Delivered at UUP by Meredith Guest on June 10, 2007

“Never, ever in my wildest dreams did I imagine such a thing would happen.”

Shortly after we purchased our home when there was still money for such things we were roofing an outbuilding that prior to our arrival had been used over the years for a chinchilla business, a machine shop and a drug dealing operation. We cleaned it, cleansed it and made it into living quarters for our nearly grown children. To guide us through the backbreaking process, we hired a handyman named Julian under whose tutelage we hammered shingles until our battered fingers could endure no more missed strokes.

As it turned out, Julian had a gay daughter, and as we talked about his daughter, he expressed a sentiment that I think is common among straight people that at least his daughter was lucky to live in a very liberal area of the country where she didn’t have to worry so much about the things that plague gays in other places. “Yes,” I agreed, “we are lucky in ways. Still,” I added, no longer willing to support this commonly held illusion, “when was the last time you saw two men walking through downtown Petaluma holding hands or two women share a lover’s kiss over a candlelight dinner in a local restaurant?” He had never noticed this, had never thought about what one takes for granted in relationships between straight couples, and it shook his confidence a bit in the comforting illusion of Sonoma County’s liberality. It is hard for most people to recognize the signs of homophobia that are, in fact, everywhere and very much visible and audible to those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear, for those of us who cannot afford the luxury of blissful ignorance.

So in honor of June as Gay Pride month, I would like for those of us living in “liberal” Sonoma County to consider the presence and power of homophobia. No one will argue that at least here there is a welcome diminution of overt forms of homophobia. Ride my school bus, and you will probably not hear the word faggot used above a whisper, since it is well known that almost nothing will get you an up close and personal encounter with the freakishly tall bus driver faster than that word. The students have now substituted the word “gay,” which they use in ways just as pejorative though considerably less easily confronted. And the movie Brokeback Mountain added to the arsenal of insults, such as “we don’t want any Brokeback Mountain going on back there,” which I heard a high school boy’s coach say jokingly to the team members in the back of the bus assuming, of course, that there would be no gay or questioning students on his athletic team who might find this remark offensive and intimidating, an assumption that is almost certainly false. And overt gay bashings are thankfully much less common, since several successful lawsuits filed by victims have cost school districts around the country tens of thousands of dollars. This absence of overt homophobia can lead some to conclude that it doesn’t exist or if it does, only at the fringe of society. Oh that it were so.

Allow me to illustrate.

You may have seen but not recognized a victim of homophobia if you saw a blonde headed boy walking home on Bodega Ave. Chris, from the jr. high has a year’s pass to ride my bus costing $350, yet the only time he rides is when the weather is really bad or else he has to get home fast. Otherwise he walks, and I know it’s over two miles, since bus transportation is not provided regular ed students who live closer to the school than two miles. You see, Chris is slightly built, shy, has a beautiful face with fine features and lovely wavy blonde hair cut short but stylish, which is to say, Chris is gender nonconforming simply by virtue of his appearance. While I cannot know this for sure, I think Chris prefers to walk rather than risk the abuse heaped upon boys who are gender nonconforming by boys who chips off the old manly block, boys who have already had the femininity beaten out of them. One day as we passed the Phoenix theater on my way to the high school with a load of about 20 junior high kids, my bus suddenly exploded with jeers, groans and shouted insults. I looked over and saw what appeared to be two girls wrapped in a passionate kiss. I happened to know, however, that one of the smitten couple was not a girl, but rather a boy with a head of long, dark, gorgeous hair I would give my right arm for. God only knows what would have happened had the kissers resembled boys.

Similarly, I took a group of elementary students on a field trip to San Francisco, and we passed a bus stop billboard with the picture of two shirtless, handsome young men standing together promoting AIDS testing. Upon seeing this, the bus erupted in Ewwws, and “Look, two naked men” though, while shirtless, they were by no means naked. And you cannot tell me that those children had never seen men with their shirts off. Of course, no adult said anything, though had they made such a reaction to two people based on their race, there would have been a week long program of sensitivity training for the entire school paid for by the government.

One morning years ago, Jan, my partner and a teacher of grades 1-3 at the Montessori School, found one of her favorite students weeping. She took her aside and asked, “Zoe, what’s wrong?” Whereupon Zoe told her that she had just learned that her dad was gay. “But, Zoe,” Jan said, “there’s nothing wrong with being gay.” “I know,” Zoe replied tearfully, “but it’s my dad.”

When Caleb, my son, first started driving to Petaluma High, I let him us an old Nissan 4 wheel drive pickup that years earlier I had put a rainbow colored Celebrate Diversity bumper sticker on. While I knew it was a gay rights bumper sticker, to me it was equally about biodiversity and our need to celebrate and protect it. In that sense it was a two for one thing. One day on my way to take out the trash, I noticed that Caleb had covered the Celebrate Diversity bumper sticker with duct tape. It was shortly after I had come out full time, and it felt to me like he was trying to cover me in duct tape, and I was hurt. Recently, however, I was editing a paper Lia, his sister, wrote for one of her classes at Cal Poly. This is what Lia said: “He [Caleb] initially had no problem with the bumper sticker for he was not ashamed of our father, and he did believe in the celebration of diversity. After several counts of verbal attacks and incidents in which he was harassed for having such a sticker, he covered it with duct tape. He may as well have duct taped his mouth and the mouth of our family as well.” So Lia interprets the duct tape incident, not as rejection of me, but as the silencing of Caleb, which I must admit is a rather more mature way of interpreting the event than I had.

So what do walking Chris, the kissing couple, Zoe, Caleb and Lia all have in common? They are all victims of homophobia, and, to my knowledge, none of them is gay.

We tend to think of homophobia like we think of racism, as hostility, prejudice and violence against a particular group, in this case gay, lesbian and transgender people. And certainly it is sometimes, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that gay, lesbian and transgender people (who I like to refer to as people of the Rainbow Tribe) are more like some sort of collateral damage inflicted primarily by those who are so insecure about their own identities they need to hide their insecurity and sexual ambivalence beneath a protective coating of ubermanliness. No, I think the real victims of homophobia, and I think the intended victims of homophobia are not people of the Rainbow tribe. They are rather boys and men, especially young men. And the true goal of homophobia is not to inflict pain and suffering on gays but rather to create a male monoculture faithful to the culturally defined rules of manhood.

In her book Self Made Man, Norah Vincent chronicles her year-long impersonation of a man and her infiltration into an all male bowling club, a monastery and the world of hypercompetitive sales. Vincent, who is really a gay woman, summarizes the experience in her final chapter, which I highly recommend, especially for men. Here is an excerpt:

“Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it’s other men, other women, even children. And everybody is always on the lookout for your weakness or your inadequacy; as if it’s some kind of plague they’re terrified of catching, or, more important, of other men catching. If you don’t make the right move, put your eyes in the right place at any given moment, in the eyes of the culture at large that threatens the whole structure. Consequently, somebody has always got to be there kicking you under the table, redirecting, making or keeping you a real man.”And that, I learned very quickly, is the straightjacket of the male role. You’re not allowed to be a complete human being. Instead you get to be a coached jumble of stoic poses. You get to be what’s expected of you.

“The worst of this scrutiny came from being perceived as an effeminate guy even though in real life I’d always been perceived as a masculine woman. Other guys, it turned out, were hypervigilant about the rules of manhood, and they were disconcerted, sometimes deeply so, by my failure to observe those rules. They could be obtuse as hell about all kinds of other signals, especially emotional ones, but boy were they attuned to the masculinity quotient. So much so that it really does justify the term homophobia — and I’ve certainly never been a fan of that word. But it felt to me as if most men were genuinely afraid, almost desperately afraid sometimes of the spectral fag in their midst. It’s hard to explain it otherwise.” (Self Made Man by Norah Vincent, pp. 276-277)

Think about what the children’s response to the poster of the two men in San Francisco said to every boy on that bus about what you can and cannot do as a man. Think about what it says about the parameters of male affection, and if expressions of affection are rigidly controlled and restricted, do you think the capacity to love is unaffected? By the rules that every 4th grader on that bus already knew, two shirtless men standing together touching one another affectionately had better have just beat the dickens out of the opposing team or else be holding M16s. Then, maybe it’s okay. Otherwise, there’s always the specter of the fag. And it wasn’t just the boys who reacted negatively, the girls were right there with them. I believe homophobia is why there’s never been a men’s movement equal to the women’s movement in liberation from the straightjacket of social expectation and oppression.

But why, if women can be freed from rigid social roles governing their occupational, recreational and sartorial choices can’t men? Why is the society so stubbornly reluctant to cast homophobia on the trash heap of human folly along with racism? There are probably a variety of reasons, but I think the real goal, as I said earlier, is to create a male monoculture. Look around. The culture very much controls how boys and men dress, their hair styles, their general appearance plus it controls men in ways men don’t even know. For instance, how men move their hands, walk, sit in a chair, enter a room, talk, even the vocabulary they can use are all controlled to achieve a high level of conformity. I know, because I have had to try and unlearn them, and it hasn’t been easy, because these rules of behavior are beaten deep into males at a very young age. Why? Because if even trivial behaviors can be controlled, there is a greater likelihood that men’s thoughts can also be controlled, and society wants to control the way men think because that increases the likelihood that there will always be a sufficiently large pool of men, particularly young men, who can be convinced that it is right and good and divinely sanctioned that they should fight and kill, suffer and die to protect the status quo when the controlling elite determine that it is being threatened. Homophobia is one of the most powerful psychological hammers used to beat and fashion young men into the shape of warriors.

So if the goal of society is to create a male monoculture and homophobia is a tool to that end, then, in what can only be described as a remarkable irony, homophobia and HIV are two expressions of the same disease. Julia Whitty in the May/June issue of Mother Jones writes, “The richer an area’s biodiversity, the tougher its immune system, since biodiversity includes not only the number of species but also the number of individuals within that species, and all the inherent genetic variation — life’s only army against the diseases of oblivion.” HIV, the virus that causes AIDS is a disease that attacks the body’s immune system, leaving the victim vulnerable to opportunistic infections that are eventually fatal. Homophobia does the same thing to the psyche, both the individual and the social psyche. It works to create a male monoculture thereby weakening the immune system, leaving the victims vulnerable to the infections of fear, suspicion, scapegoating, prejudice, discrimination, repression of the true self, misogyny, nationalism, fundamentalism, violence and the ultimately fatal disease of war.

If I’m right, even if I’m just partially right, we have seriously under appreciated the degree to which homophobia has infected our culture, the degree to which it has weakened our immunity to disease, and we have failed to calculate the inestimable damage it inflicts — not just on homosexuals — but on the psyches of men and boys, and thus on the collective psyche of the entire society. The spectral fag is the 10-ton gorilla in the room wrecking havoc to which we are as oblivious as people were oblivious to the presence and power of germs prior to Louis Pasteur in 1860.

But do not be dismayed for there are signs of hope:

As an adult, Zoe and her gay father have a wonderful relationship.

Some time back I was transporting one of the junior high girl’s teams to Ukiah for a competition. We pulled up to the school and standing in the crosswalk was a handsome, bearded, middle-aged man wearing a skirt. It resembled a kilt, but it wasn’t like any kilt I’ve ever seen. Of course, the girls on my bus went nuts at seeing a man wearing a skirt, but the kids at the school seemed to take no notice of it whatsoever. When he kindly directed me to the bathroom later, I got the distinct impression he was the school principle. So guys, maybe your sartorial choices aren’t as limited as you think — especially if you have nice legs.

K.C. makes up forms for the junior college, and on a recent women’s retreat she told me that on one questionnaire she made, on the question of sex, she put: male, female, other. I have a box of my own to check. I exist. Don’t underestimate the significance of something so seemingly small. I keep waiting for a form from the California State University system that instead of asking for the name of: 1) mother and 2) father, simply says: Parents’ names. Are there no gay parents in California?

Recently in my partner Jan’s classroom of 1-3rd graders, a conflict arose over some playground issue that fell along gender lines. It seems the boys wanted one thing and the girls wanted another. When someone pointed out that Raymond had voted with the girls, one of the boys responded, “Well, Raymond’s a girl.” He said this not as a put-down or with intent to hurt or belittle Raymond, but simply as a statement of fact. And Raymond took no offense, but rather accepted it as a statement of fact. Did they mean they thought of Raymond as female? No. Raymond is obviously not female and shows no desire to be. He is simply a girl in the way girls are girls. Imagine a world in which males can be girls without shame or fear. Imagine a male equivalent to tomboy. Why don’t we have one?

I was on my way to speak to a gathering of students at Sonoma State, when I saw attached to the backpack of a young female student walking ahead of me a rainbow pin that simply said, Ally. I caught up to her and said, “I just want to thank you for your pin. It means a lot to those of us in the tribe.” She said the Gay/Straight Alliance had been handing them out. We chatted briefly and went our separate ways. It’s good to know there are people out there who are our allies and aren’t afraid to make it known.

A female student was recently allowed to seek the title of Prom King, because California law protects the gender identity of students. I didn’t know that. And I want to name one other sign of hope, and if this matters to you, I want you to think about it the next time the offering plate passes or you are asked to pledge. This is a sign of hope: that I am welcomed without qualm or question into this religious community and am up here preaching to you today. And while there are a few other congregations in the county that might allow me into their pulpits, I am quite certain there are very, very few — perhaps no others — where shortly after joining I was asked, “You are coming to the women’s group, aren’t you?” Never, ever in my wildest dreams did I imagine such a thing would happen.

Now I am very much aware that next to the behemoth of homophobia, these signs of hope are ridiculously flimsy. It’s like flies trying to topple an elephant. But…if the flies got together and swarmed the eyes of the elephant, blinding it to the log in the path, over which it tripped and fell, could we not say that the flies brought down the elephant?

Please take your hymnals and turn to hymn #170, We Are A Gentle, Angry People. If We Shall Overcome is the signature song of the Civil Rights movement, I would like this to be the signature song of the movement for the rights of the Rainbow Tribe. So in honor of Gay Pride Month, I ask you to sing it with me, but I don’t want you to sing it like a bunch of straight people. I want you to think about all the little boys whose essential individuality is being beaten out of them. Think of the young men in Iraq who are literally being beaten to death even as we sing. Think of them when you sing it. And besides that, by virtue of my acceptance into this community my family and many of my old friends think all of you are a little queer. So by the power vested in me as a Two-Spirit of the Rainbow Tribe, I pronounce you all queer for the day. Sing it like you belong.