Seriously? Here’s one from just a few months ago:
Are violent homophobes actually that common? I know a lot of men who would be highly upset if a gay man actually started touching him but I have not known very many who would actualy be violent to a gay man just for being gay. I witnessed a bit of teasing in high school but not really all that much.
But there is more to it than that. If Republicans were social pariahs and the default was that ‘everyone’ was a democrat, then someone with republican leanings might suppress those feelings in order to fit in, perhaps even going so far as to denounce republican ideals even though deep down he supported it. The fitting in part is a big factor – so much so that ‘in the closet’ refers to actual gay people. You never hear about closeted Israelis because there is no need for hiding such realities. In all of your examples, no one needs to pretend to be something they are not in order to fit into society.
Let’s consider the opposite of this: “Is there something about violent outbursts specifically that targets homosexuals?”
I’m going to say no, except that homosexuals tend to be weaker. I think all who are weaker are targets to violent outbursts; women, children, homosexuals, and so on. An average sized person who likes beating people up always tend to beat up people who can’t in turn beat the beater up.
I’ve taken the time to look up in the Bible the prohibition on homosexuality, sandwiched in there between not lying with your neighbor’s wife and not lying with animals. It’s an interesting read if you want to know the long list of peoples who we’re not supposed to strip down naked in public … Leviticus chapter 18 … enjoy.
Peruse gay news and you will see the answer is an emphatic yes:
dallas-neighborhood-on-lock-down-after-14-antigay-hate-crimes
gay-man-severely-burned-in-hot-water-attack-speaks-out
These two are just off the top of my head
Yeah, but haven’t you heard any of those sermons about how the gays are always tempting you and you can’t follow temptation into gay sex, etc., etc., etc.?
Because you know who’s actually tempted by gay sex? Not straight people.
Exactly, any time I hear people say that homosexuality is a choice, I assume they think that because they are struggling with their own desires and they assume everyone else is. If you have to choose not to be gay every morning when you wake up, then you’re gay; but if you were brought up to believe that being gay is a terrible sin, then you’re stuck in a vicious cycle.
I’d guess that a lot of the people committing violence against gays are motivated by their own unresolved feelings and the rest are motivated by the fact that they can beat up somebody without repercussions (basically, just creeps who like committing violence and society is giving them a free pass to target gays).
The fear/hate of gays has a lot to do with the fear of being perceived as gay. Since gay people are stereotyped as weak, effeminate, and sexually deviant, being perceived as gay is an inherently insulting proposition. Homophobes often believe that gay people are indiscriminate rapists, but the real fear is that if a gay person initiates a romantic overture, other people will assume that they are also gay and will be permanently marked as “gay” in the eyes of the group. This is a humiliating proposition because it implies a loss of manhood and status.
The notion that a person can have a sexual orientation forced upon them is absurd. Nonetheless, among the mouthbreathing reprobates of the world this is a real perception. I’ve heard of some places where sodomy is used specifically to shame people, in the belief that suffering it permanently robs the victim of their manhood.
Regardless, they are not so much afraid of the gay person as they are the humiliation of being perceived as gay. Humiliation is unique among the emotions in the extent to which it is utterly intolerable and provokes people to violence. A person can feel guilt or shame or sadness and not act on these emotions because they are internal. Humiliation, on the other hand, is something another person inflicts on you and therefore provides a target for feelings of hatred and revenge. Researchers are only just beginning to scratch the surface on the extent to which humiliation drives violence, but I think that has a lot to do with the issue of gay violence.
I also scratch my head about people who cite the Bible as a reason to hate gay people. There are many, many proscriptions in the Bible, and many of them are completely absurd. Christians seem happy to forget about laws that require them to avoid blending their textiles or mixing their crops, on the basis that these laws are obsolete, and yet emphasize the proscription on homosexuality above all others. There have been surveys done that indicate many people are starting to see the opposition to homosexuality as the Church’s sole purpose and defining characteristic. That seems like a weird hill to die on, and I don’t quite know how we go to that point.
I haven’t seen the show so does it actually show women physically attacking other women for being lesbians? Because that is not something I have ever seen or heard of. Does it take place outside the US?
Authoritarianism (the personality trait, not the mode of governance). One major component of this state of mind is the conviction is that the ingroup (the “us”) is under imminent threat, that this threat is due to the actions of specific outgroups (i.e., some category of “not us”), and that to ensure its safety the ingroup should and must defend itself by aggressive suppression of those outgroups. For people with strong authoritarian inclinations and a tendency towards violence, feelings of “outgroup threat” can convert to “kill it”, or at least “beat the shit out of it”.
The fun part is that in addition to the people who are naturally authoritarian, authoritarianism can be induced in average people when they feel threatened. Authoritarian thinking is great for inducing group cohesion and obedience to authority, so demagogues love to whip up “outgroup threat” as a way of achieving and maintaining power. Physical violence towards the targeted outgroup(s) is a side-effect.
Importantly, the targeted outgroup can be whatever (Jews, Muslims, witches, civil rights activists, gay people); what matters is that they’re “not us” and that they do something the ingroup has identified as abnormal/weird/bad. Homosexuality just had the bad luck to be something the Christian Right picked up as a cultural touchstone of the not-us: their constant harping on gayness as both “unnatural” and “contagious” (“they’re trying to convert your children”) is perfect to induce the “outgroup threat” response.
Stupidity and ignorance + religious moralistic fervor + personal sexual insecurities = a dark triad of hate.
I keep hearing the stereotype that gay men are “weak and effeminate”, which is amusing to me, because several of the gay men that I have known are anything but “weak and effeminate”.
Do you think that this notion is mistakenly perpetuated by television and movies? I am not sure that it is true to life…
Well put - think about how often “gay” or “fag” or other similar terms were used as insults back in the day, or are still by dumb-asses and adolescents?
There was a little more to it, I think. More than just being viewed as non-manly or part of the outgroup- nerds were there, and still nobody goes around murdering nerds.
What I recall is that there was a general diffuse dislike/antipathy toward groups perceived as different, and then there was a more targeted hostility toward less manly groups- nerds, theater people for example. Then there was personal disgust at certain behaviors- like the kid who’d eat random stuff for a dollar, or people who ate nasty food, or had bad hygiene.
I think that being gay tripped all three at once- different, unmanly and did stuff that was considered repulsive. How that translates into actual physical violence, I don’t know. But the above will definitely generate some vicious harassment otherwise.
There wasn’t ever a religious component in middle school, high school or college, but the gay-related insults flew thick, and people were really remarkably hostile toward it, even if they weren’t going to do anything violent.
Authoritarianism is correlated with religious fundamentalism
So the role of religious is (IMO) probably secondary to authoritarianism. Authoritarian regimes that are secular (fascist and communist regimes) are also anti-gay. I think it is more authoritarianism as a growing trend in religion, and that causes attitudes that people in the west associate with religious extremism (xenophobia, misogyny, terrorism, homophobia, dogmatism, etc) but it is more the authoritarianism that is at the root of the issue, not religion.
But again, there are many outgroups. I haven’t seen much info about goths or neckbeards being beaten or killed the way gays are killed. I’m not sure what makes gays different. Again, I think it is because to some people they signify weakness and there may be a fear that society as a whole becomes weaker if gays are allowed to live unmolested.
As best I can figure out, this dates to the 1860’s when homosexuality was explained as a mental disease of “sexual inversion,” in which gay men behave like women and lesbians act like men. There’s a book out there called An American Obsession (Terry, 2010) that claims people of the time had very strict gender roles, and since gay men didn’t fit the model of what a manly man was “supposed” to be like, the only other category that they could be placed in was the woman’s role. Whether this idea existed before then, I don’t know, but that appears to be the point at which scientists first started to seriously consider the question of why some people are gay.
I also think selection bias has a lot to do with it. It is much easier to identify someone who displays effeminate mannerisms and behaves in a stereotypically “gay” manner, whereas a gay man who does not display stereotypical behavior can be presumed to be “straight” and therefore escape notice. I also suspect that people of earlier generations didn’t understand, or even care, about the difference between a transgendered person and a gay person, so they probably assumed they were the same thing.
I think that’s a good assessment, especially where children are concerned. In a broader sense, however, I think they were just inheriting a century of anti-gay bias that had been built into them culturally.
Again citing Terry’s 2010 book, this idea had firmly taken root during the Victorian Era: “…the overwhelming majority of published medical cases equated ‘sex perversion’ with lunacy. By doing so, physicians posited a strict delineation between perverted degenerates and the population of normal people who were presumed to be free of hereditary taint…” (p. 77)
This quote really struck me, not just because it highlights the extent to which gays were categorized as subhuman, but also the use of the word “taint.” This implies to me the perception of some kind of contamination, like something out of an HP Lovecraft story. Throughout the century, people have consistently perceived homosexuality as a contagious moral hazard that could not even be discussed in public without risking spread of the disease. (ibid, 76)
Good point! The first few gay guys that I knew were just a bit effeminate at times, but I saw how they “turned it off” or “toned it down” at times. I’ve only known two who were the “flamin’ flamboyant” stereotype, and never seemed to bother toning it down a notch, that I know of. (Not saying that they should, just stating a fact.)
Several others never pinged my “gaydar” (I’m not sure if people still use the term anymore) – they were just conventional regular masculine type folks who happened to be attracted to men. They were nice people and easy-going and all that, but built the way that they were, I definitely would never want them angry with me, if you know what I mean.
In the case of this episode it is outside the US. It doesn’t show any actual violence of any kind that I recall but it does talk to several people; both those doing the violence and those receiving. Guys admitting to or wanting to slap gay men around didn’t surprise me much. What did was the reaction and comments of a couple of the ladies who “would want to just hit some woman kissing another woman” or something to that effect. I’ve seen a couple episodes now and this doesn’t seem limited to Brazil. Which makes me wonder - is it not happening in the US or are we just not admitting to it?
Wanting to hit someone and hitting someone are two very different things. Even so, I have never heard or witnessed much women-vs-lesbian animosity. Maybe it’s more common in younger women? I think violence by women in general is more prevalent now than when I was younger.
I think that given an easy target, bullying and cruel tendencies arise easier than we’d like to admit. It’s less to do with sexual orientation than just the desire to hurt someone different.