A Portrait of Hate: Fred Phelps 1929-2014

Well Fred Phelps is dead. 

He was born in 1929, so he made 84. 

It is almost impossible to describe this man, such was his life, such is his legacy. Probably the closest single word as epithet would be 'tyrant' or perhaps ‘hatemonger’. A man so full of bitterness and bile that he twisted and contorted his entire extended family into a parody and turned them into willing acolytes in the cult that is the Westboro Baptist Church, obeying the old patriarch to the letter. Until very recently, he ruled the cult as impassioned religious demagogue but also as tyrant. The Louis Theroux 2007 BBC documentary ‘The Most Hated Family in America’ showed all too well the fear of Phelps that was held by the family members. His tyranny was rampant and so, not much questioning, not much dissent occurred in Westboro Baptist.

Their ‘church’ has been rejected by the Baptists and other Protestant denominations as has Phelps himself for his extremist views. On only a few occasions, one or two family members have left the cult and have been rejected by them ever since. The evil perpetrated in this man’s name at so many levels is astounding and is a monument to the obsession, opprobrium and resolve of Phelps to do all in his power to militate against gay people and more latterly, the whole of America, including its dead soldiers and the military in general, for accepting gay people.

So why? How did it come to this?

Phelps was not a stupid man. He had graduated from law school. He was also given to obsessiveness and retribution for perceived hurt. He had worked as a lawyer in his earlier career, but presaging the turmoil that would surround his adult life, he was disbarred in 1977 in telling circumstances.

The Wikipedia entry for his disbarment states:

“A formal complaint was filed against Phelps on November 8, 1977, by the Kansas State Board of Law Examiners for his conduct during a lawsuit against a court reporter named Carolene Brady. Brady had failed to have a court transcript ready for Phelps on the day he asked for it; though it did not affect the outcome of the case for which Phelps had requested the transcript, Phelps still requested $22,000 in damages from her. In the ensuing trial, Phelps called Brady to the stand, declared her a hostile witness, and then cross-examined her for nearly a week, during which he accused her of being a "slut", tried to introduce testimony from former boyfriends whom Phelps wanted to subpoena, and accused her of a variety of perverse sexual acts, ultimately reducing her to tears on the stand. The trial became an exhibition of a personal vendetta by Phelps against Carolene Brady. His examination was replete with repetition, badgering, innuendo, belligerence, irrelevant and immaterial matter, evidencing only a desire to hurt and destroy the defendant. The jury verdict didn't stop the onslaught of Phelps. He was not satisfied with the hurt, pain, and damage he had visited on Carolene Brady” (Wikipedia).

While being trained in the profession of the law, Phelps was not of the calibre to be able to examine intensively and extensively. In other words, he was smart enough, but he was no genius. And his personality traits coalesced with some little intelligence as to make him an impossible and unreasonable opponent.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing;   drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring”

(Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, 1709).

Pope’s famous couplet is apposite to Fred Phelps most surely. His wit took him to Bible College where he was eventually ordained into a Southern Baptist church and his personality took him to extreme Calvinism where he thought of himself as a Primitive Baptist (not that they accepted him either). I have always found Calvin pretty hard to swallow and have rejected his most famous of theological positions: unconditional election and limited atonement; the first holding that God has chosen a certain elect to be saved, their own lives being irrelevant to God’s decision, while others are not to be saved; while the second holds that Christ died for these elect only and not for anyone else. The God portrayed by these theologies comes off as a pretty unsavoury character, hugely partial, biased and indifferent to the lost eternity of those not in the elect which is most of humanity if you think about what Jesus said, ‘narrow is the gate and few there be that find it’. The pure Calvinist God is monstrous and couldn’t match it with the weakest of human fathers. Phelps was utterly and completely attracted to this portrayal of a ruthless God like a moth to a flame. This imago dei matched his own skewed retributive and belligerent personality. In the Westboro Baptist cult otherwise known as the ‘God hates fags church’, Phelps fashioned God after his own image.

Fred Phelps’ behaviour is legendary or more accurately infamous. I do not need to go into the picketing of funerals of gay people and of fatally wounded American soldiers. I do not have to go into the hate speech and vile invective of their website. If you believed that, then God hates everything and everyone, every nation, every person not of the Phelps persuasion. It is a theology of grotesquery, a twisted parody of the Judaeo-Christian God-figure where God is portrayed as a furious, rage-filled, retributive, violent, castigating, aggressive, vengeful deity. “Can you preach the Bible without preaching the hatred of God?” Phelps asked in a 2006 interview with The Associated Press. “The answer is absolutely not". The Theroux documentary was challenging to watch as the members of the cult when speaking of God came across as being absolutely terrified of him. And their fear of God was what they preached and protested.

“God hates fags.” “God is your enemy.” “God hates you.” “USA = fag nation.” “Fags die God laughs.” “Thank God for maimed soldiers.”  “Pray for more dead soldiers.” “Thank God for dead soldiers.” “Thank God for IEDs.” “God killed your sons.” “Thank God for 9/11.”

A man of impenetrable hatred preaching a god of fury, rage, retribution, judgement and tyranny and indoctrinating his family to do the same; adults and children alike. It is not conceptually possible to get further away from the relational God whose essence is love that Jesus told us of if you purposely tried.

What do we do with Phelps’ death? Well, whether we are Christian or not, I believe we should be better and bigger than Phelps and his family ever were. We should not picket his funeral if he has one. We should not dance on his grave. We should not delight in the demise of another human being. If we do call ourselves followers of Jesus, then we need to leave Phelps to God and not return hatred for hatred. 

It is hard to imagine anyone being so unempathic, so blind to the suffering he caused others. But psychologists do talk about a trait called psychopathy that is identified in people who do not have the ability to empathise. Most people usually think immediately of serial killers when we use this term, but serial killers are only the extreme version of psychopathy. Many people are known to exhibit strong traits of psychopathy, eg., some bosses and narcissists come to mind. It is often associated with either narcissistic or anti-social personality disorder. It would not surprise me to learn that Phelps might have been in one of these categories, such was his lack of empathy.

As such, I think he deserves our pity. Please do not misperceive my meaning here. I do not feel sorry for Fred Phelps. And I certainly do not endorse his life. But I do wonder whether this was a tormented soul. Was Phelps narcissistic? Did he have a personality disorder? Did he have homosexual inclinations himself and used Freudian reaction formation as a defence against it? We will never know. But we do know that Fred Phelps was not a happy man nor a man in peace. I am comfortable leaving him to whatever comes next for those of his ilk. He leaves a dreadful and terrible legacy of twisted religious bile behind him and a family probably forever destroyed.

There is one final point I wish to make. It has been a strong theme through the whole BGBC Blog. I want to point out that Fred Phelps was a fundamentalist extremist. But he used mainstream Christian doctrine and well-known Bible verses to spread his filth. Where we are convinced that we have the truth and everyone else is heretical; where we hold that our version of God is correct and all others are in error; where we say what is right and what is wrong; where we focus on one tenet of thought and neglect all others; where we ignore science and human reason; where we pronounce judgement on our fellow human beings guided by our own teachings; where we split God’s beautiful creation into the saved and unsaved, the elect and non-elect, the washed and the great unwashed; where we put dogma ahead of people; where we give blind allegiance to texts written in the ancient world; where we place the letter of the law before the spirit of the law; where we follow a primitive tribalism over an inclusivity of the family of humanity, then any of us potentially could become another Fred Phelps. 

Fundamentalism misses the point of spirituality entirely. It is a parody of authentic spiritual life. It is pharisaic and misguided. In its most tribal forms, it is cruel and even cultic. It is a diminution of the human spirit and an attempt to give borders to the divine, to put God in a box.

Fred Phelps might have been one of a kind and to be sure, he was. But there is a lesson here. The road away from Jesus - his life, his example, his teachings, his non-violence, his preparedness to forgive, his willingness to love, his desire to be with those most struggling, his willingness to die to show a better way - leads only to law, judgment, exclusion, arrogance and domination; the stuff of fundamentalist religion. People suffer under the yoke of fundamentalism because the focus of fundamentalism is not people; it is conformity. Jesus' focus was always the people. Fred Phelps was an exemplar of the most extreme forms of fundamentalism and should be discussed in the same arena as Jim Jones, Shoko Ashara, David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard and other cultists of their ilk. When you look at Fred Phelps, you see a neon-lit example of how fundamentalism can easily tip over into cultism. For those of us who call ourselves Christian, we need always to be vigilant that we follow in Jesus’ footsteps and to eschew once and for all religious arrogance.

Vale Fred Phelps. In truth, the world will not be poorer for your passing.

Pax et Amor - Stuart

Queers and Religion - Bent tv

A few months after BGBC was published in 2012, I went to Melbourne to do some media work around the book. One of the interesting gigs I got to do was appearing on Bent tv which did a special episode on LGBT people and religion. Bent tv is Melbourne's queer television station. 

With me were fellow guests, good friend Rev Joy Etwell, Julie Leder and Michael Barnett. Hosting the show was Remy Scholten. It was lots of fun and even though we didn't get time to discuss issues in depth, we did get to touch on some important issues like the one so many gay people ask: 'why on earth do you stay in religion after so much hurt has been done to LGBT people by the religious community'?

You can watch the episode here or click on the YouTube icon and watch full-screen. I hope you enjoy it. And do share it around if you think it will help others you know. 

Pax et Amor - Stuart

A Call to Clergy - Church Homophobia

Calling all Clergymen and Clergywomen the World Over

In 1967, English band The Tremeloes covered the song Silence is Golden. It became a huge hit for them and stayed at the top of the charts for three weeks; the incredible falsetto voices and close harmonies soaring the words of the chorus into history. "Silence is golden, but my eyes still see. Silence is golden, golden, but my eyes still see".

In this post, I want to challenge the church and especially its leaders that silence regarding the vilification and denigration of gay people by the Christian clergy, is not only NOT golden, it is also an act of collusion in oppression. The silence over this issue by clergy leaders is one of the great sins of the Christian church (see BGBC Blog post J'accuse).

 

A New Presence

Over the last two years or so the world has been discovering the presence of gay people in a new and, for us us gay people, exciting way. It has taken almost everyone, gay people included, by surprise. There is the very obvious gay marriage debate which is found in every quarter of the Western world and in some developing countries too. Gay marriage is everywhere - on our screens, in the papers, on the Net, on Facebook and Tumblr and internet mags and journals. I have written a post on gay marriage on the BGBC BLog myself.

But the gay marriage thing is not the only LGBT issue presently around. Other gay issues are being discussed now, regularly, openly, daily: adoption, aged-care facilities, political equality, discrimination, church teachings on the nature of gay sexuality, gay ordination and gays in the military. All these issues are upon us and around us everywhere and the conversatons about gay people are now being had in the wider community. But it is not always with grace that people are entering into these conversations.

 

The Kickback

Because there is still a vast amount of cultural homophobia and heterosexism inherent in our society, there is the inevitable kickback. And we are feeling it now. It is coming from a number of quarters, but probably most vociferously from certain elements in the Christian church.

Many times, I have read the commnents section to a gay-focused article like:
"these bloody gays are everywhere. We're getting swamped with gays". Or, "these gays have no right to foist their lifestyles on us - if they choose to be gay, then that's their choice, just let them stay out of our lives". Or "God will not bless these unions because He condemns homosexuality outright in His word and God never changes". Such sentiments are not uncommon at the end of opinion pieces.

Of course, there is no 'swamping' and there are no more gays now than before; it's just that we're a lot more open and less shamed about who we are these days. However, as an example of the kickback, allow me to share my own experience.

On 11 May, I wrote an article for the online political paper The Punch who were interested in the author of Being Gay Being Christian doing an opinion piece on gay sexuality and the church. I was happy to oblige and duly wrote the piece and sent it in to them. No doubt with a gleam in their eye for sensationalism, The Punch provocatively entitled the piece: Modern Christians Can Trump Bible Thumping Fundies. 

If anything was going to bring the haters and the homophones, the aggressive atheists and, excuse the plain speaking, the nutters out of the woodwork (and no I'm not talking abut the mentally ill), that title was going to do it. And it did. The majority of them were Christians or purportedly Christian by their rhetoric.

Of 273 comments posted on the page at the completion of my text, only one was unequivocally positive about the piece itself or the issues I raised. 1 out of 273. All the rest were highly critical of me, telling me in no uncertain terms that among other things:

•  I will burn in hell
•  I am not a Christian
•  I am a fool
•  I am rewriting everything to suit myself
•  I need to repent
•  I should do some research on the Bible
•  I am a nasty and vicious person
•  I am confused
•  I am a poor scholar
•  I am a fundamentalist
•  I am deluded

And one I do love in particular was being described as "an avowed homosexual"; presumably by someone who is an 'avowed' heterosexual. Come to think of it, I don't recall making a vow when I accepted my sexuality.

Anyway, one of my Facebook friends suggested that given the number and negative nature of the comments, it "suggests an organized alert went out to a certain cohort of people". Wow! They really do get themselves organised! It felt like a shark-feeding frenzy as the comments came up relentlessly, one after another, all two hundred and seventy three of them.

 

Difficult for Gay People of Faith  

Now we gay people have been forced to live with this stuff; not easily or comfortably mind you, but nonetheless, we've managed. It's nasty. It's frustrating too, because almost all of this kickback is premised on erroneous thinking, ignorance of science and anthropology, and a blind obedience to a 'conscious literalist' approach to the Bible where solid and sound scholarship about these matters can easily be found. But it can be hurtful too. Although I am a big boy now and can look after myself, having the emotional maturity to be able to manage such emotional  abuse, I do fear for younger more tender-yeared gay people who do not have the emotional maturity or the life experience to be able to healthily bat this stuff away for the embarrassing ignorance that it is.

And of course, I'm not the only one. I have a pastor friend, straight and married, who stood up for the LGBT community and declared his support for marriage equality and duly lost his parish ministry. He has said that he has been called names and that he has been accused of being deceived "by those promoting the gay agenda". I have another young gay friend who came out of a pentecostal church, went through an 'ex-gay' ministry and was nearly driven to suicide by engrained church teaching that tortured him much the same way that it tortured me when I was his age. After finally finding freedom as a gay man of faith, he told me that he has been called "a demon, sexual deviant, stupid, deceived and numerous other insults more times than I care to remember".

Ramping Up the Rhetoric

Now of late, the trend of such kickback has become worrying. The rhetoric has been ramped up and has become much more aggressive and there have been instances of violence or abuse that have been incited. And this, by clergymen.

The trend toward hostility toward gay people is becoming very noticeable and is an entirely unwelcome phenomenon in the discourse of the Christian church, being so antithetical to the Gospel.

What is it about the opponents of gay people in the church that makes them so strident and so unloving? There's that incredible comment by a gay person who in answer to a Christian said, "if you people are supposed to love the sinner but hate the sin, then why am I feeling so unloved when you speak to me?" It's an important point.

Verbal Violence

I am profoundly worried that the rhetoric coming out of America, especially evengelical/pentecostal churches is becoming more and more violent. Over the last few weeks we have had various pastors lining up to offer their take on gay people.

Pator Sean Harris

We start with Pastor Sean Harris of Berean Baptist Church North Carolina. He encourages his fathers to punch their sons if they exhibit any gender non-conforming play or to use his words are "a little girlish".

Here is an excerpt of his sermon.
“So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, ‘Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,’ you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed. Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you reign her in. And you say, ‘Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.’”

So, here you have a Christian minister, a so-called leader in the faith suggesting violence to kids.  This is the 'beat the gay out them' Gospel.

Then we move on to Rev Charles Worley. I have already written a post on this man after he told his congregation to many 'amens' and 'preach it brothers' that the solution - final solution? - to the "queer" problem is to build a giant enclosure surrounded by an electric fence where all the "queers and the lesbians" can be penned up for the rest of their lives until they die out. Charming huh. I'm not the first one to recall Nazi allusions. He told his people that "the Bible's agin it, God's agin it, I'm agin it and if you got any sense, you're agin it". That's what they call 'down-home preaching' - 'no fancy theology here brother'. Is this man actually suggesting the deprivation of liberty, summary imprisonment with no offence committed, and ultimately, mass man slaughter? Is this what passes for theology in the Baptist Church in the State of North Carolina?

Over this last week, we have had the unedifying video clip of a small toddler in Pastor Jeff Sangl's Apostolic Truth Tabernacle in Indiana singing to the church congregation, "I know the Bible’s right, somebody’s wrong...ain't no homos gonna make it to heaven."

Apparently in Indiana, it's okay to teach very small children to hate, to normalise discrimination and to be homophobic to the rapturous applause of the colluding adults. As a Psychologist, I consider this child abuse. As a human being, I find this heart-breaking. It is as aggressive and immoral as a parent teaching their small child to bully other kids when they're at school.

I don't know if this is only America. I have not heard yet of any other similar things happening in Europe or other Western countries to the same degree. But here's the thing and this is the crux of my post.

WHERE are the church authorities?

Where are the clergy councils, or the state or national assemblies that are running these denominations?

Why is there deafening silence over these travesties of 'men of God' who are out there week after week spouting this vile filth?

Why are they not defrocked?

Why are they not laicised?

Why are they not disendorsed?

Why are they not rebuked with the utmost vigour?

Why are the churches so silent?

What these men are doing is such a complete disgrace that the ramifications of their actions and words are barely describable. The harm to people is incalculable and the reputation of the Gospel is trashed.

A few years ago at the height of the fear over the so-called war on terror, the world asked the same question of the imams and leaders of the Islamic faith. Where is your voice? Why don't you denounce the violence and murder done in God's name? And the imams and Islamic leaders to their eternal credit did just that. There has been widespread condemnation of religious terrorism by Moslem leaders in mosques the world over. Public denunciations of the incitement of religious-based violence. We Christians can take a leaf out of their book.

Silence is not golden and unfortunately our eyes still see. We continue to see these ignorant men declaring in God's name that we gay people are less than people. They dehumanise us from their pulpits and call that Christianity. I want no part of that god or that faith. And neither should anyone else who understands even a mere scintilla of the Jesus message.

Christian brothers and sisters in the pews - when you hear this kind of thing, you need to denounce it as pernicious wickedness. Don't just sit there and take it. To speak such violence and using God's name no less to do it, is beyond the pale. This would be utterly rejected if secular leaders got up and said this stuff. Church hierarchs - you need to speak up. There should be no room in the brotherhood and sisterhood of the clergy for such men and women. If they want to remain in the denomination, then let them recant. Let them go back to school and do some theology, learn some modern Biblical studies, some hermeneutics and Biblical exegesis and some humility lessons wouldn't go astray either. Denominational hierarchies, you need to take this seriously. We should all have zero tolerance in the Christian church, no matter what denomination, for its pastors and priests to be speaking such calumny against any group of people, including gay people.

The Catholics are no better. There are so many bishops and priests across the globe who do not agree with official Roman teaching about gay people, that is, that we are 'objectively disordered' and 'inclined to moral evil'. It's time for bishops and priests to speak up. It's time that you spoke out. Be part of what the Spirit is doing in the world today regarding LGBT people. The Bishops' Conference is the place to do it. Stand up and speak out. Get your brother bishops to listen to what you have to say. Call for others to stand with you. You know that science and anthropology and sound Biblical studies and theology are all on your side.

Melbourne writer, Will Day's essay Don't Tell the Cathedral is powerful reading. Bishops and priests - read it. I include an excerpt here.

“. . . there is a long-standing Catholic tradition of exercising a grumbling patience in relation to injustices within the church itself. This stands in stark contrast to the vigorous response of Catholic workers and activists to injustices in the wider community. Within the church there is a tendency to trust that the Spirit will work at its own pace and in its own time – usually slowly. It is an unusual and courageous priest or nun who stands up to address church authorities, crying; ‘Hey, you can’t do that!’ in public. I imagine the reasons for this are complex: religious, ideological, political and probably often very personal.

“Certainly to speak out may draw onerous sanctions, may threaten one’s job security, housing security, financial security and social standing. One might be sacked and ousted, or shunted off to a disheartening gig in the middle of nowhere.

“Imagine if every priest and bishop in Australia who believed that official church teaching on homosexuality was wrong stood at the pulpit one Sunday and said as much. The landscape would powerfully change for the adolescent boys and girls in the congregation to whom the official church was teaching that their emerging sexual orientation was a ‘disorder’. The landscape would also change for the countless older queer folk in the congregation and within the priesthood.”

 

Conclusion

I am not the only commentator to have observed this development. Others have written about it too. For example, see Michelangelo Signorile's article in the HuffPost Gay Voices where he names names in the United States.

I say again to the ecclesiastical authorties in the Christian Church the world over - every denomination - from the mainstream well-known ones to the little ones that hardly anyone has heard of: 

SILENCE IS NOT GOLDEN.

Silence is immoral.

Please speak up. Denounce hatred for hatred. Denounce violence for violence. Denounce bigotry for bigotry. Say what needs to be said. If you are true to your vocation, then you MUST speak up. Let there be a resounding chorus of church authorities and church figures throughout the world who will stand up for the oppressed. Don't let ignoramuses trash the Gospel, ruin the reputation of the Church, hurt gay people and push people away from Christian spirituality because they figure that if that's what it's like, then they want nothing of it. When you have the power and opportunity to speak up and you remain silent, you collude in their ignorant and evil behaviour.


Pax et Amor - Stuart

IDAHO Day 2012

IDAHO, the International Day Against Homophobia is the new kid on the block when it comes to gay people being out, comfortable and proud on a global level. Why do we need it? Because there is still much work to be done. Homophobia is still alive and kicking.

There is much similarity with the women who participate in the Reclaim the Night' marches. Mostly, we can all go out safely at night, but occasionally, people do run into trouble and can be threatened or assaulted. So these gallant and thoughtful folk march to say that our streets need to be safe places so that our society can flourish. You cannot have a flourishing society when there are threats of violence on the streets. Women need to feel safe on the streets. So do men. So do children. Safe streets are a signal that a society is healthy and flourishing. So they march. It is high symbolism. It draws attention to the issues. It is an acknowledgment that there is still work to be done.

So what about homophobia? Is it still out there? Well, just ask any LGBT person about the timeframe
when they last encountered some level of homophobia. Most will be able to give you an
answer somewhere within the period of the preceding twelve months. The last time I encountered it
was just one week ago on May 11 in the Comments section after I published a piece in The Punch
about sexuality and Christianity. Some of it was quite vicious. Homophobia is still alive and
kicking. It is a part of our societies. So a day like IDAHO Day is still needed. It raises consciousness
and helps to bring some focus to the world that we still have a long way to go on this issue.

The Origin of Homophobia

Where does homophobia come from? The answer to that question at least is easy. It comes from
patriarchy - the system of inequality that privileges men and masculinity over women and femininity
(from the Greek, πατριάρχης [patriarkhēs] - rule of the father). There are many ways to be a man.
But patriarchy insists that there is only one way to be a man, and this is a very specific type of
hierarchical masculinity. Patriarchy also insists that this form of masculinity is natural or normal.
Patriarchy says: this is just how males are. When ruling figures adopt this model and enforce it with
coercion, the result is a top-down effect whereby a competitive, hostile, jealous, dog-eat-dog, I've
gotta be first, emotionless, self-centred, unempathic form of masculinity becomes normalised. This
tribalistic form of masculinity is what gender sociologist R. W. Connell calls hegemonic masculinity.

And hegemonic masculinity has its less obvious forms in everyday masculinity. In the West, men are
supposed to be strong, controlled, focused, rational and independent. Women, of course are
therefore represented as the opposite: weak, uncontrolled, unfocused, irrational and dependent.
This classic gender model is not only normalised, but actually celebrated and accorded a centrality in
the way we structure society. Still in Twenty-first century Australia, men run the show. Where
women do succeed, they either have to fight like crazy to get to the top, or sadly, act like men so
they will be respected.


Patriarchy affects straight men in coercing them to conform.

Patriarchy affects women in keeping them competitive with each other for the favours of the males
(if you don't believe me, watch how women treat each other in any open plan office with a few
women in it).

Patriarchy affects all gay people in the most harmful way as I shall describe below.


So patriarchy pretty much effects everyone and steers the gender order and thus the options of
people within a society.

Patriarchy, Homophobia and Gay Men

Patriarchy and homophobia go hand-in-hand for one very definite and observable reason. Patriarchy
has as its central tenet that women are inferior to men. Any man displaying any softness,
emotionality, any sense of being in touch with a more feminine side to his nature will be
instantaneously degraded in the patriarchal imagination. He will then be punished. For patriarchy,
there’s only one way to be a man and only one way to be a woman. Thus, with patriarchy's ability to
order society in its own image, gay men and women don't stand a chance. Why?

Because the one thing you cannot be in a patriarchy if you are a man is 'not a man.' 'Not a real man' is the standard by which gay men are judged by a patriarchal society. Gay men are seen as not real men. No man should sound like a woman. No man should look feminine. No man should be soft. No man should be in touch with his emotions. No man should display passion, enthusiasm or wonder in the way that a woman is supposed to. No man should be bookish or into creative arts. It is unmanly. We teach little boys that they shouldn't cry because 'big boys don't cry.' We teach little boys from a very early age that certain characteristics or emotional displays are unacceptable. We give them names like sissy or girly. It is unbecoming for a man, even a little boy type man, to display such behaviour.

Yet such sentiment has been around for a very long time. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the fratricidal Claudius speaks of Hamlet's "unmanly grief" when Hamlet is grieving the unexpected death of his father. Men don't show emotion. Men don't talk about the deep things that trouble them. That would make them appear like women, who are very good at doing just that. So, gay men are prime targets for hegemonic masculinity or even everyday patriarchal masculinity. We are a threat to their sense of
being real men. This is why they find us disturbing and don't know what to do with us, so they often
lash out, either in discrimination, hurtful humour, emotional abuse or violence. They retain their
most hate-filled aggressive speech for us: faggot, fag.

But they have got us right to one extent although they miss the point entirely. Gay men usually are
more in touch with their more feminine side than are straight men. It doesn't mean we are women.
It just means that we acknowledge a part of us that is quite antithetical to the patriarchal
masculinity stereotype. We are not afraid to show that we care, that we sing, that we dance, that we are in our bodies, that we care about our appearance, that we are engaged with our emotional life, that we can be soft and tender, that we hug and kiss other men hello and goodbye, that we like to be creative, that we love our music. Even gay men who work as plumbers or as other tradesmen, play rough contact sport, are members of the military or in elite sports, can identify with this softer side of them that is a little more feminine.

And the wonderful thing about this incredible acknowledgment in the face of almost overwhelming societal sanction against it is that we are comfortable in this because we know there is an authenticity in it. We get to be ourselves. It has usually taken us quite a journey to come out of the closet and to cease living the life-lie, so we are reluctant to live inauthentically ever again. We know that our sexual orientation does not make us less of a man; maybe it even makes us more of a man because we do live our lives authentically and fully, unlike many straight men who must conform to the masculinity stereotype to one degree or another even when they do not want to. Straight men are not supposed to be in touch with this side of their nature. Some are of course, but they pay a price. And that price comes from a basic elemental homophobia. Men are men and that's the way it's supposed to be. Straight men who cross-dress clandestinely certainly do subvert this patriarchal system by bending gender conformity at least in the privacy of their own homes. Uncloseted gay men do it openly and unashamedly. And we pay a price too.

Patriarchy, Homophobia and Lesbians

Lesbian discourse has for years talked about the invisibility of lesbianism, both in society and in the gay world. You can see two women walking down the street hand in hand and we don’t too much bother. Society can cope with this, maybe even accept this. But two guys walking down the street hand in hand is another matter. You rarely see it outside Oxford Street, and even there now, not very often. In Australia 2012, two men openly displaying affection is still a big deal. Similarly, female cross-dressing is not considered as scandalous as men wearing women’s clothes. And yet, in some ways, lesbian women cop a double dose of the worst of patriarchy: already subjugated and devalued because of being women, they are then denigrated and often abused for being the wrong kind of women. Lesbians are considered a threat to the patriarchal system because they insist that they can live lives of integrity without marrying a man. The homophobia inflicted upon lesbians ranges from relatively mild workplace discrimination to the extremes of sexual violence.

 

Patriarchy and the Collective Unconscious

Homophobia is certainly out there. It is insidious and nasty. It is deeply misogynistic. It rejects the
feminine. And it particularly rejects the feminine in men. In Carl Jung's Analytical Psychology, he
posited that humanity has an unconscious collective mind that transcends personal consciousness.
Because it is unconscious, it is out of awareness. Thus, for the collective unconscious to be expressed
in the male, it is expressed as anima, a softer more feminine self, which has to be repressed in the
conscious life. And likewise, for the collective unconscious to be expressed in the female, it must be
expressed through a masculine inner personality, animus. We know these are present in all of us
because in our most secret moments, our most alone times, we let animus and anima out of their
cages for a while and enjoy something profoundly nourishing, something that the conscious mind of
patriarchal society cannot accept or cope with. Homophobia springs from that rejection of engaging
our opposite sex gender. It is an uncontrolled lashing out at something it does not understand.

Internalised Homophobia

As gay people, we grow up in this same society that breeds homophobes. As children, we accept the
values and mores of society and normalise them, including traditional church teachings about sex
and sexuality if we are part of a church. This normalisation process is very harmful to us if we gay. It
effectively internalises homophobia within our very lives so that we have to come out not just once,
but for the rest of our lives. The shaming aspect of homophobia shouts at us that we should be
ashamed of who we are and how we are. It bellows at us that we should go back into the closet and
hide ourselves away again for we are unacceptable. You are not a real man. You are not a real
woman. It is powerful and something that psychologists call internalised homophobia. It is where we
beat up on ourselves.

Merewether Ocean Baths photo by OzinOH

None of us are immune. True story. Personal story. In summer, just a few months ago, my partner Chris and I went for a swim in the glorious Merewether Ocean Baths. There were lots of families, lots of kids, lots of teenagers and young straight couples. While swimming around, Chris came up to me and from a body's distance from me, stretched out his legs and grasped my waist with his feet. Instantly and without thinking I brushed them off because of the fear of the humiliation of looking gay in public. Chris was hurt and began to swim off. I was immediately taken by the gravity of what had just occurred and my part in it. I had repudiated my own partner's attempt at simple affection because of my own internalised homophobia. Interestingly, where Chris and I are usually quite open and affectionate with each other in public and I thought that I was beyond that kind of attack, I drew new insight that afternoon that really, none of us are immune. My brushing his feet away was like a reflex action - you know, tap the knee, the leg jumps out bypassing the brain. This is what happened in the pool that afternoon. An automatic internalised homophobia that tried to force me back into the pretending and lying of the closet. It happened so quickly that it took me by surprise as much as it did Chris. It bypassed my brain and I reacted rather than responded. I swam after him immediately and apologised and acknowledged what had happened and we swam to the pool ocean edge and peered out to sea for a while and talked it through, bodies touching each other as we leaned our arms on the edge and talked. We have to be so careful of homophobia, both as an agent of a patriarchal society and within ourselves.

The Ubiquity of Homophobia

Unfortunately, homophobia is to be found everywhere. It is rife in the schools. High school kids suffer an enormous burden with homophobic bullying, and at a time when they do not have the emotional maturity nor life experience to deal with it properly. Homophobia is in sport. There are very few out gay men in elite sport in Australia. When someone does come out, it is usually a big deal and makes headline news. Olympian Matthew Mitcham braved homophobia and came out before he won his gold medal in diving. Homophobia is in the police force, in medicine, in the law, in just about every career that you could name. It is certainly in politics. Occasionally it rears its ugly head and makes itself manifest in the parliaments of our country. Homophobia is everywhere. In some quarters, it is particularly strong and overt, while in others it is more subtle and invidious.

Final Thoughts

As I pen this post, four men in Iran are preparing to be executed for their homosexuality. Like the
two gay teenagers in this shocking picture, they will be hanged. Let me give you their names: Saadat Arefi, Vahid Akbari, Javid Akbari and Houshmand Akbari. I want to honour them because they are our brothers. They are being killed because they dared to be authentic. Homophobia, fuelled by patriarchal religion (and they are all patriarchal to varying degrees), is going to murder them. I hope there is a last minute reprieve but the sounds coming from Iran are not good.

On this IDAHO Day, let us remember that homophobia is just another form of prejudice, the filth of which we all need to reject as being unacceptable in a world that we want to be a better and freer place.


Pax et Amor - Stuart