Even though I swore off using all the "phobia" words, homophobia is just shorthand for disliking gays. So this post is a thought about why many people dislike gays.
I am watching a documentary about various people coming out to their families. In Jamaica. And in rural Oklahoma. I am remembering my own coming out speeches. Pretty dramatic. Long ago.
For a long time, understandably, I could not disengage the question of why people dislike gays from why someone would dislike me for being gay. I have more distance now.
Anyway, here's my short answer: the differentiation between males and females, between men and women is one of the most foundational and crucial structures in human society, and in the human psyche. If you seriously challenge that, people are going to react badly.
It would be tough enough if the difference were simply on the level of erotic object choice, if gay men and lesbian women were pretty much like most men and women but for the objects of their desire. But I have come to realize that the way "gay" has turned out, it is very much about deviating from standard maleness and femaleness. It is as much about effeminacy as it is about same-gender sex. So, confusing the genders is very much what makes people upset.
The celebrated "tolerance" of some North American Indian tribes, with their institution of the "berdache" is not an exception to the rule, but its confirmation. People in those cultures who crossed the gender boundary were institutionalized quite specifically so that the opposite gender boundaries --very localized in specific tasks-- were maintained.
Am I saying that if gay men and women were conventional men and women with the exception of what we do in bed that there would be no bad reaction? No. Not at all. But the prominence of drag and queeniness in gay culture certainly does not help.
And if I am right, that male-female opposition is a fundamental human structure (our recent and revolutionary feminist experiment being rare), then homophobia, though unpleasant, is understandable.
My thought for the day.
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