Father Love As A Beginning
It is only gradually that I am beginning to understand the reasons for this paper. Of course, there are social change reasons. The world would be a better place, if men could learn how to love each other. It would be an even better place, if they could learn not to be afraid of loving each other. Children would do better, women would do better, if men learned how to stop living lives in isolation from each other, angry at each other, hopeless to ever have a successful deep and intimate relationship with at least one other man.
But there is more. Most of you know that I have three sons. I always thought that I would have daughters. Having sons, three of them, still goes beyond my wildest imagination. At times I have to remind myself and say it to myself: I am the father of three sons. Aside from it making me feel strong, even protected and unafraid, saying it out loud fills me with deep passionate love for those three boys who will so very soon be men.
Though I suppose there are many boundaries between my sons and me, important ones that have their use and function, I think that our relationship is not defined by homophobic boundaries. When we’re together it is okay to be weak, to be vulnerable, to cry or to laugh out loud, it is okay to ask for a hug, to offer one, to quickly rub the other’s shoulders or simply to lean against the other.
I am very protective of this kind of relating to each other. Even when we argue with each other, and we do have our share of arguments, I tend to look for peaceful loving ways to resolve it. I tend to want to make sure, in every argument, that they know I love them. My wife sometimes thinks I’m too soft on them. I never thought of myself as “soft” only as determined not to humiliate others.
For the sake of not seeming “soft” many men sacrifice their ability to love other men and replace it with something that often comes close to humiliation. It is a competitive way of one-upmanship which sons learn from their fathers early. It is often reinforced with strongly homophobic notions. As we will discuss later on, homophobia literally translated means fear of the same sex. The very fact that homophobia is used in this way suggests to me that there might be a culturally perceived need for men to be afraid of other men, even a need to teach them to be afraid of other men, almost as if we’re afraid that—if don’t teach homophobia—our cultural edifice will inadvertently begin to crumble. And maybe it will, who knows?
Sexual Identity: A question of Essence vs. Existence
Countless are the so-called straight men who have come through my office confessing they either have or have had something for or with another man or other men. Countless are also the numbers of so-called gay men who have had something for or with a woman or women. Men from both groups worry that their incongruence with the relationship patterns of the group they would like to belong to—gays or straights—means that they are now seen as the opposite: a straight man in gay’s clothes or a gay man in straight’s clothes.
If such an encounter with another person falls within that person’s professed sexual identity, we are likely not going to think too much of it. We call it a one-night stand, a new love, attraction, boredom with another partner, affair, etc. In other words, we look at such an encounter simply as a moment in that person’s existence. However, when the encounter falls outside of the boundaries of such sexual identity we trip. We’re no longer certain that we can consider this person in the same way we had up to this point. Though it might have just been a moment in that person’s existence, a blip so to speak, we are now considering him from the perspective of essence., eternity in other words. The essence perspective is easily identified by the word “to be” and its derivatives. He is gay, she is queer, you are bi-sexual, I am straight, etc. However, considering a person from the perspective of essence after they have had an encounter outside of their sexual identity leads to concern and worry.
What is even more complicating is that there is such a thing as a cumulative essential view. This kind of view takes place when a person exhibits repeated existential moments of a certain behavior. For example, if a man has repeated affairs we might consider this as evidence that he is a philanderer. This is a different essential perspective though. It is inductive, whereas the straying from one’s sexual identity leads to a deductive essential perspective, i.e., one encounter changes a person’s sexual identity.
I believe that this sense of incongruity with one’s own sexual identity is especially troubling for men. The firm and seamless fit of a man’s masculinity, i.e., his actions, behaviors, mannerisms and thoughts as a man, this seamless fit with a perceived cultural and social ideal is an expectation that most men have of themselves. We men crave sexual identity and fear endlessly sexual disidentity. Consider for example the male client to whom I suggested he read Ronald Levant’s book Masculinity Reconstructed. My client recoiled from the thought alone believing strongly that such reading would identify him—in the eyes of others and perhaps his own—as gay.
This exemplifies, I believe, what it really means to be “straight”. Being straight means that we are willing and able to walk a very narrow edge of acceptable behaviors and thoughts that—viewed from the outside—give the reassuring sense of our heterosexuality. Being straight means that we always have to be vigilant about how we are perceived. It means that we are in constant need to reassert our heterosexual manliness.
The men that come to my office for counseling, which, of course, in and of itself is already not so straight anymore and suspiciously close to being unmanly all exhibit this kind of vigilance. It can be expressed as a relentless checking of the time and an emphasis on what they have to do afterwards, it can be a detached attitude meant to demonstrate aloofness and control, it can be—as in the case of a 15 year old boy I saw for a while—an attempt to make certain parts of his appearance look more masculine. This boy kept pressing his chin to his chest while he spoke. It took me a while that he was trying to make sure that his voice, which hadn’t changed completely yet, would not slip up on him and make him utter a humiliating squeak.
Difference and Incongruity
Difference among men is more suspicious than it is among women. Go to any average clothing store and compare the range of clothes available to women with the range of clothes available to men and you know that men are meant to look alike. Acceptable colors for men? I call them camouflage colors. Any color-choices away from that and one runs the risk of either being thought of as gay or (as in my case) from Europe.
We have no trouble imagining the lonely woman donning her male lover’s shirts, boxers, socks, etc. But just try and picture the lonely man doing the same with his female lover’s clothes and you’re probably not far from seeing the word “pervert” flash at you.
Examples can be found in every single area of our human lives. They all speak the same message: boys and men must be careful in their choices as they run the very high risk that making extraordinary choices might be seen as an incongruence in their sexual identity. Sexual identity has turned out to hold us hostage in ways that keep men on a very narrow edge of understanding their own manhood and masculinity. Sexual identity is about either/or . While it might be very helpful to a man to be able to say “I am gay” and while it might be equally helpful for a boy’s parents to say their son is gay—helpful because it identifies rather than hides, I worry about those men for whom gay and straight are not easily identified. I worry about men who call themselves bi-sexual because they have no other choice and because simply saying that they have loved or are in love or just love a man is more likely of being interpreted as closeted than as honest. I worry that sexual identity as a concept does not leave room for men to simply be together and love each other.
Identifying Gays: A New way of Reinforcing Straightness
Interestingly, we continue to make this love between men less possible and more unlikely as we continue to be liberated enough to identify and celebrate gay culture. Because no matter how it’s done, celebrating gay culture also has the effect of fencing off gay men from non-gay men. This celebration creates a zoo-effect in which we, who consider ourselves non-gay, can stand outside, enjoy what we see and, at the same time, breathe a sigh of relief that we’re not behind the fence.
Homophobia in Recent Literature on Boys and Men: The Case of Michael Gurian, et al.
Take for example Michael Gurian’s treatment of gayness in his book The Wonder of Boys. Gurian begins—as other writers who deal with boy issues—by sympathizing with the parents.
“Few things are more difficult for parents than hearing their son say, I’m gay.”
While this start into the issue of being gay makes sense from a homophobic perspective, it already recreates what it itself is most afraid of: viz. being labeled, being misunderstood, being misidentified. Of course, it can be a relief to say “I’m gay” as it helps a boy or man fit into a cultural drawer or stereotype. But what would happen, if a boy or man when he comes out says “I’ve fallen in love with a man” rather than saying I’m gay? What if his parents responded by saying “You mean you’re gay?” And what if the son responded “No, I am saying I have fallen in love with a man.”
Furthermore, what would happen if a boy or man came to his parents or friends and said “Mom and Dad, I’m straight.” It would be silliness and in that silliness we recognize the silliness of the confession “I’m gay.” Of course, we don’t read it as silliness when a boy comes to us and says he’s fallen in love with a boy. Instead we think of it as denial. And by “we” I mean us—gay or straight.
So how can we understand Gurian’s insistence on this essential identifier “I’m gay.”?
Much of it has to do with the debate over whether sexual orientation and sexual identity are about biological unchangeables in the human body or whether they are about choices.
The implicit argument Gurian is making is that it is better to recognize the biological grounds of someone’s gayness rather than thinking of them as choices.
One way parents and communities deny the biological fact of homosexuality is to call it “a lifestyle choice.” When a boy or young man comes to them and says “I’m gay,” they say “You’ll change.” Most often, the gay adolescent knows this won’t happen, though he may try to make it happen for a while, even marrying and having children.
This makes intuitive sense, I believe, for if we entertain the idea that a boy or man is choosing whether to be with a man or a woman then we are possibly exposing him to an overwhelming wave of pressure to choose “right rather than wrong,” i.e., choose heterosexually rather than homosexually.
We all can probably sympathize with this position on some level. If we can assert and, possibly, prove that being gay is about a biological condition rather than a choice, then we have successfully rejected the possible interpretation that a gay man is choosing to do something bad. But, as many have pointed out before me, this means that we continue to accept our cultural view of homosexual encounters as bad. The only thing we’re saying is “I couldn’t help it.” It is somewhat like an insanity defense in a murder case. We all believe that killing another person is bad, but when insanity is involved, we back of and allow the person to say “I didn’t choose to kill that person, I just couldn’t help it.”
Again Gurian quoting a father:
Why do people go on about life-style choices? Who in his right mind would choose to be gay? You have a higher likelihood of getting AIDS, everyone hates you, it’s harder to get a job, your friends are dying all around you. My son didn’t choose (sic.) to be gay. Like so much else in life it was chosen for him.
I think we all can feel the passionate truth this father is working hard on expressing. My son, he is saying, didn’t choose this. He is not dumb. He is not stupid. He has his wits together. He is not a bad person. And in working out this passionate view of his son’s intelligence he is, more or less, beginning to think of his son as being handicapped. Being gay is not a choice, it is a biological fact and it is, as Gurian points out:
Genetically and chromosomally influenced, with certain families having far more homosexuals in their generational lineage than others; and it is wired into the brain. This wiring has been measured by researchers on autopsied brains.
Well, thank heavens that we have science to measure brains of dead people. And as it is en vogue in much of psychological literature these days, once the brain has been mentioned talk of the hypothalamus is not far off and we can expect a paragraph or two about brain-functioning. So Gurian continues:
The hypothalamus is the mission control of the brain. In the hypothalamus is a bundle of neurons called the “sexually dimorphic nucleus” or “two-shaped nucleus” by biochemists and neurobiologists. It controls, among other things, sexual orientation. In a gay person’s brain, this nucleus is half as large as the companion nucleus in a heterosexual person’s brain and although the research is far from complete it is now clear that somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of our boys have a smaller sexually dimporphic nucleus and a stronger biological tendency toward homosexuality.
I should, perhaps, explain that I grew up in a country that made it its business to autopsy people they were uncomfortable with in order to prove scientifically their biological and genetic inferiority. Aside from the very likely fact that Gurian’s summary is shoddy science I simply don’t care whether or not a person’s brain or parts thereof are smaller bigger, gone or have moved to another part of their body because I believe that at the end of it all we continue to say the same thing we sought so hard to avoid only more strongly: men who love men are handicapped, something in their brain is simply . . . smaller!
And so Gurian continues and with him so many other well-intentioned men who want to write about boys and men but cannot embrace their own potential to love men (platonically or sexually) and instead create a group of people to which they, of course, don’t belong. This is powerfully exemplified in Gurian’s next chapter—Loving our Gay Boys. Gurian waxes eloquent in his defense of gay boys and men. He emphasizes that gays are not more likely to be criminals of any sort. Gays even have unique gifts, he points out, gifts we non-gays would do well to appreciate. And, of course, we also hear about the Zuni tribe and the “special role of the berdache” Little does it matter that the berdache is not gay but represents a third gender that is male nor female. He goes on and on.
Prejudice Against Others vs. Prejudice Against Self
What is wrong here? Well, it’s easy to see that being liberated from prejudice against others might not result in a liberation of being prejudiced against oneself. While we might be able to convince ourselves that it is okay to be gay and to have a smaller sexually dimorphic nucleus, we might very well find ourselves unable to find that same thing acceptable in ourselves. I think what’s wrong and slips easily away if we don’t pay acute attention to it is that talking about homophobia and being against it is easy when it concerns other people. Yes, there are still enough people who haven’t quite graduated from “How to respect people who are different?”, Ethics 101. They should definitely continue learning about prejudice against others. But Gurian seems to have mastered that class just fine. What he doesn’t get into focus at all, in fact what he pushes away, is not the fear of others who are or might be gay but the fear that besets so many men in our culture that they themselves might be gay. For, unfortunately, the fence we draw around gays and their culture is, also one we then experience as an internal fence keeping us out of a realm of things, actions and thoughts that might, if externalized be thought of as gay. This, however, casts a large shadow not only over men who are thinking they might be gay, it particularly disables the possibility of men simply being close to and loving with each other. In one short sentence, identifying gays as gay and as different makes it harder, not easier, but harder for men to love each other. Of course, gays are off the hook now. They can do whatever they want, right? But what about the rest of us?
Scared Straight: Men Being Afraid of Each Other
The question then is, as Robert Minor—a professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas—describes it in his book Scared Straight, if we would not be served better by taking the term “homophobia” at its most basic definition, i.e., not as hatred against gays and gay culture, but as “fear of getting close to one’s own sex.” Listen to a longer quote from his book:
Even so, homophobia is a cultural condition, a major chemical found in the water that surrounds us. It is a conditioned characteristic of everyone regardless of sexual orientation. Essentially it has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Yet prejudices about, and discrimination and violence toward people perceived to be homosexual is a direct result of this conditioning because the existence and visibility of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people embodies the fear itself. (52-53)
Minor explains that homophobia is a “conditioned response” that pervades our culture in its entirety. He points out that our market economy which often advertises products that will bring us close to others is precisely based on the fear of others, i.e., homophobia, which the product in question is supposed to overcome.
How do we become homophobic? Minor believes that homophobia has very little to do with our sexual orientation and much more with how we look at and understand masculinity and femininity.
The definitions of manhood and womanhood homophobia enforces actually strip from us much of who we are as gender roles by which to define ourselves. I want to point out in the process of this discussion that oppression, prejudice, and discrimination directed toward gay people are in reality the mean for installing, maintaining, enforcing, and valuing gender roles which are our conditioned definitions of what a “real” man or woman is in our society. (53)
How does this work? Minor explains that it can happen in several ways, but that it often has something to with finding “causes [of homosexuality] that won’t disrupt the status quo.” Finding, for example, biological evidence that gays are different is less disruptive to the status quo than is what I am claiming in this paper and what Minor is claiming in his book, viz. that all men have the potential to act homophilic, i.e., with love for another man.
Similarly Minor points out that the sociobiology, if not interested so much in hard-wired processes is looking for inherent differences in men and women that might explain different sexual behaviors both toward each other and toward their own sex. Minor criticizes these studies heavily as
not at all helpful improving genetic origins. Instead they actually illustrate that by an early age gender conditioning has already taken hold. By thenj children have been conditioned relentlessly during all their waking hours in all their social environments for those four or five years. (55)
The compulsion to know the sex of a new human being, Minor charges, tell us that adults can’t relate to the baby as a full, open human being with all human possibilities ahead of it. In order to understand and react to the child, conditioned adults just have to know it’s sex. (56)
Once we know its sex, we can begin to pave for it the “straight” path on which it is supposed to be. And if, for some unforeseen reason, this straight path doesn’t work out for him, then there is a queer path which, as we have seen in Gurian’s account, is actually just as straight as the straight path, just smaller, just less traveled.
The term straight itself is problematic. Minor points out how that term narrows down what’s culturally acceptable in male and female behavior.
Straight is a good term for the tight-rope our society wants every person to walk—rigid, up-tight, narrow, self-protectively alert, highly strung. The word is used in anti-drug support groups to describe someone not “using.” It’s used in anti-crime programs which hope to scare youth into a law-abiding lifestyle. It’s been used as an equivalent for honesty in, “Are you being straight with me?” And it’s a part of the Boys Scout’s pledge to describe their standard of morality for real men, and now redefined to exclude gay men. It’s a broad designation for everyone who fits into the conditioning at all levels. Ideally, we are to look, act, think speak and feel “straight.” (124)
Broke Back Mountain: The Story of Two Gay Cowboys or Two Men Who Love Each Other?
So, the issue we are faced with in thinking about men loving men is that the suggestion alone is far from straight. Our culture has reached a point where it can accept straight heterosexuality and straight homosexuality. It can even accept those who sometimes choose to be with a man and sometimes with a woman. This is called straight bi-sexuality. What we have trouble with is “straight love” be that for a man or a woman. A man simply cannot express his love for another man, let alone demonstrate it by hugging him or kissing him or being sexual with him without having to call himself gay or at least bi. Men, therefore, often end up denying themselves the comfort and nurturance they can receive from another man for fear of being called or of thinking of themselves as gay.
This is the story of Broke Back Mountain. It is not the story of two gay cowboys who must learn how to survive in a homophobic society. Rather, it’s the story of two men who fall in love with each other and experience, in their desperate loneliness the nurturing comfort of another man’s presence. They cook for each other, wash for each other, sit together, and find that they’re drawn to each other. In an almost stereotypical way Ennis Del Mar says to Jack Twist after their first sexual encounter “you know I’m not queer.” Twist responds saying, “I know.” In a culture that has conditioned us to be open about “our gay boys” we read this statement as denial. Why not be straight forward we ask and admit that you are gay? Ennis Del Mar answers this question heroically, i.e., like a man: “If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.”
But what if “I know I’m not queer” is actually a true statement? What if this is not about finding out that deep inside Ennis and Jack are gay men? What if this is not a dormant truth or essence that could come only in the solitude and quiet of Broke Back Mountain? What if it is as simple as love? What if this love came out at Broke Back Mountain because in a homophobic society there is no other place than absolute solitude for two men to confess their love for each other.
How can it be that our culture cannot permit men to love each other without laying claim to their sexual orientation? Why is it, in other words, that we need to know (and for them to profess) their sexual orientation at the same time? If we could permit it, we would allow for a new kind of love, a love without sexual orientation, a love that simply gives and receives. But, if men were indeed permitted to express their love for each other in all ways possible they would indeed create a disruption of the status quo.
A Last Word About Boys
In his book Real Boys William Pollack describes how boys are kept away from each other and from the possibility of expressing genuine affection and love for one another. The
“gender straitjacket, combined with the absurd link that is often made between boyhood affection and adult male homosexuality, creates a restrictive environment. Boys are frequently pushed away from one another when they exude even a modicum of overt genuine love or affection for one another. This misguided perception—a form of homophobia—is perhaps most regrettable because it may lead us to undermine boys’ friendships before they’ve even taken hold. Ironically, this may, in turn, cause us to doubt whether boys are capable of intimate friendship. And [it might push] some boys to turn to drugs and alcohol, substances that temporarily mute the shame they feel about their genuine longings for friendship, love and affection.
It is clear, I believe, what Pollack wants to say in this paragraph. Boys’ need for affection should be acknowledged and permitted. Allowing it will perhaps even lower their likelihood to become aggressive, drug-dependent or alcoholics later in live. Not allowing this would be, Pollack points out, homophobic. This all makes sense. Yet, the ghost of homophobia, of not allowing men to love each other is well alive even in his lines. For the argument really is that boys’ affection with one another is not about adult male homosexuality. This, of course, means we shouldn’t worry about boys’ affectionate behavior with each other because it’s not like it’s going to end up as homosexual behavior.
This means to me that as long as we think of homosexuality, of gays, as the other—whether it’s the other we need to appreciate or the other we need to avoid—our own thinking and acting will be tormented from within with the fear of becoming the other. We will therefore never be able to love another man because, while we might appreciate and accept someone else’s gayness, our fear of being gay will not permit us affectionately expressive behavior towards other men.
It is only gradually that I am beginning to understand the reasons for this paper. Of course, there are social change reasons. The world would be a better place, if men could learn how to love each other. It would be an even better place, if they could learn not to be afraid of loving each other. Children would do better, women would do better, if men learned how to stop living lives in isolation from each other, angry at each other, hopeless to ever have a successful deep and intimate relationship with at least one other man.
But there is more. Most of you know that I have three sons. I always thought that I would have daughters. Having sons, three of them, still goes beyond my wildest imagination. At times I have to remind myself and say it to myself: I am the father of three sons. Aside from it making me feel strong, even protected and unafraid, saying it out loud fills me with deep passionate love for those three boys who will so very soon be men.
Though I suppose there are many boundaries between my sons and me, important ones that have their use and function, I think that our relationship is not defined by homophobic boundaries. When we’re together it is okay to be weak, to be vulnerable, to cry or to laugh out loud, it is okay to ask for a hug, to offer one, to quickly rub the other’s shoulders or simply to lean against the other.
I am very protective of this kind of relating to each other. Even when we argue with each other, and we do have our share of arguments, I tend to look for peaceful loving ways to resolve it. I tend to want to make sure, in every argument, that they know I love them. My wife sometimes thinks I’m too soft on them. I never thought of myself as “soft” only as determined not to humiliate others.
For the sake of not seeming “soft” many men sacrifice their ability to love other men and replace it with something that often comes close to humiliation. It is a competitive way of one-upmanship which sons learn from their fathers early. It is often reinforced with strongly homophobic notions. As we will discuss later on, homophobia literally translated means fear of the same sex. The very fact that homophobia is used in this way suggests to me that there might be a culturally perceived need for men to be afraid of other men, even a need to teach them to be afraid of other men, almost as if we’re afraid that—if don’t teach homophobia—our cultural edifice will inadvertently begin to crumble. And maybe it will, who knows?
Sexual Identity: A question of Essence vs. Existence
Countless are the so-called straight men who have come through my office confessing they either have or have had something for or with another man or other men. Countless are also the numbers of so-called gay men who have had something for or with a woman or women. Men from both groups worry that their incongruence with the relationship patterns of the group they would like to belong to—gays or straights—means that they are now seen as the opposite: a straight man in gay’s clothes or a gay man in straight’s clothes.
If such an encounter with another person falls within that person’s professed sexual identity, we are likely not going to think too much of it. We call it a one-night stand, a new love, attraction, boredom with another partner, affair, etc. In other words, we look at such an encounter simply as a moment in that person’s existence. However, when the encounter falls outside of the boundaries of such sexual identity we trip. We’re no longer certain that we can consider this person in the same way we had up to this point. Though it might have just been a moment in that person’s existence, a blip so to speak, we are now considering him from the perspective of essence., eternity in other words. The essence perspective is easily identified by the word “to be” and its derivatives. He is gay, she is queer, you are bi-sexual, I am straight, etc. However, considering a person from the perspective of essence after they have had an encounter outside of their sexual identity leads to concern and worry.
What is even more complicating is that there is such a thing as a cumulative essential view. This kind of view takes place when a person exhibits repeated existential moments of a certain behavior. For example, if a man has repeated affairs we might consider this as evidence that he is a philanderer. This is a different essential perspective though. It is inductive, whereas the straying from one’s sexual identity leads to a deductive essential perspective, i.e., one encounter changes a person’s sexual identity.
I believe that this sense of incongruity with one’s own sexual identity is especially troubling for men. The firm and seamless fit of a man’s masculinity, i.e., his actions, behaviors, mannerisms and thoughts as a man, this seamless fit with a perceived cultural and social ideal is an expectation that most men have of themselves. We men crave sexual identity and fear endlessly sexual disidentity. Consider for example the male client to whom I suggested he read Ronald Levant’s book Masculinity Reconstructed. My client recoiled from the thought alone believing strongly that such reading would identify him—in the eyes of others and perhaps his own—as gay.
This exemplifies, I believe, what it really means to be “straight”. Being straight means that we are willing and able to walk a very narrow edge of acceptable behaviors and thoughts that—viewed from the outside—give the reassuring sense of our heterosexuality. Being straight means that we always have to be vigilant about how we are perceived. It means that we are in constant need to reassert our heterosexual manliness.
The men that come to my office for counseling, which, of course, in and of itself is already not so straight anymore and suspiciously close to being unmanly all exhibit this kind of vigilance. It can be expressed as a relentless checking of the time and an emphasis on what they have to do afterwards, it can be a detached attitude meant to demonstrate aloofness and control, it can be—as in the case of a 15 year old boy I saw for a while—an attempt to make certain parts of his appearance look more masculine. This boy kept pressing his chin to his chest while he spoke. It took me a while that he was trying to make sure that his voice, which hadn’t changed completely yet, would not slip up on him and make him utter a humiliating squeak.
Difference and Incongruity
Difference among men is more suspicious than it is among women. Go to any average clothing store and compare the range of clothes available to women with the range of clothes available to men and you know that men are meant to look alike. Acceptable colors for men? I call them camouflage colors. Any color-choices away from that and one runs the risk of either being thought of as gay or (as in my case) from Europe.
We have no trouble imagining the lonely woman donning her male lover’s shirts, boxers, socks, etc. But just try and picture the lonely man doing the same with his female lover’s clothes and you’re probably not far from seeing the word “pervert” flash at you.
Examples can be found in every single area of our human lives. They all speak the same message: boys and men must be careful in their choices as they run the very high risk that making extraordinary choices might be seen as an incongruence in their sexual identity. Sexual identity has turned out to hold us hostage in ways that keep men on a very narrow edge of understanding their own manhood and masculinity. Sexual identity is about either/or . While it might be very helpful to a man to be able to say “I am gay” and while it might be equally helpful for a boy’s parents to say their son is gay—helpful because it identifies rather than hides, I worry about those men for whom gay and straight are not easily identified. I worry about men who call themselves bi-sexual because they have no other choice and because simply saying that they have loved or are in love or just love a man is more likely of being interpreted as closeted than as honest. I worry that sexual identity as a concept does not leave room for men to simply be together and love each other.
Identifying Gays: A New way of Reinforcing Straightness
Interestingly, we continue to make this love between men less possible and more unlikely as we continue to be liberated enough to identify and celebrate gay culture. Because no matter how it’s done, celebrating gay culture also has the effect of fencing off gay men from non-gay men. This celebration creates a zoo-effect in which we, who consider ourselves non-gay, can stand outside, enjoy what we see and, at the same time, breathe a sigh of relief that we’re not behind the fence.
Homophobia in Recent Literature on Boys and Men: The Case of Michael Gurian, et al.
Take for example Michael Gurian’s treatment of gayness in his book The Wonder of Boys. Gurian begins—as other writers who deal with boy issues—by sympathizing with the parents.
“Few things are more difficult for parents than hearing their son say, I’m gay.”
While this start into the issue of being gay makes sense from a homophobic perspective, it already recreates what it itself is most afraid of: viz. being labeled, being misunderstood, being misidentified. Of course, it can be a relief to say “I’m gay” as it helps a boy or man fit into a cultural drawer or stereotype. But what would happen, if a boy or man when he comes out says “I’ve fallen in love with a man” rather than saying I’m gay? What if his parents responded by saying “You mean you’re gay?” And what if the son responded “No, I am saying I have fallen in love with a man.”
Furthermore, what would happen if a boy or man came to his parents or friends and said “Mom and Dad, I’m straight.” It would be silliness and in that silliness we recognize the silliness of the confession “I’m gay.” Of course, we don’t read it as silliness when a boy comes to us and says he’s fallen in love with a boy. Instead we think of it as denial. And by “we” I mean us—gay or straight.
So how can we understand Gurian’s insistence on this essential identifier “I’m gay.”?
Much of it has to do with the debate over whether sexual orientation and sexual identity are about biological unchangeables in the human body or whether they are about choices.
The implicit argument Gurian is making is that it is better to recognize the biological grounds of someone’s gayness rather than thinking of them as choices.
One way parents and communities deny the biological fact of homosexuality is to call it “a lifestyle choice.” When a boy or young man comes to them and says “I’m gay,” they say “You’ll change.” Most often, the gay adolescent knows this won’t happen, though he may try to make it happen for a while, even marrying and having children.
This makes intuitive sense, I believe, for if we entertain the idea that a boy or man is choosing whether to be with a man or a woman then we are possibly exposing him to an overwhelming wave of pressure to choose “right rather than wrong,” i.e., choose heterosexually rather than homosexually.
We all can probably sympathize with this position on some level. If we can assert and, possibly, prove that being gay is about a biological condition rather than a choice, then we have successfully rejected the possible interpretation that a gay man is choosing to do something bad. But, as many have pointed out before me, this means that we continue to accept our cultural view of homosexual encounters as bad. The only thing we’re saying is “I couldn’t help it.” It is somewhat like an insanity defense in a murder case. We all believe that killing another person is bad, but when insanity is involved, we back of and allow the person to say “I didn’t choose to kill that person, I just couldn’t help it.”
Again Gurian quoting a father:
Why do people go on about life-style choices? Who in his right mind would choose to be gay? You have a higher likelihood of getting AIDS, everyone hates you, it’s harder to get a job, your friends are dying all around you. My son didn’t choose (sic.) to be gay. Like so much else in life it was chosen for him.
I think we all can feel the passionate truth this father is working hard on expressing. My son, he is saying, didn’t choose this. He is not dumb. He is not stupid. He has his wits together. He is not a bad person. And in working out this passionate view of his son’s intelligence he is, more or less, beginning to think of his son as being handicapped. Being gay is not a choice, it is a biological fact and it is, as Gurian points out:
Genetically and chromosomally influenced, with certain families having far more homosexuals in their generational lineage than others; and it is wired into the brain. This wiring has been measured by researchers on autopsied brains.
Well, thank heavens that we have science to measure brains of dead people. And as it is en vogue in much of psychological literature these days, once the brain has been mentioned talk of the hypothalamus is not far off and we can expect a paragraph or two about brain-functioning. So Gurian continues:
The hypothalamus is the mission control of the brain. In the hypothalamus is a bundle of neurons called the “sexually dimorphic nucleus” or “two-shaped nucleus” by biochemists and neurobiologists. It controls, among other things, sexual orientation. In a gay person’s brain, this nucleus is half as large as the companion nucleus in a heterosexual person’s brain and although the research is far from complete it is now clear that somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of our boys have a smaller sexually dimporphic nucleus and a stronger biological tendency toward homosexuality.
I should, perhaps, explain that I grew up in a country that made it its business to autopsy people they were uncomfortable with in order to prove scientifically their biological and genetic inferiority. Aside from the very likely fact that Gurian’s summary is shoddy science I simply don’t care whether or not a person’s brain or parts thereof are smaller bigger, gone or have moved to another part of their body because I believe that at the end of it all we continue to say the same thing we sought so hard to avoid only more strongly: men who love men are handicapped, something in their brain is simply . . . smaller!
And so Gurian continues and with him so many other well-intentioned men who want to write about boys and men but cannot embrace their own potential to love men (platonically or sexually) and instead create a group of people to which they, of course, don’t belong. This is powerfully exemplified in Gurian’s next chapter—Loving our Gay Boys. Gurian waxes eloquent in his defense of gay boys and men. He emphasizes that gays are not more likely to be criminals of any sort. Gays even have unique gifts, he points out, gifts we non-gays would do well to appreciate. And, of course, we also hear about the Zuni tribe and the “special role of the berdache” Little does it matter that the berdache is not gay but represents a third gender that is male nor female. He goes on and on.
Prejudice Against Others vs. Prejudice Against Self
What is wrong here? Well, it’s easy to see that being liberated from prejudice against others might not result in a liberation of being prejudiced against oneself. While we might be able to convince ourselves that it is okay to be gay and to have a smaller sexually dimorphic nucleus, we might very well find ourselves unable to find that same thing acceptable in ourselves. I think what’s wrong and slips easily away if we don’t pay acute attention to it is that talking about homophobia and being against it is easy when it concerns other people. Yes, there are still enough people who haven’t quite graduated from “How to respect people who are different?”, Ethics 101. They should definitely continue learning about prejudice against others. But Gurian seems to have mastered that class just fine. What he doesn’t get into focus at all, in fact what he pushes away, is not the fear of others who are or might be gay but the fear that besets so many men in our culture that they themselves might be gay. For, unfortunately, the fence we draw around gays and their culture is, also one we then experience as an internal fence keeping us out of a realm of things, actions and thoughts that might, if externalized be thought of as gay. This, however, casts a large shadow not only over men who are thinking they might be gay, it particularly disables the possibility of men simply being close to and loving with each other. In one short sentence, identifying gays as gay and as different makes it harder, not easier, but harder for men to love each other. Of course, gays are off the hook now. They can do whatever they want, right? But what about the rest of us?
Scared Straight: Men Being Afraid of Each Other
The question then is, as Robert Minor—a professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas—describes it in his book Scared Straight, if we would not be served better by taking the term “homophobia” at its most basic definition, i.e., not as hatred against gays and gay culture, but as “fear of getting close to one’s own sex.” Listen to a longer quote from his book:
Even so, homophobia is a cultural condition, a major chemical found in the water that surrounds us. It is a conditioned characteristic of everyone regardless of sexual orientation. Essentially it has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Yet prejudices about, and discrimination and violence toward people perceived to be homosexual is a direct result of this conditioning because the existence and visibility of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people embodies the fear itself. (52-53)
Minor explains that homophobia is a “conditioned response” that pervades our culture in its entirety. He points out that our market economy which often advertises products that will bring us close to others is precisely based on the fear of others, i.e., homophobia, which the product in question is supposed to overcome.
How do we become homophobic? Minor believes that homophobia has very little to do with our sexual orientation and much more with how we look at and understand masculinity and femininity.
The definitions of manhood and womanhood homophobia enforces actually strip from us much of who we are as gender roles by which to define ourselves. I want to point out in the process of this discussion that oppression, prejudice, and discrimination directed toward gay people are in reality the mean for installing, maintaining, enforcing, and valuing gender roles which are our conditioned definitions of what a “real” man or woman is in our society. (53)
How does this work? Minor explains that it can happen in several ways, but that it often has something to with finding “causes [of homosexuality] that won’t disrupt the status quo.” Finding, for example, biological evidence that gays are different is less disruptive to the status quo than is what I am claiming in this paper and what Minor is claiming in his book, viz. that all men have the potential to act homophilic, i.e., with love for another man.
Similarly Minor points out that the sociobiology, if not interested so much in hard-wired processes is looking for inherent differences in men and women that might explain different sexual behaviors both toward each other and toward their own sex. Minor criticizes these studies heavily as
not at all helpful improving genetic origins. Instead they actually illustrate that by an early age gender conditioning has already taken hold. By thenj children have been conditioned relentlessly during all their waking hours in all their social environments for those four or five years. (55)
The compulsion to know the sex of a new human being, Minor charges, tell us that adults can’t relate to the baby as a full, open human being with all human possibilities ahead of it. In order to understand and react to the child, conditioned adults just have to know it’s sex. (56)
Once we know its sex, we can begin to pave for it the “straight” path on which it is supposed to be. And if, for some unforeseen reason, this straight path doesn’t work out for him, then there is a queer path which, as we have seen in Gurian’s account, is actually just as straight as the straight path, just smaller, just less traveled.
The term straight itself is problematic. Minor points out how that term narrows down what’s culturally acceptable in male and female behavior.
Straight is a good term for the tight-rope our society wants every person to walk—rigid, up-tight, narrow, self-protectively alert, highly strung. The word is used in anti-drug support groups to describe someone not “using.” It’s used in anti-crime programs which hope to scare youth into a law-abiding lifestyle. It’s been used as an equivalent for honesty in, “Are you being straight with me?” And it’s a part of the Boys Scout’s pledge to describe their standard of morality for real men, and now redefined to exclude gay men. It’s a broad designation for everyone who fits into the conditioning at all levels. Ideally, we are to look, act, think speak and feel “straight.” (124)
Broke Back Mountain: The Story of Two Gay Cowboys or Two Men Who Love Each Other?
So, the issue we are faced with in thinking about men loving men is that the suggestion alone is far from straight. Our culture has reached a point where it can accept straight heterosexuality and straight homosexuality. It can even accept those who sometimes choose to be with a man and sometimes with a woman. This is called straight bi-sexuality. What we have trouble with is “straight love” be that for a man or a woman. A man simply cannot express his love for another man, let alone demonstrate it by hugging him or kissing him or being sexual with him without having to call himself gay or at least bi. Men, therefore, often end up denying themselves the comfort and nurturance they can receive from another man for fear of being called or of thinking of themselves as gay.
This is the story of Broke Back Mountain. It is not the story of two gay cowboys who must learn how to survive in a homophobic society. Rather, it’s the story of two men who fall in love with each other and experience, in their desperate loneliness the nurturing comfort of another man’s presence. They cook for each other, wash for each other, sit together, and find that they’re drawn to each other. In an almost stereotypical way Ennis Del Mar says to Jack Twist after their first sexual encounter “you know I’m not queer.” Twist responds saying, “I know.” In a culture that has conditioned us to be open about “our gay boys” we read this statement as denial. Why not be straight forward we ask and admit that you are gay? Ennis Del Mar answers this question heroically, i.e., like a man: “If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.”
But what if “I know I’m not queer” is actually a true statement? What if this is not about finding out that deep inside Ennis and Jack are gay men? What if this is not a dormant truth or essence that could come only in the solitude and quiet of Broke Back Mountain? What if it is as simple as love? What if this love came out at Broke Back Mountain because in a homophobic society there is no other place than absolute solitude for two men to confess their love for each other.
How can it be that our culture cannot permit men to love each other without laying claim to their sexual orientation? Why is it, in other words, that we need to know (and for them to profess) their sexual orientation at the same time? If we could permit it, we would allow for a new kind of love, a love without sexual orientation, a love that simply gives and receives. But, if men were indeed permitted to express their love for each other in all ways possible they would indeed create a disruption of the status quo.
A Last Word About Boys
In his book Real Boys William Pollack describes how boys are kept away from each other and from the possibility of expressing genuine affection and love for one another. The
“gender straitjacket, combined with the absurd link that is often made between boyhood affection and adult male homosexuality, creates a restrictive environment. Boys are frequently pushed away from one another when they exude even a modicum of overt genuine love or affection for one another. This misguided perception—a form of homophobia—is perhaps most regrettable because it may lead us to undermine boys’ friendships before they’ve even taken hold. Ironically, this may, in turn, cause us to doubt whether boys are capable of intimate friendship. And [it might push] some boys to turn to drugs and alcohol, substances that temporarily mute the shame they feel about their genuine longings for friendship, love and affection.
It is clear, I believe, what Pollack wants to say in this paragraph. Boys’ need for affection should be acknowledged and permitted. Allowing it will perhaps even lower their likelihood to become aggressive, drug-dependent or alcoholics later in live. Not allowing this would be, Pollack points out, homophobic. This all makes sense. Yet, the ghost of homophobia, of not allowing men to love each other is well alive even in his lines. For the argument really is that boys’ affection with one another is not about adult male homosexuality. This, of course, means we shouldn’t worry about boys’ affectionate behavior with each other because it’s not like it’s going to end up as homosexual behavior.
This means to me that as long as we think of homosexuality, of gays, as the other—whether it’s the other we need to appreciate or the other we need to avoid—our own thinking and acting will be tormented from within with the fear of becoming the other. We will therefore never be able to love another man because, while we might appreciate and accept someone else’s gayness, our fear of being gay will not permit us affectionately expressive behavior towards other men.
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