At least here in the West, homophobia-phobia has long been of the most oppressive, coercive, corrosive, behavior-distorting blights on human male behavior. Homophobia-phobia being the (sometimes well-founded) fear of being mistakenly identified as a gay man when you're straight. My favorite example is men being paralyzed when asked to carry their wife or girlfriend's purse.
Because, you know, touching a purse might make you gay. Or, worse, look gay.
Because, you know, all gay men carry purses.
Or something.
Anyway, I say homophobia-phobia is a well-founded fear for straight men because... of the verbal and too-often physical bashing actual gay men have too-often had to face.
Too often at the hands of...
Straight men who themselves were...
Terrified of themselves being identified as...
Gay.
As George Carlin (in)famously put it while discussing macho in the tough ethnic-Irish neighborhood he grew up in, "A fag was a guy who wouldn't go downtown with you beatin' up queers."
Bingo! Nobody wanted to be the "fag" who wouldn't beat up "queers" because, well, then the guys wouldn't have to go downtown to find someone to beat up. If you weren't willing to go they could save a bunch of time by just beating you up instead.
So?
So, kudos to DailyKOS founder Markos Moulitsas for nailing this little sea change:
Marines and Navy personnel march in last year's Gay Pride Parade in San Diego. If wingnuts want to confuse me with these guys, why would I get upset?
One of these days, dumbass conservatives will figure out that calling me gay is not an insult. It's a compliment.
And no, they'll never really figure that out.
Source: Daily Kos
I think that's about as good as it gets.
Aside: This is a bit off topic but I didn't use Markos's original photo. Instead I used one from a recent Pride parade in my hometown of Knoxville, TN. Because another consequence of the decline of both homophobia and homophobia-phobia? The main street of town, the named in the 1890s, the one that's been blighted since the early 1970s by its name to a point where nearly all the business on the streets moved out and the ones that couldn't move started using the street addresses of the alleys behind them in a veritable orgy of homophobia-phobia? That street? Gay Street? It's having a renaissance like you wouldn't believe. The beautiful old stores, banks, and office buildings are being restored. The preserved-through-neglect nearby old city is awash in night clubs, coffee shops, and startups. And the nearby Market Square is alive at night -- verged with restaurants, ice-cream shops, boutiques, and fountains and filled with students, families with their children, the young hip and alive as well as the old and crusty -- in a way I've only seen in plazas in Greece. There aren't a lot of places more genteely homophobic or homophobia-phobic than east Tennessee so I'm thinking if it can start there -- even in a tiny area, even in a tiny way, then it can happen anywhere.
Finally!
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Shouldn't homophobia phobia
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 2012-07-28 19:25.Shouldn't homophobia phobia be a fear of being homophobic? You seem to be referring to run of the mill homophobia
Hi Anonymous. It's actually
Submitted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-07-28 23:08.Hi Anonymous. It's actually meta-homophobia but homophobia-phobia sounds funnier. Also, yeah, while you can cast a really wide net and say it's all homophobia I'm trying to distinguish (and extinguish) what's probably the most widespread kind: the ones where individuals may still express homophobia out of (a perception of) social pressure rather than, say, personal conviction. Getting rid of that is a big, big deal all around. --fl
And then there are the
Submitted by Absurdist (not verified) on Sat, 2012-07-28 19:39.And then there are the straight guys who don't want to be seen holding the purse because it makes them look -- you'll pardon the term -- pussywhipped, which is a similar but distinct condition.
One of the posts I most
Submitted by Lynn Gazis-Sax (not verified) on Sat, 2012-07-28 21:33.One of the posts I most remember from my Usenet days was by a guy who responded to a "pussywhipped" suggestion with "I love the whip."
Once again I have kind of a
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Sun, 2012-07-29 13:33.Once again I have kind of a tangential comment. This post fits in a weird way with a 1940s novel I was just reading (The Folded Leaf, by William Maxwell -- set in the 1920s), in which there's a homesick fifteen-year-old boy who goes out and picks a fight with another boy specifically to make himself feel better. He's clearly not after a chance to beat someone up -- he wants an equal match. He sees the other guy tossing back his longish hair and says, "Why don't you get a violin?" and the other guy says, "I don't like your attitude," and "Are you looking for trouble?" They then have this very stylized fight that seems to me to be completely homoerotic. "They were in position now, their moves as fixed and formal as the sexual dancing of savages." Afterward he's tired and happy and says guys like that are "not bad when you get to know them."
I couldn't help wondering if there really was, maybe still is, a phenomenon of gay boys fighting each other in order to have that kind of physical contact, without fully realizing why, or if that was something that the author (who didn't seem like the kind of guy who would ever willingly have been in a street fight in his life) was using symbolically. Kind of taking back gay-bashing and doing something different with it? but I certainly have read other accounts of boys having fistfights and then being friends afterward, without anything like so much subtext. I always wondered if that was something real or if it was just sentimentalizing some rather brutal pecking-order enforcement. (Of course the idea that it's normal for young men to be out fighting each other, whether true or not, is a terrific cover for the ones who want to do things like gay-bashing.)
The Folded Leaf is about two young men who are obviously in love with each other, indeed sleep together, but never actually have sex. Maxwell himself insisted it wasn't about a homosexual relationship, which is difficult for me to believe given that he puts in things like a college classmate reading Krafft-Ebing's description of a homosexual patient who "began to rave about boys of his own age when he was fifteen" -- though the actual quotation from K-E in the book gets cut off at "began to."
The weird thing about the whole book is that the main characters take their relationship for granted and no one else openly says there's anything odd about it -- they don't actually get called pansies or beaten up or anything. I mean, regardless of whether they're actually homosexual or not, I would have thought their relationship would trigger homophobic reactions anyway. I had the feeling of it being in a slightly alternate universe, though maybe Maxwell was right and it's just my ignorance of the 1920s. (See books.google.com/books?id=2sViqMf48IcC&pg=PA98 .) Or was Maxwell exhibiting homophobia himself? He was very happily married and I'm sure didn't want gossip about the book's autobiographical elements implying that he was a closeted gay man. Even bisexuality he might have thought of as kind of an insult to his wife.