The Food of the Gods

 Jon Schwarz recently tweeted:

As Harry Truman said, "The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know." I thought of this quote when I found out Richard Pryor and Marlon Brando had sex with each other.

Well, cool.  It's not news that Brando had sex with men and women; he told a French interviewer so in 1976, adding "But if there is someone who is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing."  (The stilted language presumably comes due to translation.)  Pryor wrote in his late autobiography Pryor Convictions that he once had an affair with a drag queen, "But after two weeks of being gay … I went back to life as a heterosexual."

This doesn't prove that Pryor and Brando had sex, of course; it only puts the story into the realm of plausibility.  Schwarz linked to a 2018 article from the Guardian, which reported that the rumor came from the music producer Quincy Jones, and was confirmed by Pryor's widow (well, one of them) Jennifer Lee Pryor.  She said that Pryor "was always very open about his bisexuality with friends, and documented it extensively in diaries. Jennifer says she'll publish them later this year."  (No sign of the diaries yet.)

Neither Jones nor Ms. Pryor inspires a lot of confidence, however.  Jones reportedly told New York magazine that "He’d fuck anything. Anything! He’d fuck a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. Marvin Gaye."  Ms. Pryor told TMZ, "It was the '70s! Drugs were still good, especially quaaludes. If you did enough cocaine, you'd f*** a radiator and send it flowers in the morning."  Remarks like these are just the flip side of the popular homophobic evasion that goes something like "I don't care if X had sex with men, women, or drainpipes."  Pryor, especially, was openly a heterosexual horndog and an abuser of alcohol and other drugs; he famously burned himself badly when the crack he was smoking blew up in his face. Who can say who got into his pants when he was drunk or high?  But that's not a sign of erotic free-spiritedness, rather the reverse.

The rumor sparked predictable responses.  Pryor's daughter Rain, posted on Facebook (excerpted by People):

“Y’all so thirsty and LOVE THEM but ever know the real source or full story, and you’re gonna wonder how 45 became president? WAKE UP!!!” she wrote.

“So read this, I don’t need you as a fan or a friend. I don’t need anyone in my life that thinks a sensationalized interview is relevant and ‘incredibly well done,’” Rain added. “People who lie or share information to raise themselves up are bottom feeders no matter how much money or influence they have. Wrong is still wrong!!! #GTFOH.”

Yeah, no.  Even if I consider that Rain Pryor was a child in the 70s and is not a knowledgeable source about who her father was having sex with, there's nothing here but ranting.

People also quoted "Miko, Brando's oldest living son": "The Marlon Brando family has heard the recent comments by Quincy Jones and we are disappointed that anyone would make such a wrongful comment about either Marlon Brando or Richard Pryor."  It's not clear how Jones's claim about Brando and Pryor could be "wrongful," given both men's known sexual promiscuity.  It certainly couldn't harm either one of them, even if it isn't true, any more than the many rumors and known facts about their heterosexual activity.

People touted the story as "the rumor rocking Hollywood," and allowed that the idea of a tryst between Pryor and Brando "sounds scandalous."  In 1978, maybe; in 2018, no, except for people who dote and excite themselves on scandal.  Nowadays the news that any two adult celebrities copulated consensually shouldn't be a big deal, except as fodder for masturbatory fantasy, and that doesn't require factual accuracy anyway.

But back to Twitter.  Schwarz's tweet didn't draw a lot of response, but some of the responses were revealing.  One straight leftist male commented, "I'll take 'Mental images we could do without' for $600."  I presume he wrote "we" when he meant "I," but to each his own.

Another person, who turned out not to be straight, complained "Remind me why this is any of our business?"  I replied that Pryor himself had claimed in Pryor Convictions that he walked into the dressing room of a club he was working to find jazz legends Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie making out. Was that our business? Pryor evidently thought so.  Plus Pryor had reported his own supposedly one-time gay affair with a drag queen, let alone his abused childhood and his alcohol and drug abuse.  

The person replied: "It took years for me to be public with life. I also know lots of ppl choose not to. I reflexively protect them. I prbly [sic] always will. I thought I saw it happening." Someone wasn't paying much attention.  Pryor had not been 'private' with his life during his lifetime, and now that he and Brando are both dead it's not an invasion of their privacy to report or speculate about it, any more than it would be to report a sexual liaison between Pryor and a female celebrity.  We can dispute the truth of Quincy Jones's gossip, but as a very wise man* once said, "Gossip is the food of the gods."  We've come a long way since the 70s, but as long as queer revelations still upset closet cases and homophobes, we still have a long way to go.

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*Sutherland, a character in Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance.

Clap Your Hands If You Believe in the Ferryman

I've begun reading For the Ferryman: A Personal History (Chelsea Station Editions, 2011) by Charles Silverstein, a psychologist who played a significant role in the gay liberation movement.  He presented an argument to the American Psychiatric Association's Nomenclature Committee that contributed to the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973, and went on to write pro-gay books on numerous subjects that many gay people nowadays would tell you were impossible to write about positively in those ancient times.  One was A Family Matter (1977), on dealing with parents and other family members; another was Man to Man (1981), on the management of committed gay male relationships.  Most famous, probably, was The Joy of Gay Sex, co-written with Edmund White, which first appeared in 1977 but has gone into three editions, the latest in 2009.  I could have sworn I'd heard that Silverstein died twenty years ago, but Google tells me he's still alive at 85, which pleases me a great deal.

I'm about a hundred pages into For the Ferryman; it's not great literature, but it's a good read and a significant document of the post-Stonewall era, and there are a couple of passages I want to pass along.

One involves the Gay Activists Alliance, the second and longer-lived gay activist organization to emerge in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion.  GAA's headquarters was a former firehouse, which supported its activities with weekly dances that drew crowds of a thousand or so every Saturday night.  (There's a scene in the movie Parting Glances set at the Firehouse during one of those dances.)  GAA was an avowedly anti-capitalist organization, but:

On the other hand, GAA had to pay rent and the phone bill and buy beer for dances.  Therefore, we charged an admission fee of two dollars for the dances.  The result of the conflict of values was an irresponsible accounting system.  The first year the treasurer was caught with his hand in the till.  Unwilling to trust the police and the courts, GAA held its own trial and ended up the treasurer's membership.  (The former treasurer threatened to run for president in the next election, saying that stealing the money was our own fault because we let him [95-96].

And the name of that treasurer was... Donald Trump! -- No, not really.  Unfortunately, antisocial behavior among LGBTQ people is still sometimes excused on the grounds that the offender suffered under heterosexism and can't be held responsible.  It occurs to me now that charging admission to the dances as a fundraiser to cover expenses wasn't capitalism, but people had the same trouble defining their terms that they do now.  Besides, many GAA members at the time were probably still influenced by the hippie ethic, which held that everything should be free; but it was still necessary to get money for necessities even for nominally free stuff.  GAA could have called the admission fee a "donation," and maybe they did.  It's not capitalism unless you're accumulating capital and making a profit.

The next bit has bearing on an issue that's still very much with us:

The word "homophobia" is another example [like "gay"] of using words to reinterpret the world.  It has very little meaning from a psychological perspective, especially because of its use of the word phobia.  It was a brilliant political conception first publicized by the psychologist George Weinberg and used so extensively that people believed it to be a significant psychological term.  Its political function was to attack institutions or people who depreciated gays.  The people who who beat us on the streets or called us fags were no longer merely prejudiced.  They suffered - and here is the brilliance of the term - from a mental illness called "homophobia." We provided a medical diagnosis to balance the scale that had previously been tipped to our detriment.  "Homophobia" was as effective in going on the offense against discrimination as the word "racist" was to the Black Liberation Movement and "sexist" to the Women's Liberation Movement [96-7].

Now, that's interesting, but even though Silverstein was on the ground at the time, I don't believe it.  It has been many years since I read Weinberg's Society and the Healthy Homosexual, but I don't recall any sense that he was using "homophobia" as a political conception.  As late as 2012 he was arguing in all seriousness that it should be entered into the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is a bad idea all around.  Far from casting "homophobia" as a political tactic, Weinberg insisted that it must be an illness because people did bad things to gay people. It makes no sense to call a majority attitude (as antigay bigotry was in the 1960s and 1970s) an illness.  Among those who "believed it to be a significant psychological term" were the many LGBTQ people who went into the helping professions after Stonewall, so whatever political sting the term may once have had, it's long gone now.  Also, "racist" and "sexist" are not pseudoclinical terms, so they're not comparable to "homophobic."

Oh, one other thing, on the same page.  Silverstein says of the first Gay Pride Marches that

we did not call them "parades" as they do now.  Parades have a celebratory air about them, suggesting a time for fun and frolic.  We were not celebrating, we were marching for our civil rights, exhibiting ourselves to a shocked heterosexual audiences and shouting for other gay people to come out of the closet.  This was not accidental.  GAA did not want their marches to deteriorate into the parades they have now become [97].

I've written about this before.  If GAA didn't want their marches to "deteriorate" into celebratory parades, they shouldn't have included celebratory, carnivalesque elements in the very first march.  But the marches' tone was out of their control almost immediately, even just in New York, let alone all the other cities that quickly followed their lead.  In the beginning, the celebration had a political edge, because those shocked heterosexuals had never seen such goings-on outside of New Orleans for Mardi Gras.  Silverstein tries to play down those aspects, summing up the first march with "We greeted each other with friendly kisses and 'Happy Birthday,' as if we had started life anew at the Stonewall" (97).  (N.B.: Silverstein wasn't at the Stonewall, as he informs his readers himself - see page 87.)

Harumph, harumph!  Ah well.  Silverstein's perspective is worth having, and I look forward to the rest of the book.

But Already It Was Impossible To Say Which Was Which

It's frustrating to be called a faggot.  But liberal Democrats tell me it's important that I empathize with their pain over Hillary's loss last year, which can only be expressed adequately by fag jokes.

Oh, of course, they aren't talking about me, or so they will claim.  Well, maybe they are talking about me, because I voted for Clinton without adoring her, which indicates that below my left-wing surface I'm really a Putin-loving cock holster.

What they don't get is that when they call Trump a cock holster, or post cartoons depicting Mike Pence on his knees gobbling down the Donald's manhood, they are revealing how much they despise me and every other faggot.  (And by corollary, every woman.)  We're the polluted bogeymen who unsettle their dreams, and no matter how much they support gay marriage they keep waking up in a cold sweat, clutching their scrotums to make sure they haven't undergone sex-reassignment surgery in the night.

A liberal Democratic Clinton supporter I know posted a video clip on Facebook the other night which he said expressed his hope that Jared Kushner will soon be in prison being violated by brutal hairy felons.  I called him on it, and he accused me of trying to blind everybody with my intellect, but he wasn't cowed and would stand by his principles.  He claimed that he couldn't see what I stand for; which I understand to mean that one only 'stands for' a political party, specifically its anointed and corporate-funded leadership, with fervent and unshakeable loyalty.  So, opposing rape requires an advanced intellect, and fantasizing online about prison rape -- for someone else -- shows one's courageous devotion to principle?  But maybe his fantasies about Kushner's ravaged rosebud are driven by economic anxiety.  Whatever: it's good to know what I'm dealing with.

What I'm dealing with is an all-American, bipartisan anti-intellectualism.  I'm quite used to being accused of a smarty-pants know-it-all by far right-wingers, less so by near right-wingers of the Democratic center.  But the Dems are howling for the heads of pointy-headed intellectuals more and more these days.  What worries me is that this guy, who seems to have trouble keeping a job (economic anxiety?), sometimes works as a substitute teacher.  Sometimes he posts his contempt for his charges on Facebook.  His students, good or bad, shouldn't have to defend themselves against such attacks.
  
Jon Schwarz had linked to "this incredibly prescient" 2012 Onion video a few days earlier on Twitter, but he presumably saw it as a harbinger of the right-wing rage that made Donald Trump the Republican presidential candidate in 2016.



And it is that, though any reasonably attentive observer would know that demented right-wing rage has always been with us.  It wasn't new when Father Coughlin, a Rush Limbaugh in a clerical collar, had millions of radio listeners from the 1930s onward.  Jon knows it himself, since in October he recommended a documentary about a 1939 pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden.  Hell, the Pilgrim Fathers brought this kind of rage with them from the Old World in 1620, though it already existed here among Native Americans from time immemorial.

But the same mindset can be found among nominally liberal Democrats, and never more than in the Age of Trump.  This shrieking white-hot sphere of pure rage, we're informed, howled "'Guns ... Not my America', and then it just repeated "faggots' at a deafening pitch for hours and hours."  When it became clear that Trump had won the Presidency in the electoral college, the shrieking white-hot sphere began winning adherents among mainstream Democrats: they began to say that Trump was not their president and his America was not their America.  They fantasized about Resistance, even armed Resistance.  The first human sacrifices were offered up.  And liberals began repeating "faggot" at a deafening pitch for hours and days and months.

I know, I should be compassionate.  I'm finding it very hard to be so, because Democratic loyalists would like me to believe that only they can stop Trump and block his dastardly designs.  It doesn't look to me like they have any idea how to do so, let alone repair the damage he's already done and will continue to do.  So this isn't really about them, it's about me and the other people who are Trump's and Paul Ryan's real targets as they dismantle the systems of social and economic justice that were built at such human cost in the past century.

Nobody Expects the Politically Correct Inquisition

(I should have written about this a week or two ago, but don't worry -- more of the same kind of material will circulate for as long as Trump is President.  P.S. And I was right: today one of my liberal friends liked a post about Putin defending Trump, which had the added remark: Putin's standing up for "his girlfriend.")

The above cartoon began to circulate after Mike Pence walked out of a football game to make known his displeasure to NFL players taking the knee during the national anthem.  Liberals made much of the fact that the action was planned in advance -- like the players' protests weren't -- and cost the taxpayers perhaps a quarter of a million dollars, which is chump change in the Federal budget.  The same complaint could be made about any president's official visits to disaster sites, or other symbolic gestures, but of course when it's Not Your President or Vice President who's doing it, it's completely different.  The Democratic outrage that ensued was a bit odd, considering how many of these people claim that they regard Pence as a lesser evil that they can deal with when Trump is impeached.  I regarded it all as yet another distraction from the actual purpose of the protests, by making them all about Trump.

But then several people I knew, liberals all, passed along the cartoon above.  It too is far from the worst thing in the world today, but it infuriated me anyway because of the people who thought it was funny.  As with Stephen Colbert's "cock holster" quip, it's not really funny; there's no wit about it, it's just a crude and juvenile homophobic taunt, which means it's not the sort of thing liberals should be spreading.  But evidently they thought it was so hilarious that they had to share it.

Ordinarily I respond to homophobic rhetoric on the Internet with sarcasm -- how nice of woke liberals to show their superiority to Rethuglicans by indulging in homophobic attacks, that sort of thing -- but not this time.  I was direct: it really pisses me off when liberals show how woke they are by indulging in homophobic or misogynist attempts at humor -- which generally fail, as this one does. If you spread crap like this around I don't want to hear any bullshit about how much you care for equality and everybody getting along together. You're not an ally.

A few weeks earlier, Mel Brooks complained in an interview with the BBC that "political correctness is 'the death of comedy'.  He said Blazing Saddles, his Western spoof about a black sheriff in a racist town, could never be made today."  This is bullshit.  Blazing Saddles couldn't have been made just a few years before Brooks made it, not because of "political correctness" but because of the Hollywood Production Code, which was the result of the movie industry appeasing religious (especially Roman Catholic) reactionaries.  (I imagine that it couldn't have been made before the Code was adopted either, because of its flamboyant profanity.)  And even after the Code was replaced with a rating system, Brooks encountered resistance to making and releasing the film.  As I recall from the commentary track on one of the DVD versions, some of the actors Brooks wanted refused to speak the naughty words, and others were understandably uncomfortable about spewing racial slurs on camera.  ("Understandably," because of the well-known tendency of audiences to confuse actors with the roles they play.)

Contrariwise, movies full of racial slurs and profanity are reasonably commonplace today, especially when black filmmakers produce them.  But has Brooks never seen, say, Pulp Fiction, which contains plenty of both?  The racist material in particular seems to be there more simply for the taboo-breaking frisson rather than any dramatic or, as in Blazing Saddles, satirical reason.  I don't believe that "political correctness" is preventing such movies from being made.

Brooks went on to declare piously:

But there is one subject he insists he would not parody.
Referring to World War Two, he said: "I personally would never touch gas chambers or the death of children or Jews at the hands of the Nazis.
"In no way is that at all useable or correct for comedy. It's just in truly bad taste."
However, he says that is the "only thing" he would avoid. "Everything else is OK."

This is passing strange, because one of the sources of Brooks's notoriety was Blazing Saddles' predecessor, The Producers, about a couple of sleazy Broadway impresarios who stage a musical, written by a diehard Nazi, celebrating Hitler.  It's just in truly bad taste.  I've never been able to get through the entire film myself, not because I'm offended but because it's not all that interesting: as in Pulp Fiction, the "humor" comes from the breaking of the taboo.  Brooks has never disowned The Producers, and indeed in his dotage made it into a very successful stage musical.  At any rate, he has his own personal "political correctness," the line he won't cross.

Even more obnoxiously, Brooks tried to exalt comedy, especially his kind of comedy, into a virtually spiritual vocation exempt from criticism.  "Comedy has to walk a thin line, take risks. It's the lecherous little elf whispering in the king's ear, telling the truth about human behaviour."  Numerous critics pointed out that Brooks was wrong about the jester's traditional role here.  I certainly agree that comedy, like art in general, can and should take risks, even if it offends; but those who are offended can and should speak up.  Traditional racist, sexist, homophobic &c. comedy wasn't meant to take risks, quite the opposite: it afflicted the afflicted while comforting the comfortable.  It couldn't have been made if it had done otherwise.  Because of the ambiguity of art and entertainment, many of such comedy's targets turned it around and found some kind of affirmation in it.  But to pretend that Sambo shows, for example, were intended to "tell the truth about human behavior" is dishonest.

I liked Blazing Saddles because it turned its satire on white racists, but I suspect that many whites liked it because they thought it gave them a license to say "nigger."  As, apparently, many white schoolkids do with Huckleberry Finn, or rap.  I'd hope that it couldn't be made today, though, at least in its original form, because it's too uneven.  (That is typical of Brooks's films, except for Young Frankenstein, which had fewer comic peaks and more valleys as time went on.)  I wasn't offended by the fag-joke soundstage number featuring Dom DeLuise later in the film, but I never found it funny either; it takes no chances, it's a reprise of the 30s-style Hollywood fag jokes itemized in Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet.  The closest it comes to edginess is having some of the rugged cowboys saunter off arm-in-arm with the queeny chorus boys, and that's not close enough.  (Heathers, and numerous other later comedies, came closer.  Colbert's "cock holster" line and the Pence/Trump blowjob cartoon fall even shorter.)  I think that Richard Pryor, who co-wrote it, probably deserves more credit for Blazing Saddles's virtues than Brooks does, if only because on his own Brooks never again reached those heights.

The proof of the comedy, and the satire, is in the laughter -- and people disagree on what to laugh at.  I think again of Ellen Willis's satirical definition of "humorless": it's what you are if you don't think rape, big breasts, or sex with little girls is funny -- but you're not humorless if you're not amused by castration, impotence, or vaginas with teeth.  And if an artist fails to produce the results he or she aimed for, he or she needs to be told.  Yes, comedy should take chances, but taking chances often fails, and while I sympathize with comedians who don't want to be told, they need to know when they fail.  I might watch a comedy about Nazis, the gas chambers, and all the other subjects Brooks rejects -- if it was really funny.  It's a question that can't be answered in advance.  Blazing Saddles only proved itself by being made.  As Joanna Russ wrote, "To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political."  Like comedy, it's hard to do, and not many bring it off.  Nothing is sacred, including comedy.

But Some of My Best Friends Are Cock Holsters!

Just as I was about to let Stephen Colbert's unfortunate "joke" about Trump and Putin sink slowly into the past, various people kept kicking it back to the front of my consciousness.  So, for example, Roy Edroso dismissed US Representative Jason Chaffetz last week as "a little bitch who remained lashed to his great white Hillary whale long after everyone else abandoned ship because pretending to be a tough guy is all he knows how to do."  Edroso got his metaphors a bit mixed up there, but these are troubled times and we've got to do something.  Then, yesterday, Edroso mocked country singer Toby Keith, who performed for an all-male audience in Saudi Arabia during Trump's visit there:

I like to imagine Keith getting a call: "Hey Tobe! It's me, Faisal. How'd you like to pick up a quarter mil easy money? All you have to is change some lyrics -- you know, 'Pellegrino for My Horses, Mango Nectar for My Men.'" Or maybe it's not that kind of relationship, and Keith came wrapped in a rug?

The link goes to a clip from the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster Cleopatra, in which Elizabeth Taylor has herself delivered to Rex Harrison wrapped in a rug, thereby signaling her sexual availability or something.  So Edroso wants us to think of Keith as Faisal's little bitch.

Then this morning liberal tweeter Yes You're Racist invited Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to "eat my entire ass."  YYR is a better person than I am; being rimmed by McConnell would just make me feel dirty.  (Or as the lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel had a character say in one of her early strips, "I thought sodomy meant having sex with a Republican.")

These examples, which of course could be multiplied, are useful partly because they disprove the straight-liberal-guy protestation that calling somebody a faggot is not a reference to gay sexual practices, that they are totally cool with gays boning gays, they totally support gay marriage, they just don't like "Servants of power.  You know - faggots."  But as Colbert and Edroso and YYR show, they equate being a servant of power with being penetrated sexually, which they regard with visceral repulsion.  So how do they think of the women in their lives?  I probably shouldn't ask.

Another reason I almost didn't write about all this was that Brandon U. Sutton wrote an excellent piece about the controversy at Progressive Army.  Sutton said most of what I'd intended to say.  For example:

First, and while this may seem churlish, what Colbert said was not even particularly clever or funny. Arguably, it was barely even a joke, since jokes have a certain structure from which they derive some of their humor. Colbert saying that the only thing Donald Trump’s mouth is good for is as a “cock holster” was just an insult that people found funny.

"Funny" is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but I think he's right.  "Cock holster" is the kind of epithet sixth-grade boys consider hilarious: not because they have any personal experience of fellatio from either end, but because they're extremely anxious about bodies.  Which reminded me of a couple of sketches from Colbert's show during last year's campaign, in which a young boy played Trump's "nickname strategist."  It appears that Colbert took the boy on as one of his writers.

That many conservatives objected to Colbert's insult was unsurprising -- not because it was "homophobic," which they would normally consider a good thing, but because it targeted someone on their side.  If, during the 2008-2016 period, some comic had called Barack Obama a cock holster for Benjamin Netanyahu, would liberal Democrats have considered it just a joke?  For that matter, I recall Colbert himself adopting a stance of unironic submission to then-President Obama, who ordered him to get a military buzz cut to show his solidarity with Our Troops in Iraq. "Servant of power" would have been a perfect characterization for Colbert in those days, and depending on whom he's bending the knee to, it still is.

I don't want Colbert fired.  I just want to name what he's doing.  His liberal defenders have had to resort to right-wing insults against his critics, such as "virtue signalling."  But virtue-signalling is Colbert's stock in trade.  One Colbertista on Twitter responded to me in those terms: "Thanks for another example of our virtue signaling culture where everyone is perpetually offended."  To which I replied, "I'm not 'offended' by his homophobic insults; I'm a faggot, they just roll off. They just undercut his signalled virtue."

But there's another thought: one reason we're not supposed to say such naughty things is that they'll drive gay kids to suicide.  So why does Colbert get a pass on it?  Because he's on Our Side, one of the Good Guys, and anyway, liberals are happy to use homophobic / misogynist rhetoric against their enemies.  (Don't imagine that kids wouldn't hear about what Colbert said, even if it weren't freely available the next day on YouTube.  That's another right-wing fantasy, that children will know nothing of homosexuality if we can just keep Teh Gay out of the media.)  I'm not seriously worried about Colbert affecting youth-suicide rates, of course: I'm just savoring the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.

Some Things Just Don't Change, I Guess

It's been annoying enough to see all the babble about the Chicago Cubs going to the World Series -- did I get that right? I really don't pay attention to these things -- though I admit, having so many of my Facebook friends distracted from posting stuff about the election campaign made online life a little easier for a while there.  And now it's over, which I know because the express bus I rode to Seoul this morning played the final game* live on its video screen, with commentary from a couple of Korean sportscasters on location.

But yesterday one of my Facebook friends, formerly a resident of the dorm where I worked for thirty years and now a journalist somewhere, posted a link to an article that included this graphic.

For context: the Fox sportscaster Joe Buck has been vocal in his admiration for the Chicago Cubs player Kyle Schwarber, "the heroic slugger who is almost certainly the first professional athlete to return to play after suffering a tragic knee injury."  Apparently he ran on until it began to annoy some sports fans, some of whom expressed their annoyance by constructing memes like the ones sampled above.  Some fans also started a wedding registry for Buck and Schwarber -- no, two of them, with proceeds from one allegedly to go to Cleveland Indians Charities.

I looked it over for a while, then commented that I was trying really hard, but I couldn't find a way to read it except as good old-fashioned fag-baiting.  No reaction, either from my friend or from any of his friends.  This morning I added a comment: "I give up -- it's fag-baiting." Still no response, but when I looked for the post tonight to grab the collage of images, it was gone.  So maybe I made an impression, though not the impression I'd intended to make.  (It took me a while to find another article with the same graphic; I was unable to find the article my friend had linked to.)

This could be an answer to the question I posed myself a few days ago: whether there were images that would offend me to the point that I'd demand their suppression and removal.  Now, I did not and do not call for the suppression or removal of my friend's post, or of the article he linked to.  What I do want is a response.  It seems to me that these images are the equivalent of images of Barack Obama as a chimpanzee or as an African witch-doctor with a bone through his nose, that no nice liberal would admit to being amused by; but as I've noticed before, nice liberals -- especially males -- despite their lip service to and even sincere belief in Equality and support for gay marriage, still harbor homophobia in their hearts that now and then will come bursting out in fag jokes, uncomfortable references to buttsex, and pictures like the ones above.  And if you have any doubt that antigay bigotry is involved, consider this tweet, just one of numerous ones that make it explicit.

One right-wing commentator complained that Buck's admiration for Schwarber, which she also called a "man crush," "is getting annoying, if not borderline creepy."  "Creepy"?  Well, I haven't listened to Buck's commentary, nor am I going to bother doing so.  What is creepy, to my mind, is the persistence of this kind of grade-school mockery -- Joe and Kyle / Sitting in a tree -- among nominal adults of any political persuasion.  Where's the liberal hand-wringing about how this sort of thing will drive young Homo-Americans to suicide?  Again, I'm not calling for suppression, even on that rationalization, just wondering what runs through people's heads when they make and share images like these.

P.S. Something else funny here, in more than one sense of the word.  Remember how distraught many straight people (and some gay people too) get about supposedly "modern interpretations" of manly friendship and admiration that cast the manly men involved as homos?  Writing about this before, I distinguished between

what I'll call a homophobic (or gay-baiting) interpretation -- which detects eroticism in same-sex bonding in order to mock and discredit the people involved, while furiously denying the possibility of eroticism in pairs whom the homophobe does not want discredited -- and what I'll call a homoerotic (or gay) interpretation, which sees eroticism in same-sex bonds as positive and desirable.

Homophobic / gay-baiting readings have always been acceptable in the mainstream; it's pro-gay / homoerotic readings that arouse indignation there.  What we have in these images is clearly gay-baiting, and an example of how gay-baiting is used by straights (mostly by men, but by women too) to shame and control each other. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pointed out somewhere (I think in Epistemology of the Closet) that it's impossible to draw a sharp line between "innocent," "platonic" male friendship and Sodomitical vice, but this is a feature, not a bug: men can never be sure that they haven't crossed the line between the former and the latter, which fuels anxiety that can be redirected into mockery and hostility against other men, as we see in these images.  The fag-baiting of Buck and Schwarber is comparatively harmless, unlikely to hurt either man, but it shows that, although homophobia may be declining, the anxiety Sedgwick wrote about is still lurking in many men, ready to surface in harmless and harmful ways.

*Evidently it wasn't the final game.  You see?  I told you I don't pay attention to these things.

Only I Get to Decide Which Criticisms of Me Are Valid

To a great extent I agree with this meme; it makes an important point.  But even as I clicked "Like," I heard once again that snarky voice in the back of my mind saying, "Oh, yeah?"

Rather than try to tell other minorities what they should do, I'll start with the one of which I'm a member.  I don't trust gay people to decide what is homophobic, or what is antigay bigotry.  Many gay people are themselves homophobic; if they can't spot it in themselves, they probably won't be able to spot it reliably in heterosexuals.  And they don't.

There are two phases to the question, it seems to me.  First we need to know what we're talking about when we talk about homophobia.  Merriam Webster's definition is revealing:

irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals

I've already discussed the odd conflation of "aversion" and "discrimination."

But I once had a revealing exchange about all this online.  I wrote that if you are uncomfortable seeing two men kissing, but not a man and a woman kissing, that is homophobia.  It didn't seem like a particularly controversial statement to me -- that discomfort is an irrational aversion, no? -- but other gay people disagreed with me vehemently.  Their argument was that if you aren't throwing rocks at a gay person, you aren't homophobic.  It also seemed that they were hesitant to label someone a homophobe merely for wanting to vomit at the sight of two boys kissing, because homophobes are, like, monsters -- demons, even.  That's odd when you consider how much fuss there has been among my people over language like "That's so gay," which doesn't constitute overt violence either.  But then, many gay people have at least claimed to be disgusted by public displays of affection between people of the same sex.  They would commonly try to mask their own homophobia by claiming to be just as disgusted by heterosexual PDAs.  The only disgust at PDAs I've ever observed among my fellow Homo-Americans, however, is disgust in gay men at lesbian PDAs.

I've known a fair number of people who were initially shocked (irrational aversion) or repulsed (ditto) by the idea of homosexuality, or the sight of same-sex couples kissing (or even holding hands), but who got over it -- without therapy.  Their original reactions were born of ignorance and socialization, and these faded away when they got to know gay people, and their repugnance faded.  Even if one wanted to call this homophobia an illness, like most illnesses it can pass without treatment.  Some people, true, cling to their revulsion; that's a lifestyle choice.  It can be judged morally, though a sensible person will also recognize that clinging can become a reflex that isn't turned off easily.

Many, perhaps most gay people regard as homophobic any criticism of born-gay theories of sexual orientation.  Anyone who doubts that homosexuality is innate will be accused of believing that being gay is a "choice" and of siding with the bigots.  This is problematic given the absence of sound scientific evidence for, or a coherent concept underlying for those theories; but as with the medical model in general, the conclusion comes first and the evidence later, if ever.  And the born-gay faith is compatible with considerable internalized homophobia.  (Would anyone choose a lifestyle that caused them to be hated, despised, persecuted ...?)

Having said that, I notice that "Gentiles don't get to decide what is anti-Semitic" is conspicuously absent from the meme.  I suspect that many if not most American Jews would agree that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, unless the critic is a Jew, in which case he or she is a self-hating Jew. Should this be allowed to stand?  I know that the acquaintance who posted the meme on Facebook is critical of Israel, as am I, and would dismiss the contention and the accusation.  But this can't stand, on the meme's simplistic terms. 

"Non-patriots don't get to decide what is anti-American" is also absent from the list.  So is "Non-Christians don't get to decide what is anti-Christian," along with "Non-Catholics don't get to decide what is anti-Catholic," and even "Non-fundamentalists don't get to decide what violates religious freedom."  What complicates the problem -- and also indicates the way out of it -- is that not all members of any of these groups agree, about much of anything.  There is a wide range of attitudes to homosexuality and antigay bigotry among gay people, for example; many critics of Israel are Jewish; many critics of the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy are Catholic; feminists take a wide range of stances; and so on.  It's easy, and all too common, to dismiss the dissenters as willing victims of false consciousness, but that won't work: who gets to decide who has authentic consciousness?

But too much good work on women's issues has been done by men, good work on gay issues has been done by heterosexuals, good work on race has been done by white people, and so on, to limit discussion to the simplistic level of this meme.   Beyond that level, what matters is the quality of the arguments a person makes.  By that standard, much of the discourse of oppression by the oppressed groups doesn't measure up, and it's not news that majorities in such groups are often hostile to the arguments made by the more thoughtful among them/us.  Which doesn't mean that academics and other intellectuals should automatically have the last word either; nor can an outsider dismiss the complaints of the oppressed by pointing to one or two among them who support the oppressor.  You have to acquaint yourself with the range of opinions in any group, and then think about them.  That's a lot harder, but it's what has to be done if anyone's going to learn anything.

The Medicalization of Bigotry

While writing another post I went into a digression that seems worth pursuing, so I decided to give it a post of its own.

I was writing about various kinds of discrimination, and not for the first time it occurred to me that there's a problem with the word "homophobia."  Merriam Webster's definition is revealing:

irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals

"Irrational fear" and "discrimination" are two different concepts, though they often overlap in practice: a person might discriminate because of an irrational fear of those she discriminates against, but there are other reasons too.  Irrational fear and aversion might, it seems to me, arise when a society maintains certain social divisions, and the aversion might be more of a reaction to the breaching of those divisions than to the specific instance.  So, for example, there is no innate revulsion against eating pork, but if you've grown up in a society where pork is forbidden, you might very well be disgusted by the thought of eating it, or by people who eat it.  There's no innate revulsion against political parties, or against athletic teams, but people learn to invest intense emotion in these rivalries, and to despise their opponents.  As with other forms, it doesn't really make sense to call an attitude a disease when it's a sanctioned majority position in a society.  It's a sign of how people have confused the two that Webster found it desirable to conflate them in a single definition.

"Homophobia" was invented out of whole cloth in the 1960s by a psychologist named George Weinberg.  I see from this 2012 article that he wants it to be put in "the index of mental disorders," though he still evidently has no evidence that it is one.  Anecdotes about abusive attitudes and behavior do not constitute such evidence.  Indeed, what constitutes a mental disorder has never been settled among mental health professionals.  Why would Weinberg want to confuse bigotry, which merits moral condemnation, with a mental disorder, which ought to be regarded with compassion and given treatment to cure it?  I think he wants to have the best -- or perhaps the worst -- of both worlds, treating illness as a moral failing which can respectably be regarded with repugnance.  That's a familiar pattern in itself: it used to be the normal (though not universal) attitude among mental health professionals toward homosexuals: revulsion and fake compassion.  We need to get rid of that pattern, not switch targets.

Weinberg presumably also wants his profession to have authority to deal with social problems, as opposed to the law or the Church -- again, the same pattern Foucault identified in the medical profession as it dealt with sexuality and other matters in the nineteenth century.  Without any evidence at all save the kind of lurid case histories Weinberg offered at HuffPost, doctors claimed that they understood the true nature of (for example) homosexuality, and should be authorized to determine its treatment, though they had none to offer.

What Stuart A. Kirk, Tomi Gomory and David Cohen wrote in Mad Science (Transaction, 2013) about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders fits Weinberg's methods as well.

DSM offers behavioral diagnostic criteria as if they confirm the existence of a valid disorder, when the criteria merely describe what is claimed a priori to be an illness. Descriptive diagnosis is a tautology that distracts observers from recognizing that DSM offers no indicators that establish the validity of any psychiatric illness, although they may typically point to distresses, worries, or misbehaviors [166].

Weinberg doesn't even mention treatment of homophobes in his 2012 screed; it doesn't seem to be a concern of his.  I expect he knows that homophobia can no more be "treated" than homosexuality can; maybe it's inborn?  If not, where did it come from?  But the important thing is that in inventing "homophobia," Weinberg is working on the same principles that had made "homosexuality" a mental illness too.

This is is why, though I'll use "homophobia" loosely to refer to a gut-level emotional reaction to gay people or homosexuality, I prefer to call it antigay bigotry.  I think it's better to make forthright moral judgments, when that is what one wants to do, than to hide behind pseudo-scientific terminology in hopes of seeming more objective, or unbiased.  Curiously, though, it seems that many people who are quite comfortable judging others for "homophobia" are uneasy about calling a bigot a bigot.  I think such discomfort is most likely to arise when someone generally considered liberal reveals him or herself to be a bigot, as opposed to ignorant dirty Bible thumpers.  (Not always, of course.)

This, I think, is what the philosopher Walter Kaufmann called "decidophobia" in Without Guilt and Justice (Wyden, 1973).  He wasn't pretending to diagnose an illness; like me, he used "phobia" loosely to refer to a pattern of feeling, a nervousness about making fateful decisions and judgments and taking responsibility for them.  Among the patterns he identified was "moral rationalism," the belief that morality can be decided by reason, mechanically, rather than by human reflection and judgment.  "Homophobia" as a pseudo-medical term is a prime example of moral rationalism, especially when people use it as an epithet, judging while pretending not to.

Didn't I Say That on the Other Side of the Record?

The advice columnist Dan Savage "called out" antigay bigot Ben Carson last week for saying on CNN that being gay was a "choice."  Carson had pointed to people who "go into prison straight and come out gay."  Savage challenged Carson to prove his claim by choosing to become gay himself, by sucking Savage's dick.

I've said before that one reason I'm finding it hard to write this blog is that I feel like I'm repeating myself.  But then, so is Dan Savage: he said the same thing to another antigay bigot a few years ago, and I can't add much to what I wrote about him at the time.  Since then, however, he's shown his moral superiority to bigots by calling some high school students "pansy-assed" because they walked out on one of his personal appearances, using a homophobic epithet to try to shame them; and by saying that he sometimes thinks about "fucking the shit out" of the antigay bigot Rick Santorum, again using the homophobic trope that fucking another man degrades him.  As I wrote of Savage's remarks about Santorum, Savage is indulging in homophobic abuse that no one should be allowed to get away with, using sex as a metaphor for debasement and humiliation. He's tapping into the same reservoir of male violence that drives queerbashers and rapists.  And, of course, he's also revealing his own hangups about being gay himself.  So why listen to Ben Carson when you can get your daily dose of antigay bigotry from Dan Savage?

Carson backed down and apologized, but also "criticized CNN for airing the comments he'd made in an interview and said he won't be addressing gay rights issues for the duration of his presidential campaign."  Hahahahah, I'm sure he won't.  If he's going to be a presidential candidate, he'd better get used to the comments he makes during interviews (!) being aired and otherwise published.  I doubt his candidacy will get very far, though, since like other Republican hopefuls he's prone to making stupid gaffes that will entertain his hardcore supporters but put off everybody else.

On the other hand, Carson said something true: that "up until this point there have been no definitive studies that people are born into a specific sexuality."  Maybe his medical training has paid off after all!  But if he really cared about factual accuracy, he wouldn't make any statements at all about the etiology of sexual orientation, and he certainly wouldn't have said what he said about the effects of prison on sexual orientation.  Nor would he claim, as he continues to do, that homosexuality is a choice.  But he seems to be driven to make a fool of himself, so even in the apology he posted on Facebook he said that "we are always born male and female", which as a scientist he should know is oversimple, and that he thinks "marriage is a religious institution"; if he really believed that, he'd reject civil marriage, the interference of the State in a religious institution.

It's interesting how far Carson (like other religious bigots) has surrendered to the Politically Correct Gay Agenda.  Does he want homosexuals to be executed, as Scripture commands?  Does he want to reinstate sodomy laws, or Don't Ask Don't Tell?  Does he want same-sex couples to be outside of all legal recognition and protection?  No, he does not:

I support human rights and Constitutional protections for gay people, and I have done so for many years. I support civil unions for gay couples, and I have done so for many years. I support the right of individual states to sanction gay marriage, and I support the right of individual states to deny gay marriage in their respective jurisdictions.

That's not a Bible-believing Christian talking, not one who stands firm against the moral erosion of American society.  That's a flaming liberal.  Even when he says that marriage should be restricted to one man and one woman, he's agreeing with the liberals that polygamy -- a Biblical and traditional value, mind you -- is wrong.  Someone really should ask him, though: since he thinks marriage should be defined and sanctioned by states rather than the Federal government, does he think that Loving v. Virginia, which overturned state laws against "interracial" marriage, should be overturned?  And if he really believes that permitting legal same-sex marriage is an illegitimate redefinition of marriage, why is he willing to let states do it?

"I am not a politician," Carson concluded.  As a presidential hopeful, he is a politician.  But he won't be one for long, the way he's going.

Ah there, you see?  I've said all this before, though sometimes about different people.

The More It Changes the More It Stays the Same, Latest Iteration

I've had some interesting discussions with people about the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, which has now received several Oscar nominations.  One such discussion was with a straight friend who loved it because, he said, it was so refreshing to see a positive depiction of a computer nerd in a mainstream movie.  I think that's as questionable as the movie's depiction of a gay man, but I suppose he liked it for the same reason many people have liked its depiction of Turing as a socially clueless yet fearful closet case: because they agree that the only way you can win sympathy (or an Oscar) for Turing, as a queer or as a computer geek, is to make him hopelessly miserable and then put him out of his misery.

I would think it even more tragic if Turing had been shown as he apparently was: a gay mathematician who, despite his social awkwardness, could work with others, had friends, was unconflicted about his sexuality, and had a reasonably satisfying sex life -- but was brought down by the bigoted laws of his time and place. To show Turing in this way would take some imagination and creativity; treating him as The Imitation Game does takes the easiest possible way out, by falling back on every toxic stereotype about nerds and queers.

When I explained this, my friend replied that he thought the film "dealt with his sexuality reasonably well," and "didn't make a 'big deal' out of it" and "it was treated as a secondary struggle for him."  He conceded that "If one does a 'queer reading' of the film, I'm sure there are some problems," but he himself "found the character captivating and intriguing and the central tension of his character played well into the film's overall thematic purpose." I agree with that last point, since I think The Imitation Game's "overall thematic purpose" was to win sympathy for Turing by the use of homophobic stereotypes.  (This is not to say that any of the filmmakers were personally homophobic -- no doubt some of their best friends are homosexuals -- but that the way Turing was depicted used homophobic cliches that have long been part of popular culture.)

I think only a homophobic straight person could watch The Imitation Game and perceive it as not making a big deal out of Turing's homosexuality.  Indeed, it makes it into a crucial plot point, when the Soviet spy (whom the real Turing probably never met, let alone worked with closely) blackmails him into keeping silent by threatening to expose his homosexuality.  (Ironically, Turing's superiors certainly knew that he was queer, just as they knew about the presence of a Soviet spy at Bletchley and -- as someone tells the movie Turing -- chose what information he'd pass along to Stalin.  They would have investigated him quite thoroughly before admitting him to the team.)  As for "queer reading," my reading is structurally queer since I'm queer, but it doesn't use any of the concepts or tools of queer theory.  Of course it never occurred to my friend that his "straight reading" brought no agenda to his understanding of the film or of Turing as "struggling" with his homosexuality.

So I wasn't all that surprised when the authors of a new Young Adult science-fiction novel with non-heterosexual, non-white protagonists mentioned (in a "big idea" post at John Scalzi's blog) that "an agent offered to represent it on the condition that we make one of the protagonists straight or else remove his romance and all references to his sexual orientation."  They refused, and eventually found a home for the book at Viking Penguin.  I'm still a bit annoyed by the authors' repeated insistence that writing a story with such characters is "risky" -- there's not enough fiction out there with non-heterosexual characters of color, but there's still quite a lot of it, and "risky" has all kinds of connotations that I think go beyond the chance that an agent won't represent your work because of its content.

The writers also wrote a piece about their experience that was posted on a Publishers Weekly blog, inviting comments from writers with similar experiences, and got a lot of traffic.  (Though the writers didn't name the agency involved, it identified itself and responded, denying the writer's accusation.)  One author wrote that per "editor went through and deleted all gay references between my copyedits and the first pass pages without bothering to tell me.  I pitched a fit and my agent backed me up. The gay character stayed in the novel, as written."  Another commenter declared the need for fiction about Christian gay characters who struggle with their sexuality and ultimately "leave the lifestyle/choose to go on with their lives from a Christian standpoint."  Personally I think it would be interesting to read such a story -- it would be fantasy, of course, but we're talking about fantasy here -- and I wonder why Christian publishers haven't given us some examples already.  I'd even recommend the acquisition of such a book to my public library, and would welcome the change to discuss it here.

Despite the apparent decline in the US and Europe of homophobia and antigay bigotry, to say nothing of structural/systemic heterosexual supremacy, they're still with us.  It's good to be reminded, even if it's frustrating.

"Every Man Does Not Look Like Brad Pitt"

Dave Zirin interviewed the gay ex-NFL player Wade Davis for The Nation, and alas, Davis (who is "now the executive director for the You Can Play Project", which indicates he thinks he's some kind of spokesman) didn't do a very good job.  When the inevitable "objectification" (aka "What do I do if a gay guy looks at me in the shower?") question came up, Davis said:

You know, it all comes down to having experiences. I guarantee that if Jonathan Vilma has a chance to sit down with myself or any other gay person, he’d be like, “You know what? These old ideas that I had about gay people… they really aren’t true.” It’s not all Jonathan Vilma’s fault. Our country has a very monolithic way that they show gay men—the Modern Familys and what not. The exposure’s great, but let’s have some nuance to show that there are different types of gay people, so Jonathan Vilma’s mind can expand and he can say, “Oh, every gay man doesn’t want me.” Most guys look terrible naked, and I should know. And, straight guys look too… there’s a perception that straight guys don’t check out other guys’ penises, and that’s a lie. The one difference is that some straight guys get uncomfortable and think that every gay man wants them. Wrong. Every man does not look like Brad Pitt.

The best thing here is Davis's pointing out that "straight guys look too."  It's not necessarily erotic, it's more the expression of competitive anxiety over penis size -- though such anxiety doesn't necessarily exclude erotic interest.  But yes, having spent some years in locker rooms, whether under compulsion for high school PE or of my own free will when I was working out, I know that if every man who looks at other men's bodies in a locker room is gay, there are hardly any straight guys in locker rooms. 

But aside from that, Davis's remarks are a mess.  What "looks terrible naked" is open to considerable variation, and you don't have to "look like Brad Pitt" to be desirable.  (Not all gay men want Brad Pitt in the first place.  Or Channing Tatum, or whoever.)  This is just more of the same old garbage which puts down everyone who doesn't look like a model or movie star as too ugly to fuck.  Luckily, those of us who don't look like models or movie stars still do get laid, and checked out in the showers for that matter.

Besides, I wonder how many straight men really will be reassured by being told that they're too ugly to fuck.  Again, in my experience, many straight men -- and not only straight men -- are disappointed when they find out that a given gay man isn't secretly seething with lust for them.  And some, especially athletes like Vilma, may still want to ask "But what if some gay guy does want me?"  That's easy enough: you say, "No, thanks" or "Yes, please," depending on your own wishes.  It may help to reassure them that no matter what they look like, not all gay men will want them.  On the other hand, some straight men enjoy being admired and desired.  The real problem for people like Jonathan Vilma is that they think that just being looked at, admired and desired, unmans them.  But there's nothing much they can do about that, since they'll be looked at, admired and desired even when they're fully suited up for the game.

Zirin and Davis use the word "objectification" for this, but that's too easy: not all desire objectifies, and indeed objectification doesn't have that much to do with erotic desire -- it's about control, about seeing erotic relations as a power struggle from which the man must always emerge the victor.  (For many gay men, of course, being a bottom is victory.)  Should Zirin and Davis have gone into this?  If they're going to touch on straight male anxiety about being "objectified," yes.  I don't think we're going to be able to resolve homophobia and antigay bigotry unless we can think about such things.  About thirty years ago Joanna Russ wrote:

I’ve always thought that patriarchal male sexuality must be a rather difficult business. To over-simplify: A partner’s hostility or boredom is ordinarily a real turn-off – and yet this is exactly the situation under patriarchy, where so many women are not interested, not excited, not participants, and not happy. Yet men must penetrate and ejaculate if there are to be any babies – and so the problem for patriarchy (whether you think of this as a one-time invention or a constant process) is to construct a male sexuality that can function in the face of a woman’s non-cooperation or outright fear and hostility.

As long as that's the case, and I think it is the case, it's not surprising that the existence of openly gay or bisexual people is going to generate anxiety among many heterosexuals.  That means we not only need to talk about such issues, we need to do some hard thinking about what they mean in people's real lives.

"Liberal" Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

There's been an ongoing argument about the meaning of bigotry, focusing recently on some vile things said by the noted liberal actor (and bogeyman of the Right and of South Park) Alec Baldwin.  I've been following at Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog at The Atlantic, so I'll quote some of his quotations.  Baldwin wrote the following to a gay journalist who'd written something he disliked:

George Stark, you lying little bitch. I am gonna fuck you up … I want all of my followers and beyond to straighten out this fucking little bitch, George Stark. @MailOnline … My wife and I attend a funeral to pay our respects to an old friend, and some toxic Brit writes this fucking trash … If put my foot up your fucking ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much … I’m gonna find you, George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna fuck….you….up.

And there's more, much more.  Just one more quotation, though it's more comical than bigoted.  When Baldwin's show on MSNBC was canceled, he responded thusly:

But you've got the fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy—Rich Ferraro and Andrew Sullivan—they're out there, they've got you. Rich Ferraro, this is probably one of his greatest triumphs. They killed my show.

I had to look up Rich Ferraro, who turns out to be a biggie (Vice President of Communications) at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media-watch organization that real queer fundamentalists consider far too easy to get along with.  I do, of course, know who Andrew Sullivan is, and while I have to giggle at how he'd react to being called a "fundamentalist," he doesn't fit Baldwin's description either.  It appears, however that in the same statement, Baldwin admitted, "And I have to take some responsibility for that myself", which shows more self-awareness than I expected, but is probably just empty pro forma "balance."

Read the post I quoted these from if you need more persuading that, supporter of same-sex marriage though he be, Alec Baldwin is a bigoted misogynist homophobic scumbag.  I really can't see why there'd be any disagreement on the question.  But there is.  (By the way, for a pretty overwrought counterattack, try this piece, which rants about "witch hunts," "the militant lobby" and the like.)

Coates has been discussing one persistent defender of Baldwin, a writer named Wes Alwan.  Alwan is very scrupulous about applying the word "bigot" to Baldwin:

These condemnations are grounded in a number of highly implausible theses that amount to a very flimsy moral psychology. The first is the extremely inhumane idea that we ought to make global judgments about people’s characters based on their worst moments, when they are least in control of themselves: that what people do or say when they’re most angry or incited reveals a kind of essential truth about them. The second is that we are to condemn human beings merely for having certain impulses, regardless of their behaviors and beliefs. The third is that people’s darkest and most irrational thoughts and feelings trump their considered beliefs: Baldwin can’t possibly really believe in gay rights, according to Coates, if he has any negative feelings about homosexuality whatsoever. The fourth, implied premise here – one that comes out in the comical comments section following Coates’ post – is that we are to take no account whatsoever of the possibility of psychological conflict. We refuse to allow ourselves to imagine that a single human being might have a whole host of conflicted thoughts and feelings about homosexuality: that they might be both attracted to it and repelled by it....
 
It is just as ludicrous to condemn people for being afraid of or repulsed by homosexuality as it is to condemn them for having violent impulses.

I believe I've written before that I object to "homophobe" being used as a moral condemnation because of its pseudomedical history and definition: if homophobia is a disease or disorder, as it supposedly is, then its victims are not morally responsible for their condition, any more than a schizophrenic is.  They should, of course, seek treatment.  I do use "homophobe" loosely, to imply that a person has a gut-level aversion to gay people and to homosexuality, but I also stress that homophobia in this sense is not limited to heterosexuals but is very common among gay people.  (That's not a terribly radical notion, it's shared by many Culture of Therapy gay people and allies under the rubric of "internalized homophobia."  Of course all homophobia is "internalized."  I suppose the term is supposed to mean that the subject turns the homophobia inward, on him or herself, but the internalized homophobe seldom stops there.)  For this reason, when I'm in the mood for moral condemnation I prefer to speak of bigotry, but Alwan doesn't like that word either.

But it should be obvious how ludicrous Alwan's defense is.  Baldwin isn't being condemned for having antigay "impulses," but for overt behavior, repeated over a considerable period of time.  As for the "worst moments" defense, Baldwin has evidently had a lot of them.  If they were really bad moments when he wasn't in control of himself and don't reflect his better self, he could apologize, seriously and abjectly (by which I mean, not the usual obviously insincere "apologies" offered up by celebrities for PR purposes), and give his critics reason to believe that he's trying to change his behavior in the future.  Instead Baldwin continues to blame his critics.  That's not going to work.  I can't help thinking that Alwan wouldn't extend the same generosity of spirit to a right-winger accused of homophobia or bigotry or racism, but that's okay -- we have Michael Kinsley to do that.

Additionally, on Alwan's logic no one could ever be condemned for bigotry at all.  The more extreme and irrational a person's opinions, statements, and actions, in fact, the more we would have to invoke the same "dark" mechanisms that produce violent and bigoted "impulses."  Again, I wonder if Alwan is willing to extend the same compassion to illiberal right-wing bigots, or if he reserves it for liberals alone.

Coates wrote again on this topic today, addressing Alwan's latest entry, in which he reaches for a dictionary and argues that "bigot" just doesn't fit.  But as Coates shows, Alwan selects the meaning that suits him, and the word is wide enough to include Alec Baldwin.  Alwan wants "bigot" to mean someone who's "unpersuadable," though Baldwin's reaction to criticism indicates that he's exactly that.  Coates goes on to point out that just as Baldwin is complex, so were many notorious white racists such as Strom Thurmond.  Of course, there's a similar panicky overreaction to calling racists by the proper label.  Alwan complained, as Coates quotes him:

I worried, when I published a long post defending Alec Baldwin against charges of bigotry for calling someone a “cocksucking fag,” that I ran the risk of being seen as defending the indefensible. I knew that if the post got any attention, readers who are unfamiliar with my reputation as a (hardcore) liberal might interpret it as a particularly sophisticated piece of crypto-conservatism or closeted bigotry. And I also worried that friends who know me better might wonder how it is I could possibly make such a defense: my motives would be suspect. Indeed, the point of Coates’ marking a portion of my argument as “bizarre,” “terrible,” and “telling” is to signal – without openly calling me a bigot, a ploy that would be too embarrassingly obvious – the fact that my motives are in question: I’m a white guy defending another white guy, not someone making a principled argument (no matter how wrongheaded) about what I believe to be right. I am, possibly, a closeted bigot, dressing up my bigotry in a sophisticated argument; not, as I intend to be, a self-critiquing liberal who wishes to hold liberals – for the sake of consistency, intellectual honesty, and fairness – to their own liberal principles.

Alwan's tangled up in his own apologetics.  I think it's obvious enough that in defending Baldwin's behavior he is "defending the indefensible."  That doesn't make Alwan a bigot, of course; it makes him an apologist for bigotry.  ("Apologist" means "defender," in the older sense of "apology."  It didn't originally mean saying you're sorry, it means making a defense.  If you read Plato's Apology -- his version of Socrates' defense speech at his trial -- thinking that Socrates told the Athenians he was sorry for corrupting the youth and denying the gods, you're in for a surprise.)   Whether Alwan's "a closeted bigot" I don't know, and I'm not saying he is.  But I don't see that he's a "self-critiquing liberal" either, self-critique appears to be absent from his discourse, along with "consistency, intellectual honesty, and fairness."

I got into this with some other commenters under Coates's earlier post.  Some people were arguing that calling someone is a bigot is a "global" condemnation of the whole person, with the implication that he or she can't change and will always be Evil.  I've run into this claim in past debates, and it always baffles me, because as far as I can tell Baldwin's critics assume that Baldwin could change his behavior if he wanted to, but he clearly doesn't want to.  He didn't claim that his behavior was a "worst moment," he denied that he behaved badly at all.  In that case I see no reason not to call him a bigot, even on Alwan's assumptions.

Another commenter claimed that you only call a person a bigot if you intend to cut off all contact with them.  I don't have any contact with Baldwin in the first place, and I'm not a fan of his work either.  But if I did, I would certainly cut him off and have no contact with him.  On the other hand, I know quite a few bigots, in real life and online, and I don't always cut off all contact with them -- on the contrary, I keep criticizing their attitudes, opinions, and behavior.  My judgment of them as a bigot doesn't assume that they can't change; I assume that they can change their behavior if not their attitudes, and I let them know that if they want to be around me in the future, they had better moderate their rhetoric in my company or I'll give them a hard time for it.  What surprises me, somewhat, is that these fine liberals apparently see criticism and shunning as nuclear options, extreme measures that they would never consider using themselves.  If this is true, and I don't entirely believe them, then I would say it doesn't speak well for them.

In the real world, I have spent (wasted?) a great deal of time patiently debating with bigots of various stripes, explaining to them why I think they're wrong, trying to answer their reasoning and self-justifications.  I don't cut people off impulsively, without a good amount of information about them, though I admit that as I get older and more experienced and can spot a bigot on the horizon, I'm less apt to let such people get near me in the first place.  And some behaviors, such as calling someone a cocksucking fag, set off enough alarms in themselves that I see no reason to withhold judgment on them for very long.  If someone wants to be regarded as a good person, he or she had better refrain from such behavior in the presence of strangers.  And no, being a supporter of gay rights (or civil rights), or having lots of gay (or black) friends doesn't give you a pass on using slurs.

Of course, bigots of various stripes have encouraged this kind of wishy-washyness, by wailing that "The accusation of racism is one of the worst things that anyone can call you in public life", or that "The word racist is truly hurtful. It’s not who I am. It’s not who I ever was. It’s just not fair. It’s just not right."  There is legitimate debate over just what racism and other types of bigotry are and how they work, but that's not what is going on here.  Rather the aim appears to be to define bigotry as something so monstrous that almost no one can fit the definition.  But the real mystery to me is why liberals are colluding in that endeavor.

Are They or Aren't They?

The above photograph is apparently world-famous -- in fact, it won the photographer a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 -- but I don't remember having seen it before.  Someone posted it to Facebook this weekend, under the header "Amazing Facts."  It depicts one male utility worker giving CPR to another worker who'd been shocked by a high voltage line. The CPR worked: the stricken man survived to live another forty years, and the man who saved him is still living.

Of course it sparked a lot of comments, some eulogizing the courage of linemen, others questioning how the picture came to be taken -- some speculated that it must have been staged, because who'd have a high-quality camera on a work site? -- some babbling about "heros" and "angles" (meaning "angels, of course), and others fiercely defending the virtue of the men depicted, this was not a dirty gay kiss but the Kiss of Life.  The person who posted the photo set a high tone by beginning the caption with "It's not what you may think."  (Gee, I thought it was a lineman giving CPR to another lineman -- do you mean they were really making out?)  One commenter wrote to another, "I hope Someone lets you die if you need mouth to mouth. Or Elton John is there and does mouth to mouth."

There were, of course, the predictable exhortations to other commenters to "get your mind out of the gutter."  There's nothing wrong with two men kissing, there's nothing of the "gutter" in it.  It supports something I've long thought: you can't always (or even often) tell, just by looking, whether two people are touching each other affectionately, erotically, or (as in this case) therapeutically.  If the circumstances under which this photograph was taken weren't so well documented, it would be hard to be sure what is really going on in it.  (If you can bear to read an ignorant and virtually incoherent account of a homoerotic reading of the picture, look here.)  It could be a carefully staged erotic photo, though it isn't.  I can sympathize, in fact, with those people who question whether it really was unstaged, because the image is so clear and the disposition of the men's bodies looks as if they were posed as lovers.  (On the other hand, the photo also reminds me of paintings of the body of Jesus being taken down from the cross.  "Passion," after all, meant suffering before it meant strong erotic or emotional feeling.)  If you first read the photo as a gay image, that is entirely reasonable.  It just happens that it isn't.  If it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, it's also true that pictures may need a thousand words to clarify their ambiguity, and the words that label or describe a picture can change radically the way we interpret it.

Nothing Says "GLBT Ally" Like Homophobic Language

First one of my right-wing acquaintances shared a meme with a quotation ascribed to George Orwell: "The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."  Interestingly, Orwell apparently didn't say this.  I found one source online which claimed it came from A Collection of Essays, which sounded iffy but turned out to exist -- it just didn't include this sentence.  (It's available as an e-book online, which made it easy to search.  Amazon's "Look Inside" didn't turn it up either.)  Wikiquote reports that it hasn't been found in Orwell's works, but did appear (not attributed to Orwell) in a "conservative" opinion piece that defended the right-wing shock jock Michael Savage as one of those who speak the truth.  Even if Orwell had said it, my friend wouldn't have agreed with him about who speaks the truth and who doesn't.

Then the item above appeared in my news feed from Yo, Is This Racist?  Maybe even funnier.  Again, the irony is delicious: calling for a homophobic and/or misogynist epithet to show one's solidarity with downcast, downtrodden gays. The person who submitted it as a question to Andrew Ti's tumblr missed it entirely, as did Ti.  Thanks, guys, but no thanks.