star Wars and transferred it to Star Trek. Even if you think Star Trek is just as good as Star Wars (which is of nonsense of course, Star Wars is the best), it would still be really weird and upsetting.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’m curious about this. Could you describe what you find important to you about your sexuality?
Hmm. It’s not an easy thing to verbalise properly (I keep getting partial verbalisations that rely on memories or sensory impressions underpinning them), but I’ll see what I can do.
My paraphilia is part of the lens through which I see the world. It affects my salience mechanisms: there are things that I notice, or remember, or find interesting, that otherwise I would not. It’s in the way I think and the way I feel, even when I’m not actively horny. (And on those occasions–menstrual-cycle stuff, distracted by the novel environment on a trip, etc–when I am completely without libido for more than a week or so, I start feeling incomplete.) It’s…sufficiently well integrated that I’m having trouble with specific descriptions. Like, sometimes it is Important Things (and believe me, an ideomotor-effect arm twitch can be…pretty profound, in the right context), but sometimes it’s the little things that add up (if my sexuality were different, I would not have been able to make this pun).
The absence of fetishes I don’t have also shapes me, though of course the absence of a thing is usually less obvious than its presence. Not always, though: sometimes when I’m reading erotica I’m not into, it feels like I can sense the power in the words. It’s all around me but not within me, it’s foreign to me. It’s a sort of awe, I think, that others find great meaning in things I would find mundane. I think if I kept the sexuality already present in me, but additionally became the kind of person who tends to have newly-encountered kinks rub off on them (even if just to a low-level extent), I would miss the experience of reading porn from without.
(Upon further reflection, I’m not sure how relevant it is that I’m asexual. Clearly it’s possible to identify with your sexuality without being ace–*gestures at shemtealeaf*–but perhaps being ace encourages me to approach my sexuality as being in essence a thing about me, rather than having to do with other people.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
@shemtealeaf
I was hoping you would respond as well too, so thanks 🙂
So would it be right to say that having your sexuality change would just be too much self-modification for you to be comfortable with?
@Brin
That’s super interesting, thanks.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Also in response to both of your experiences which show that one can be attached to one’s sexuality without necessarily having bigoted reasons for it, I just want to add that my experience is that Ozy’s explanation is nevertheless also true some of the time. At least I’m pretty sure it was true for me when I was first beginning to come out to myself as bi. This was in high school, and I hadn’t dated anyone or even really thought about sex exactly*, so I hadn’t really had time to build up a sexual identity or anything.
When some of my friends came out as gay, I decided I was totally fine with that. But when I started thinking I might be bi, it was terrifying – I think mainly not due to fear of homophobia, because I remember judging my feelings and considering them “misplaced” and wrong, even when talking to friends who believed no such thing. I feel like that was definitely internalized homophobia.
I mean I guess that’s not an instance of “straight people thinking being gay is terrible” but it seems related.
*I’m just realizing now that this is probably totally related to me largely being a responsive-desire person – since I didn’t have any sex (or masturbation) experience at the time I didn’t have anything to respond to with desire?
LikeLike
I also have a strong preference for not being gay, possibly simply because I currently do not want to engage in M/M sexual contact and thus by extension do not want to think about myself engaging in such.
But I suspect that if I were to wake up tomorrow as a Kinsey 6 the new gay!me would not actually object on a personal level.
Does this make any sense?
(“Would you take a pill that makes you 1% gayer for a million dollars?”)
LikeLiked by 1 person
@tcheasdfjkl
Yes, I’d agree with that. Honestly, magically becoming bisexual would concern me less than magically becoming gay. Being not-attracted to men is some part of my identity, but I’m sure I’d get over it eventually if that changed. However, being attracted to women is a pretty significant part of my life, and it’s hard to even imagine what it would be like if it vanished.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I feel like my sexuality is a part of my identity, at least as important as my gender. I don’t think that men are superior to women, but I would be unhappy if I became a women after being a man for my whole life. Similarly, I don’t think that straight people are superior to gay people, but I would be unhappy if I became gay after being straight my whole life. It wouldn’t be the end of the world in either case, but it’s definitely not something I’m indifferent to.
I’m on board with the general idea, but I don’t think that homophobia is necessarily the primary reason why straight people wouldn’t want to be gay.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Yeah, let me plus one this, and add on: to me, my heterosexuality is far, far more important than my gender. It actually took me quite a while overcome my transphobia, because when the classic question of “well how would you feel if you woke up in a woman’s body tomorrow” was posed to me, I answered (blithely, but honestly) “be a lesbian who was somewhat irritated at the degree to which her dating pool had been truncated, of course.” It wasn’t until I considered the possibility that others might have stronger gender identities than I that I began to genuinely accept transgender people.
I’ll also plus one the original post, because it’s very true. It’s hard to overstate how liberating it feels to get to the point where you’re not worried about being called a pussy or a fag.
LikeLike
This is tangential, but has this line of reasoning (“X-phobia hurts non-Xs too!”) ever been used for the issue of racism?
I’m asking out of genuine curiosity, I don’t necessarily think it *should* be used on that issue; but if someone went there, I’d be interested in reading.
LikeLiked by 1 person
During the abolition movement, a lot of writers noticed that a slavery economy led to a pretty dysfunctional white Southern society as well. It did not really convince many Southerners (though possibly some.)
http://inkwellmusings.blogspot.com/2009/11/five-arguments-against-slavery.html
LikeLike
My recollection was that it was a pretty popular line of argument during the Revolutionary Era, but became much less so once slavery become more entrenched.
Possible that I’m just going off a whitewashing of those people, though.
LikeLike
I’m sure it can happen, miscegany being the obvious historical example. I think racism and sex/gender stuff are fundamentally different kinds of conflicts though which is why it’s not as much of a thing . Sex/gender stuff is usually an intrasocietal thing, while racial conflict is often sort of kind of like a conflict between societies?- I’m not sure how to describe what I mean.
LikeLike
I think what you’re pointing at is very much a thing. Saying women are oppressed by men doesn’t even necessarily make sense in societies where people care primarily about the well-being of their family and less about friends and acquaintances. (Which is admittedly not true in our modern society)
LikeLike
@The Smoke
Hmm I’m not sure what you mean
A better description, now that I have time to write, of what I meant is something like: sex/gender related oppression is about how society wants people to act, while racial oppression is about who gets to be part of society in the first place (except maybe as cheap labor).
Like, the way traditional gender roles work, of course, is that people are assigned roles based mostly on apparent sex, and are punished for deviating from those roles and are coerced into complying with them. One side may have it worse than another overall, but both are oppressed by the same system, which everyone is expected to both follow and help enforce. It applies even to the elites and is considered a normative standard of behavior, and people on both sides of the gender binary often support the status quo. It is, thus, an “internal” system of oppression, keeping accepted members of society in line.
Racism on the other hand is mostly “external”, the targeted races are rejected by society outright and they don’t really have “roles” in the same way. If we imagine the system was designed by an evil overlord, one would get the impression that targeted races being here was never part of their plan and they would rather just get rid of them. Unlike The Patriarchy, Institutional racism is pretty unidirectional. (non institutional racism can point either way of course, but in a very different sense, its “these two groups of people hate and want to get rid of each other” rather than “these two groups of people are oppressed by the same system”).
So while the very broad “answer” is still ultimately the same (egalitarianism, individual freedom, etc.), I imagine the way the conflicts work can be very different.
(I am bad at describing things)
LikeLike
Institutionally racist societies do tend to ignore some classes of the nominally-benefited race, at least some times (I think). Like Idomeneus mentioned, antebellum southern society tended to ignore poor whites, because they didn’t fit the [white >> black] narrative. I don’t think this is necessarily always the case, though.
LikeLike
I think we mean the same, except that I don’t see having societal roles prima facie as oppression.
LikeLike
At minimum, racism hurts racists by causing them to miss out on opportunities for mutually beneficial interaction with members of other races. If I’m a business owner who rejects the most qualified applicant because he’s black, I’m going to end up with a less qualified employee.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sure, but sexism does a whole lot more than keep sexist men from hiring women, or having deep, meaningful interactions with them.
(It does more to the men, that is. Obviously it also does more to the women.)
LikeLike
Given that the assertions being made about straight people involve empirical claims about their internal mental states and reasonings, was any empirical evidence offered? Or was it just the usual deconstructionism?
In what way is gender different from sexual orientation, such that it is reasonable to strongly desire to be and be seen as a particular gender, but prima facie evidence of bigotry to feel the same way about sexual orientation?
LikeLiked by 2 people
As I understand it, it’s not the difference between gender and sexual orientation, it’s about the person you refer to.
I can perfectly well say “me being [gender] would be bad” or “me being [orientation] would be bad”. That’s my preference about myself, and thus nobody else’s business.
The bigoted thing would be for me to say “you being [gender] would be/is bad” or “you being [orientation] would be/is bad”, since your preferences are likewise none of my business.
LikeLike
OP explicitly includes discussion of straight people saying “me being [orientation] would be bad.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
“”” The thought process here is something like “being gay is bad (as intellectual disability is bad) and it is bad to be like gay people. Actual gay people can’t help it, so you should be nice to them and not rub it in their faces. But for you, a straight person, to be like a gay person is the worst thing.” “””
I wonder if this also ties into the essentialist viewpoint that most people have on identity — that is, your identity (including sexual orientation) is fixed at birth and does not change, even if you take some time to discover or admit it. That is, not only do these individuals fear being perceived as gay because they think of being gay as a bad thing, but also because for them it’s important to be true to their “true” (i.e. straight) identities.
At some level, I’m reminded of some of the discourse I’ve seen surrounding the concept of cultural appropriation, where many people insinuate that (1) it’s wrong for a person to act like someone they aren’t, and (2) every person is a particular type of person, fixed from the time they were born (or at least after childhood is over), which they can discover and possibly be confused about, but never truly change.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“But I also feel like it opens up a lot of tremendous freedom to be gender-non-conforming. If you want, your wardrobe can contain eyeliner and skirts and bright colors! It is totally possible!”
I have not done this, but I have bought some perfumes, and I can attest that it is quite nice and it was a good decision to do so. Seriously, try it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
One thing that might be worth mentioning: the more heteronormative a society is, the more likely you as a straight person are to end up as the beard of someone who isn’t actually attracted to you, and has a greater-than-average [citation needed] chance of cheating on you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wonder how many straight allies have had a spouse cheat* on them because of a repressed sexuality.
* And I mean actually cheat, not “former The Beard told them to go have sex with people they actually want to have sex with”.
LikeLike
“Most important, I think, is expanding the ability of men to be friends with each other. A lot of straight men have a hard time having a deep, emotional connection with other men, because that would be gay”
Glad you brought this up, as it was going around my head as I read.
The above isn’t quite true for me – I can definitely be very close friends with men. I can deeply enjoy conversations with them, look forward to seeing them, get crushes on them. But as a sexually straight guy (and I think this is pretty typical), there’s a boundary beyond which I feel uncomfortable being intimate with a man. I mean:
1) I’ll hug men, but cuddling them, even to comfort someone who’s crying, feels strange.
2) I wouldn’t use diminutives that imply genuine rather than casual affection (‘sweetie’ rather than ‘mate’) about close male friends. I realise there’s a separate issue over whether these words are patronising.
3) Like the above, would feel quite strange saying “I love you” to a close male friend.
I don’t have any of these issues with close female friends, and my impression is that women tend not to have this block with other women. I’m just not sure if it’s down to being worried about seeming gay, because if I was mistaken for gay it wouldn’t bother me at all. I think it might be more to do with letting your guard down in some way. Although I think it might also be a reason why homophobia seems stronger among men and against men.
LikeLike
I think this somewhat simplifies away too much.
For example in the section on people insulting their friends there’s some things you seem to be ignoring. There’s a very common dynamic where friends insult each other but if you know the individuals they pick the insults be ones which they know won’t cut deep.
I remember having a surreal conversation with someone I knew, lets call him Bob, because he declared that myself and a friend (lets call him Larry) of mine were “so mean” to each other because we were always insulting each other.
For example I’d mock him for being ginger and he’d mock me for my taste in music.
We eventually had to illustrate after he declared “how would you like if I called you 4 eyes!?!”. So I (wearing Glasses) say “oh, that’s a good one” turn to Larry(also glasses) and say “hey 4 eyes!” before we both collapse laughing at Bobs confused and oblivious looks.
What Bob didn’t get was that both of us pull our punches. I’m never going to dig at Larry for being single because I know it’s something which eats at him. Larry is similarly never going to dig at things which really matter to me. Routine insults tend to be on the things people are most secure about.
And on that note myself and a mate doing statistical analysis might routinely call each other morons over trivial mistakes but neither of us would use the same term in the company of a teen with learning disabilities who’s struggling to read. It’s a trivial dig to us that doesn’t hurt but since our intention isn’t to hurt we’re not going to use the term for someone who’s likely to actually be hurt by it.
An old mate who’s I’m best-manning for his wedding to the man of his dreams might get called a “slutty arsemonger” but that pale kid who’s nervous about all things romantic is going to get kid gloves and certainly isn’t going to hear the same term.
Note, this does not include unfriendly interactions where people are intentionally trying to find something that will hurt the other person.
I have a kind of vague hypothesis that the convention of these kinds of interactions with constant gentle digs does exclude people with certain emotional problems because they have trouble separating mild friendly digs from vicious attacks.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Agreed – I’ve also been in a situation where a stranger has accused me of bullying a friend of mine he’s never met. And maintained this opinion despite me explaining that said friend is generally cracking up during the conversation.
Also once a friend and I were (again) practically shouting at each other during an argument about politics, someone else asked why we always had these conversations if we got so angry about them, and we both said with genuine bewilderment “But we’re enjoying ourselves!”
I’d almost go so far as to say you know you’ve become friends with someone the first time they insult you or strongly challenge your opinion.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Utotivyaa!.
LikeLike