“I’ve never wished death on a man, but I’ve read many obituaries with great pleasure.” - Socrates
*Yes i know that’s not the actual quote, nor is it attributed to Socrates.
If the rumors that he was a closeted, self-loathing homosexual are true, then I feel sorry for him. Hear me out: so blinded was he by bigotry and hatred instilled into him by his culture that he was unable to live his truth. That’s sad. Further, his bigotry against himself compelled him to oppose LGBTQ rights, etc. which is doubly sad.
I’m reminded of that viral photo of him at Disneyworld with his princess bubble wand. Had he not been a Trump-supporting homophobe, that picture would have been celebrated as an example of an Old Gay Dude living his best life.
You mean this one
But his picture after the UFC cage match at the White House also garnered a few chuckles.
Yes. Too often we miss the reality that someone can be BOTH a villain AND a victim, and that the one does not excuse or compensate the other —but you can say, so sad that if they had only made a different moral choice to how to deal with it, they could have been happy and not hurt anyone; but they chose wrongly and when challenged doubled down rather than do the right, tough thing, and that is all on them.
Gay people, as a rule, do not malign people for beong effete. That’s a straight thing. We loathed him for being a closeted guy who worked hard to harm us.
I understand internalized homophobia: we all struggle with it too varying degrees, especially the older members of the community. That’s why we tolerate closeted people. But people working to hurt us? Never excusable, never acceptable.
@Dr.Drake is it considered bad form, or offensive, or a word or phrase like that, for us straights to speculate on whether or not a homophobe is a closeted, self-loathing homosexual? I suggested as much about Fred Phelps to a gay friend and he suggested that I keep such opinions to myself.
Nope, that’s a fine old tradition. Gay people do this too, except we’re more likely to see them on Grindr or know what it means when they hang out near THOSE publuc toilets (which is less of a thing now, but maybe still in less gay-friendly regions).
Edit: I don’t know what your friend’s objection was.
I don’t either. At a guess, maybe that’s Step One to excusing their behavior.
That’s a reasonable attitude. Hate is a toxic emotion and it seeps out to discolor a person’s whole worldview – just look at the ones who are champions of hatred. They are gleeful when trampling on those they hate but are they truly happy, even then?
I couldn’t care less if he was gay. That he supported an evil president is what matters.
I’d never heard the gay rumors. (I didn’t actually care to read anything about him when he was alive.) But if he was, it’s just inexcusable the level of damage the Christian Right/homophobes/MAGA/Republican “family values” folk have done to people. If they’d just accept people being different, if they’d just let gay people be gay, there’d be a lot more human happiness. But no, you have self-hating gay repubs who pass anti gay legislation while at the same time getting their knob polished at the airport bathroom. Gah! To hell with them all!
Gay? I don’t care. Gay and homophobic? I judge. Harshly. Still, I don’t know whether to be glad he’s gone, or feel sorry for the internal conflict he must have felt. Or am I giving him too much credit by assuming he had any internal conflict?
Dude had seventy years to get over himself. And it’s not like he didn’t have plenty of examples of queer people not being self-hating schmucks he could have used as a template to be a better person.
Nah, I don’t think he was particularly self-hating, he was just an opportunistic piece of shit who realized he could accrue personal power by attacking queer people, while using that power to insulate himself from the consequences of his own policies.
I do want to ask you to reconsider this position, or at least add nuance. Growing up gay in a homophobic society is HARD. Most of us internalize that homophobia to some degree, and it manifests in shame, self-destructive behaviors, and the like. It’s also really, really hard to get rid of that attitude once it’s been ingrained, and it gets reinforced by tons of little reminders that straight is normal.
But feeling it is one thing; it comes out in weird ways now and then, but mostly it’s just something internal to work on, same as every other human. Graham went well beyond that, and used his homophobic actions to offset his homophilic private life. That’s what I can’t forgive.
I think I’ve acquired some nuance in recent years, because I know it’s not easy to be different and forced to conform. A lot of people carry some degree of self-loathing, and as I get older I realize I need to walk the figurative mile in their shoes before I judge. But as you point out, Graham was in a position to be a force for good, and chose the path that worked best for him.
This. He was the stereotypical toad who sucked up to the powerful.
Early on when Trump was a longshot in the 2016 election season, he was anti-Trump. But when Trump won, he wormed his way into being one of Trump’s lackeys.
Opportunistic is the best way to put it.
Honestly, I suspect that most homophobes nowadays are themselves gay. There are two basic paths to homophobia. The first is simply fear of the unfamiliar. That’s simple enough to understand; anything unfamiliar is scary. But the thing with that is, once the thing becomes familiar, the fear of it goes away. That sort of homophobia is easy to cure through education and experience. And there have been enough out gay people, for long enough, that almost everyone in the developed world has had the opportunity to gain that familiarity.
The second path to homophobia, though, starts from assuming that everyone must have the same urges that you have, and that everyone else must therefore be working hard to suppress those urges. In this view, those who don’t suppress their urges must be sinful, or at least weak. But this path to homophobia simply doesn’t make sense in anyone who doesn’t themself have homosexual urges.
I could have written that.
Sometimes I wonder: the accepted consensus is that gay people make up, what, 10% of the population? But that assumes people tell the truth when asked. The stereotypical anti-gay person going to “those” bathrooms will deny, vehemently and quite seriously, that he is gay, even while his dick is in someone’s ass. It’s those godless liberals!
I’m wondering if it is more like 30-40%. Denial is a powerful drug.
The issue there is that all the way back to Kinsey there is the argument about sexuality being a continuum rather than a set of discrete all-or-nothing units. And people can’t deal with the fact they are not themselves falling into the neat category that they have been told is the “right” one. Especially among those raised in hardline religious environments, the notion that everyone is tempted with many forms of “perversion” to a greater or lesser degree, and it’s just a matter of which one(s) you’ll fall for at any given time(s), is strong.
Heck, the two paths Chronos mentions are not a discrete binary either, they surely overlap greatly. Even those coming out of the “ignorance-based” path my include as many who’ll make it as far as “I still don’t like it, but eh, none of my business” as those who’ll embrace and celebrate.
Oh, absolutely. Nothing in the real world falls neatly into tidy, discrete categories, and that goes especially true for biology, and doubly especially for psychology. There are probably people who come by homophobia through different paths, and people for whom both of those paths apply, and a bunch of other more complicated nuanced situations. I just think that those two paths, between them, account for most homophobia.
@Just_Asking_Questions , the people who publish figures like 10% are aware of that difficulty, and have made efforts to compensate for it. Have they compensated correctly? Hard to tell. But of course, that lack of binary thing is present here, too: If, say, someone is bisexual, but has only ever actually pursued relationships with the opposite sex, they’re probably going to be sorted into the “straight” category. And then you have people who, overall, prefer men over women but who most of all prefer their wife even though she’s female, and the reverse, and so on.