The closet homophobe

I suppose we're all watching in trepidation what's happening in the USA at the moment - with the Republican nominations under way. Santorum scares me particularly but it did occur to me that perhaps, if the Republicans choose a genuinely insane candidate, perhaps the majority of (I fully believe) sane Americans (especially the Black and the Hispanic) will come out on polling day and tell them where to get off. That would leave us with Obama again, who is, in my opinion, probably unfairly vilified, but that's another post altogether.
What particularly spurs me to write today is the content of some of the more extreme Republicans' oratory and why the heck it seems so damned attractive to so many people - I'm thinking of course of their preoccupation with all things sexual - homosexuality and abortion most obviously, but also, if Santorum is to be taken notice of, contraception and sex outside marriage too.
Of course it's hardly a US speciality - you don't have to look very far to find atrocities against gay men in Africa and the Caribbean, and of course it's not just Christianity - fundamentalist Islam is notorious for its obsession with women's sexuality. Go back in history and there's hardly any nation that hasn't considered it right and proper to imprison, torture and kill people for their sexuality. Weird.
My reason for being spurred to write is that I just simply don't get it. I don't know why so many people throughout history and throughout the world feel this way about sex. Obviously I'm not saying that everyone, or even the majority of US Americans, Jamaicans or Arabs feels this way. My question is more, how do the (few?) people who do feel this way get to be so powerful?

I remember in my own up-bringing how crucial a person's sexuality was among my adult (especially male) relatives. They were routinely horrified to see long-haired young men on the telly ('You can't tell if it's a girl or a boy'.) They were terrified of being caught out ogling a boy by mistake. There were all sorts of petty rules and cues you had to abide by if you didn't want to be held up to ridicule. Transgression threw up all sorts of odd reactions. I had a lot of curly hair back then - there was just nothing we could do about it, and I wasn't interested in cars or football so they didn't know what to make of me. For my part I pretty actively decided not to be like them very early on and all sorts of odd quips and names resulted. They sang "Funny little fella, wears his sister's clothes. Don't know what to call him but we think he's one of those." There were all sorts of ways I didn't fit in but I think this possibility that I might be 'one of those' was high among them. The odd thing is that for as long as I can remember I've always, really really liked girls. Back then I liked everything about them - how they talked, how they dressed and moved, and, had I had a sister I have no doubt I would have tried her clothes on. Certainly by the time I was eight (in Mr Gilbert's class) I fantasised about them constantly - Debbie, Melanie, Tracy and Gemma - although had I got one in bed I wouldn't have had a clue what to do with her. It was as much about sharing the bed as anything, kissing and cuddling, but it was still profoundly erotic. Men by comparison were hairy and sweaty, ungainly and crude. Their genitalia were ugly and smelly too and their conversation seemed hard and unforgiving. No way would I ever make myself naked and vulnerable if there were men about. I still can't use a urinal.
I never have had the confidence to be a transvestite but as an adolescent I cultivated a certain femininity of demeanour and, in common with much of what was going on at the time (this was the '80s) I could get away with an understated effeminacy that actually served me well a couple of times getting to know girls. Unfortunately I also fell into the trap of becoming 'just friends' when that was not what I wanted at all. Still, I liked being out with the girls because I preferred their conversation, and, hey, being with them as a friend was better than nothing, and many of them were genuine friends too - the ones I didn't fancy mainly, but as time went on, even the ones I had fancied came to seem quite asexual. I can't say it ever got in the way of my having proper girlfriends anyway.
Gay men also fell for me and I didn't want to be rude so I let them buy me drinks when I worked in a bar, or give me a lift home when I worked as a nursing auxilliary. I liked the attention. As a student at Brighton Poly it was almost obligatory to regard yourself as to some extent bisexual. I once told a guy who fancied me that I didn’t want to sleep with him because I wasn’t ready to come out yet, rather than tell him the truth, which was that I wasn’t gay. My brother (a true Brightonian, you may remember) seems to think he should not be so blinkered - he sees it as a sort of bigotry I think. He seems to think that he should be able, in theory, to fancy a bloke, even though I don't know that he ever has.
Even today, when I've given up on any pretence at being at all pretty, my wife has been prone to ask (only half joking) if I'm sure I'm not gay, given that I cry easily and like flowers and cooking and am not entirely averse to musicals (I get that from my dad), but of course that's just how we are today, us men, or some of us at least - we're not so worried about conforming to those old roles and we've perhaps come to wonder what all the fuss was. Men who seem especially anxious to prove their masculinity come to seem more suspect than the more sensitive among us. Certainly the kids at the local secondary school, from what I can gather (and they're pretty open about it) seem very unconcerned about how people choose to dress or who does what to whom and I find that very hopeful for the future.

So what is all this about sexuality among the Republicans and the Taliban and so forth? What exactly is it that bothers them so much? Some have suggested that they are in fact themselves repressed homosexuals but that seems too easy. Maybe some are, but the problem seems to be about sex generally, about women and their role in society, and the family, and about going out and enjoying yourself without having really done anything to deserve it.
Just saying 'The Bible/Koran/Pope/Ayatollah says so' also seems like not enough. I don't hear of anyone getting stoned for lending money or being imprisoned for covetousness. Unfortunately, it's in the nature of 'belief'* that believers reserve the right to insist that whatever they feel strongly about is The Truth, irrespective of arguments or evidence to the contrary. Usually this is just harmless fun but often it is a justification for oppression and war. If you believe that something is wrong, and wrong enough to justify making someone's life a misery for, then there's nothing anyone can say to contradict you. If you have an old book or a venerable leader to back you up so much the better. Furthermore, no one who believes in the primacy of personal belief can have anything to say about it. They're entitled to their beliefs (and whatever their beliefs compel them to do. After all, to say to someone 'you have a right to believe what you like but not to act on your beliefs' is just patronising.) But as far as I'm concerned, some beliefs are just plain wrong, and bloody dangerous too, and should be challenged. Sexual intolerance is one of them because there is just no justification for it as far as I can see.
Even the faithful though seem to find the argument 'God says so' not entirely satisfactory on its own and introduce all sorts of specious factoids and rationalisations to support their position - things about public health and the breakdown of society. There are quasi-evolutionary arguments about the roles of men and women in society which are 'natural' and hence good, and there are philosophical arguments about the irreducible rightness of certain ways of life over others. Many of these arguments were discredited years ago - arguments about disease and child abuse for example and yet they still get trotted out. I can't help feeling that a lot of the problem is a simple lack of appreciation of the wealth of information and argument out there. Isolated communities without access to outside influences, due to remoteness, poverty or authoritarian teachers must have to be to blame for a lot of intolerance (Back to Iowa...) It's a lot harder to be militantly homophobic when you work and shop and hang out with all sorts of people and discover that they are not depraved monsters.

Sex (and especially promiscuity) can of course lead to disease. Sickness means time in hospital, away from work, but then do we persecute other people who engage in risky pursuits - like rock climbing, or visiting sub-Saharan Africa, or driving a motorbike? No, because sex is different. Sex is wrong. Then there's the fear of the effect on the children, but if you can't identify anything intrinsically wrong about being gay, why would you want to stop children becoming gay? Because being gay is a problem. That's all there is to it. We don't want it for our children. They might get confused (because being confused is intolerable to children) or, worse, they might get bullied. Yes - lets give in to the bullies. Let's make sure our children are 'normal' in case some scumbag takes exception. And what about the family? How will we maintain our society? So if a gay couple choose to adopt or go for IVF that would be better? No. Why not? Because it's wrong. It's just wrong and that's all there is to it. What about unwanted pregnancy? So you'd be ok with sex acts that could not possibly result in pregnancy - like oral or anal sex? No no no - now you're just being ridiculous.
By contrast the arguments about abortion should give any intelligent person pause. At some point the unborn foetus becomes a baby, and I don't think there's any good reason to think that happens, just like that, at birth. At one point it's a bunch of cells, at another point it's a tiny human. I don't know where the line is. There's a genuine argument there - but it's an argument that should include unwanted children, not just the unborn. Is it better to be born into a world that doesn't want you (or worse, hates you) or to be aborted at five, seven, or ten weeks? I honestly don't know. Anybody who believes that murder is wrong should take these questions seriously, but this is about as different to the arguments about homosexuality or any other sorts of purely recreational sex as it is possible to be.
The evolutionary arguments still seem to cling to the old idea about the hunting male taking care of his woman and her endlessly demanding sproggs as leading to the conventional monogamous heterosexual family unit, when in fact the evidence suggests we are much more like the more hedonistic chimps and bonobos - who just do it for fun, and with pretty much anyone in the latter case. As a rule of thumb, if I had to guess, I'd say if you have to prevent it by force it's probably natural. If you have to force people to comply (monogamy for example) it's probably unnatural (and making up a silly higamous-hogamous rhyme doesn't change that.) But who's to say? You can't extrapolate. Humans are just too different to other apes. We're naked and we stand upright and we have huge brains. There's just no way of telling what we are like 'naturally' by looking at our relatives. And even if there was it would tell us nothing about how we should be.

A lot of the problem for your everyday homophobe I suspect is the simple yech factor, and here I must come clean. I too am a homophobe, in the strictest sense, meaning 'having an irrational fear of homosexuality' (rather than 'a hatred of', which is what it seems to have come to mean). In common with many perfectly decent broad-minded men I've been known to blurt out, half joking 'but I'm not gay' when I do something that fits the stereotype. I am still fairly easy about how I dress and go about things, and even enjoy a little sartorial ambiguity (or I would if I wasn't so fat now) but there are limits. I feel uncomfortable waiting in a shop holding my wife's handbag, and I still wouldn't go out in her hat even if it was chucking it down. I can't go up to a bloke in a bar just to make friends because he might think I'm chatting him up. And I get uncomfortable when blokes seem particularly friendly with me, like the bloke down the Coop who always chats to me when I go in to get my lunch. I chat back but I'm aware of a part of me not wanting to lead him on. How silly is that? Maybe it's an English thing, because we're not used to strangers being friendly, we suspect their motives. Maybe it's just me, but I really doubt it.
And then there's that disgust I mentioned above about men's bodies. I accidentally came across some pictures on Flickr posted by a chap who's eager to show everyone his hairy arse and all that dangles beneath. I think I'm broad-minded enough to know by now if I was repressing anything (see? Still feeling the need to say it - 'I'm not gay') and I can honestly say that while not all women's bits are nice to look at, I can't think of any men's bits I'd rather look at, disease and deformity apart perhaps. And handling them - wooah! Shudder to think. But I'm not really trying to prove anything. I'm just saying, for whatever reason - I have these feelings. The idea of doing it with another man, is just... Ewww...
My theory then - Santorum and the Taliban's mistake, I suspect, is that they too have my silly anxiety about getting into an embarrassing social situation, and my perfectly reasonable expression of personal sexual preference (many gay men apparently feel the same way about womens' bits) but have idiotically inflated it into something absolute, universal, and God-given that any right-thinking person should go along with - that homosexuality is objectively, categorically disgusting, and an abomination. But this is a false argument. Just because I don't happen to want to do it says nothing about what other people should be allowed do. The fact that I find the idea of doing anything to another man's bottom revolting says nothing about what other men should be allowed to do to each other's bottoms. What they do in the privacy of their own homes (or even in public under certain circumstances) has nothing to do with me as long as I have the right to be elsewhere.
And I do have gay friends. I've had to get over my anxiety that they might take things the wrong way and to be prepared to politely say 'no' if it comes to it (which I doubt it will because they're not stupid) but once we all know where we stand I'm fine. I can relax. In fact it's better than fine, because, second to women, the people I get on with best are, you guessed it - gay men.

* my first and fourth meanings of the word 'belief' (see earlier posting)
1 - beliefs people have despite the fact (or indeed because of the fact) that there is no material evidence or rational explanation for them - things like God, Heaven, The Inner Eye, Karma. Such beliefs are an assertion of a personal conviction that something is so, irrespective of what anyone else says. We tend to talk of 'Believing In' such things. Having Faith is a similar sort of idea.
4 - common sense, taken-for-granted sorts of belief where we just assume things about the world because it's never occurred to us to think otherwise. This may include anything from simply 'knowing' that tables and chairs are solid and not made up mainly of empty space, that Jesus loves you and that wearing sandals with socks is just plain wrong. Mostly we're not even aware of these kinds of beliefs until someone challenges them.