| |
|
Do other, more queer identifying, posters encounter actual homophobia. I see it on the television, with Matthew Shepard
Ooh, I'm glad this one has come up, but now I'm worried about my ability to articulate a helpful response to it.
I think that a focus on the worst - most physically violent or emotionally crippling - expressions of homophobia sometimes has the effect of masking the way that homophobia (and heterocentrism, which is not the same thing but related) plays out more subtly both through cultural productions and through our (ie everyone's) day-to-day experience. So, because incidents like the murder of Matthew Shepard are used to show that homophobia literally threatens lives, there's sometimes a sense that it's only 'actual' homophobia when and if it does literally threaten a life. And that has the effect of making more usual, mundane examples of homophobia become invisible. It's often tempting to point to things like homophobic murders and beatings in an attempt to demonstrate that there are people who do still hate gays and that it does matter, in a cultural climate where people are perhaps more likely to dismiss gay issues with 'Oh, but you have equal rights now and you're being oversensitive' than with 'Oh, but you're a filthy queer so no-one cares what you have to say'. But I myself am trying to resist that temptation, because I think it's becoming slightly counterproductive.
Having said which, the existence of homophobic violence, in the context of a social system which systematically privileges heterosexuality as against homosexuality, is a constant backdrop to the minor and mundane homophobic incidents I'm talking about. That is, these murders and assaults show how gay people have to live with the awareness that violent threat is always possible, so that certain interactions - particularly more subtle forms of homophobia - become more charged for gay or trans people. That is, even if no-one has ever beaten me up for being gay, a look in the street or a muttered remark can remind me that in some people, that disapproval can become murderous hatred and rage. If someone calls you a 'ginger' in the street, that has a certain weight given to it by a cultural myth that ginger hair is unattractive, but it doesn't have the weight given to it by the fact that people occasionally get beaten to death for being ginger, and that the assaulter may be able legally to plead that the sight of the victim's ginger hair made him psychotic and hence not morally responsible for his actions.
Mostly the homophobia that I encounter is not directly threatening, but just tiring. A big part of that tiringness is the way that I, and I think lots of other queers, often spend a fair bit of mental energy on wondering if the way someone treated us was because we were queer - for example, once when I was going round trying to get a mortgage from the bank, I explained my circumstances (student cohabiting with a self-employed Australian woman) to the mortgage advisor and he immediately became very cold, told me I couldn't have a mortgage from that bank and sat silently watching me until I left, without any verbal cues about whether the interview was, in fact, over, or any of the little friendly remarks or apologies that most of the other mortgage advisors had offered when they told me I couldn't have a mortgage. Was that because he hated lesbians or because he hated student or because he thought I was a time-waster? I don't know, but the ordinary social awkwardness and unpleasantness of it had a whole extra dimension for me.
And yeah, that's nothing like being beaten up, but it happens all the time, and it gets... like I said, tiring.
Oh, hang on, though, another thing I wanted to say is that no, I haven't encountered much overt homophobia in the three years that I've been same-sex-partnered (I'm still kind of a baby dyke in some ways). I've been quite surprised about that. Partly, I think, again because of the way that queer activists quite rightly focus on the continued existence of homophobia, but do so through the more overt instances. Sometimes - like, two or three times a year? - people say 'lesbian!' to me in the street, in which case I say 'straight boy!' back at them, and we part on good terms. (This actually happens to me less often now that I mostly appear on the street wound round another woman: I got it a lot more when I was still [passing as] straight.) Once a woman on a train hit me with her newspaper and stormed off, telling me that I shouldn't be kissing my gf in front of a child, which I found extremely upsetting (I had a new nephew then) and which took me several hours to recover from. I can't think of anything else. Oh, teenagers hate seeing me and Tangent kissing in public and stare at us in horror, but I kind of think that's fair enough, since they probably assume we're mother and daughter when they first see us and when you're an adolescent, the idea of a mother having sexual desires at all is disgusting enough, let alone that they should be directed towards someone a generation younger...
But mostly I just get worn down by heterocentrism which, like I say, is a bit different. The example I mostly give is my sister, who when I first met my gf asked 'Are you going to get married?' and 'If you could fuse your ova, would you have a baby?' She would probably never understand that those were not friendly, neutral questions demonstrating her acceptance of me, but rather slightly threatening statements that she would only listen to me or accept my relationship with Tangent insofar as it fitted into her understanding of relationships, marriage, and reproduction-as-genetic. She knew full well that I don't approve of marriage and don't want kids, and I presume she's aware of the fact that lots of lesbians do have kids despite not being able to 'merge their ova'. The equivalent questions to her, which she would have experienced as overtly and unambiguously hostile, would have been 'How do you and your husband plan to manage your attraction to other people, especially when you actually fuck those other people?' and 'Why are you and your husband having a baby in these overpopulated times, rather than adopting?' |
|
|
