What Do Homophobic Bigots Really Think?

Demonstrators at an anti-gay rally on May 18, 2004 in Los Angeles, Calif.

Photograph by David McNew/Getty Images.

There were thousands of comments in response to my last piece at Slate, in which I lashed out against Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy?s policy of funding anti-gay causes. I tried to dip in and out of the comment thread as often as I could while they were piling up, scanning them for interesting points (of which there were many). But I quickly lost track and had to get back to work on other projects.

Then a reader sent me a link to a discussion of my article at the popular conservative website Free Republic. It?s pure masochism for someone like me to wander such halls; I don?t need to read their posts to know just what ultraconservatives think of my ?homosexualism? and me. But curiosity got the better of me. And my, my, my, they really do hate us queers over there. It?s not just Free Republic, of course. Similar anti-gay sentiments are a staple of many gathering places online, not to mention those in the real world.

People are free in this country to say what they will, nasty though it is, about gays and lesbians. What to do about it, then? I believe that treating bigots as scientific specimens is the best way to disarm their hate. I can?t tackle all such propaganda in a single article (I won?t be able to cover the all-gay-men-are-pedophiles argument, the-all-lesbians-just-hate-men argument, or the next-thing-you-know-we?ll-all-be-marrying dogs-and-horses argument), but for now I?ll dissect some of the other common rhetorical devices deployed by those with an anti-gay mindset.

So without further ado, let?s put these mean bastards under the psychological knife.

The homosexuality-as-choice argument: Those who repeatedly make this claim are actually revealing something about their own sexuality: they are bisexual. Since human beings use a form of mental analogy whenever trying to understand another person?s behavior, the ?choice? argument reflects the reasoning process of an individual who has experienced notable arousal to the same sex in addition to the opposite sex, but has chosen to act only on that inspired by the latter. A true heterosexual, by contrast, has never experienced meaningful same-sex desires and understands that one cannot choose to act on what is simply not there.

The secret bisexuality of those who just cannot seem to grasp that being gay is not, in fact, a choice also helps us to understand the intense hostility that some males feel for openly gay men. Research has shown a positive correlation between a man?s loathing of gay men and his own repressed same-sex desires. ?Since homosexual behavior violates both their moral code and their sense of identity,? explained the psychologists Donald Mosher and Kevin O?Grady long ago, ?homosexual threat is experienced as men become aware at some level of their ? arousal to homosexual stimuli. This awareness can be avoided by anger, disgust, and contempt directed against homosexuals, as a means of bolstering hypersexual identity.? The psychologist Henry Adams has used a device called a plethysmograph that measures penile arousal to show that the more aversion a man says he feels toward gay men?and even more disturbingly, the more willing he is to inflict pain upon them?the more intense is his erection to gay porn.

The homosexuality-is-disgusting argument: One of the most potent propaganda devices is the age-old ploy of dehumanizing the oppressed party by stirring up feelings of disgust for them. The Nazi author of an animated children?s book from 1938 Germany, for example, wrote this for his young readers: ?Just look at these guys! The louse-infested beards! The filthy, protruding ears, those stained, fatty clothes ? Jews oftentimes have an unpleasant sweetish odor. If you have a good nose, you can smell the Jews.? (The author was later executed as a war criminal.)

In our own country?s lamentable past, disgust rhetoric slowed down the hard-won civil rights achievements of women and blacks. In the present case, scatological language litters antigay conversations, along with the portrayal of gay men as being unique carriers of ?horrific diseases? such as AIDS. Over at Free Republic, for example, you?ll read comment after comment such as these:

* If your personal identity revolves around your lust for other men?s stinking anuses, a particularly disgusting form of depravity that spreads horrific diseases, the chest swells with self-satisfaction. What a sick world we live in.

* homosexuals should never have got their special rights like civil unions let alone marriage or don?t ask in the first place. The ignorant and stupid on our side wanted to appease them because as they usually say ?I know a couple and they are nice? friggin idiots, so when did we base special rights based on fecal diseased sex in the constitution?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=415929a35aed39f2edc981c6c68b089f

occupy philadelphia occupy philadelphia conrad murray conrad murray jack del rio jack del rio heaven is for real