Reply #55: There's as many reasons as there are homophobes [View All]

[geniph]

For some, it's simply a cynical use of a handy tactic to polarize us.

For others, it's fear of the unknown - they don't realize they know any gayfolk, so they stigmatize and stereotype the idea of homosexuality.

For yet others, it's general repression and fear of sex in general and anything they perceive as "feminine" or "feminizing" - basically, it boils down to misogyny.

In some, it's the whole "green monkeys tear apart the blue monkey" thing - tribal instinct says they must fear and destroy the nonconforming individuals.

There's one whole hell of a lot of truth to what Quentin Crisp said about it. He said a lot of people, men in particular, tend to fixate on certain sex acts and cannot do so without imagining themselves performing them. As he put it, "they think, ooh, I wouldn't like to do that, and then decide, I don't like anyone who does do that, because they might do it to me."

So there's an element among the homophobes that fixate on the imagined sex acts of gay people. These are the ones who invariably call lesbians names like "carpet muncher" and gays things like "rump ranger." All their pejoratives revolve around imagined sex acts. These are the ones that I believe are repressing their own, very normal, attraction to their own sex by fixating on, and unnaturally fearing, certain sex acts. (These are also the same folks who'll go on at length about why they're afraid of going to prison - it's not losing their freedom, it's not losing their civil rights, it's not being beaten up, it's anal sex. That's all they fixate on.) The ones who fixate almost exclusively on anal sex are the most twisted and nasty of the bunch. Unfortunately, they also seem to be the loudest. (And I hate to break this to them, but a. anal sex is not the exclusive province of gay men, and b. many gay men don't engage in anal sex.) I see these folks as the ones still having issues with the whole toilet-training thing. Fixating on the anal is very infantile.