Lawrence Birken. Journal of Homosexuality. Volume 33, Issue 1. 1997.
I
Several years ago, right-wing fund-raiser Marvin Liebman drew an analogy between homosexuals in late twentieth-century America and Jews in the Weimar Republic. Arguing that the dissolution of Communism left the Right with no unifying enemy, while internal enemies like ‘‘Jews, Blacks, Catholics, foreigners’’ had become too powerful to oppose, Liebman claimed that conservatives were turning to the ‘‘one group that could be used as a target: homosexuals. The spreading AIDS epidemic and the growing activism of the gay and lesbian community provided the hate-mongers with the perfect victim.’’ While Liebman’s book sunk into oblivion without a trace, the questions he raised are as valid as ever. Indeed, the rhetoric of ‘‘family values’’ raises the question of whether gays will be the target of a new wave of hysteria and hatred. But in this paper, I am less concerned with the reality of gay-baiting than with the ideology that underpins it.
The question of why the so-called ‘‘Religious Right’’ has gone so far in demonizing homosexuals is one that needs to be answered. For if Pat Buchanan is right and there is a cultural civil war taking place in the contemporary United States, one of its most puzzling features is the central place of the homosexual question within it. Cultural conservatives have defined this question in the most apocalyptic terms, attributing a single will to millions of individuals whose only common feature is their difference, and great power to vast numbers of people who are more or less powerless. In this context, the position of the homosexual in present-day America does seems strangely analogous to that of the Jew in Weimar Germany; gay people are important enough to attract enemies, but not important enough to intimidate them. Unfortunately, cultural liberals have too often dismissed conservative ‘‘homophobia’’ as some kind of antediluvian nonsense. But the ultimate fate of German Jewry should be reminder enough to take the apocalyptic visions of conservatives seriously.
The problem is that while conservative opponents of ‘‘gay rights’’ often begin with an admission that the spread of homosexuality is itself a function of a larger ‘‘cultural breakdown,’’ they too often end up asserting that this cultural breakdown is itself a kind of gay conspiracy. But this tendency to attribute a single will to homosexuals depends on ignoring any differences between them. Thus, to start with, no distinction is made between the small number of gay activists, the much greater number of self-admitted homosexuals, and the even greater number of ‘‘part-time’’ homosexuals who otherwise lead heterosexual lives. Nor is any distinction made between the very different lifestyles of gay men on the one hand and gay women on the other. Thus we have the spectacle of a conservative movement committed to individualism employing an essentially collectivist strategy against the idea of gay rights.
A perfect example of how cultural conservatives have attributed a monolithic character to what is in effect an enormously complex phenomenon is their tendency to link homosexuality, plain and simple, to AIDS. One could even say that the intensification of homophobia in the 1980s constitutes an opportunistic superinfection in and of itself, a kind of ideological ‘‘virus’’ which has taken root in the cultural fissures of our troubled society. Pat Buchanan was perhaps the first but certainly not the last to see HIV as a divine response directed specifically against ‘‘homosexuals.’’
But this ‘‘Buchananist’’ theory of AIDS is far more ideology than it is science. To start with, it completely ignores the difference between gay men and gay women. Yet even the crudest epidemiological analysis would have to concede that whereas gay men have the highest incidence of AIDS in the United States, followed by straight women and then straight men, gay women actually have the lowest. Moreover, even among gay men, those who engage in unprotected anal intercourse would have a far higher rate of HIV infection then those who do not. But cultural conservatives have long practiced an intellectual shell game by subsuming gay women under gay men, gay men under devotees of anal sex, and devotees of anal sex under gay activists who are associated with the HIV virus.
An example of this kind of rhetoric can be found in an inflammatory tract published by the Reverend David Chilton. In Power in the Blood, Chilton informs us in no uncertain terms that ‘‘homosexuality is far and away the main source of the AIDS virus in this country.’’ While this statement may be true after a fashion, it really tells us nothing. We need to know what kind of homosexual behavior. Certainly not lesbian sex, nor even hugging and kissing between males even though the latter is still considered in some jurisdictions a form of ‘‘gross indecency.’’ But for Chilton, all gay people more or less behave the same and are equally depraved. ‘‘As it is practiced,’’ he tells us, ‘‘homosexuality would seem to have more in common with torture and human sacrifice’’ than it does with heterosexuality.
Immediately after making this pronouncement, Chilton gets to his favorite topic. ‘‘Homosexuals’’ engage in anal intercourse and anal intercourse spreads AIDS. Now, I must make myself clear at this point. I do not dispute Chilton’s argument that anal intercourse can be dangerous business, but merely the way he makes his argument. There seems to be little doubt that unprotected anal sex is an efficient way to spread HIV. And Chilton is right in noting that rectal intercourse is associated with a number of other medical conditions such as ‘‘colitis; … mucosal ulcers in the rectum; … fecal incontinence’’ as well as a host of other problems. But then he goes on to tell us that ‘‘the damaged [sphincter] muscle is unable to hold it in … and the rectum dribbles with bloody feces.’’ Moreover, ‘‘this involuntary ooze can leave deposits wherever the homosexual sits: on toilet seats, on benches in saunas and locker rooms, and everywhere else.’’ Finally, ‘‘if the fecal matter is contaminated with the AIDS virus, there is a possibility that others might be infected as well.’’ Note the mock clinical detachment, the almost scientific tone. We are being given the mating habits of the homosexual, as if every homosexual in America inevitably drips with a foul ooze which spreads the AIDS virus with the same inevitability that a bee spreads pollen.
To paint his portrait of the species Homosexualis Americanus, Chilton dares not be too specific. Above all his argument depends on the assumption that homosexuals are all ‘‘sodomites.’’ Of course, Chilton can be dismissed as an obscure fanatic. But is he so atypical? No less a figure than noted constitutional law scholar Professor Emeritus Harry Jaffa of Claremont McKenna College has published a short pamphlet on Homosexuality and the Natural Law in which he continually refers to homosexuals as ‘‘sodomites’’ (those who like ‘‘sodomy’’ or anal intercourse), subsuming a complex phenomenon under a hated rubric. Jaffa’s arguments are not much different from those of Chilton, just a little more refined. For both, the equation homosexual = sodomite is the prerequisite for linking homosexuality the social to AIDS the individual cancer, thus completing the demonization of gay people.
But what accounts for this demonization? Cultural conservatives have long drawn from a series of historical traditions which, taken together, appear as a veritable archeology of homophobia. To begin with, there is that Old Testament set of injunctions which helped shape Christian and Islamic traditions alike. In particular, many conservatives cite Lev. 18:22 to the effect that ‘‘You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.’’ In addition, there are numerous passages in the New Testament, valid in both Eastern and Western Christianity, which clearly condemn various forms of ‘‘immorality.’’ Thus 1 Cor. 6:9 says that ‘‘neither the immoral, nor idolaters; nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.’’ Finally, there is the exclusively Western tradition of what Michel Foucault called ‘‘scientia sexualis’’ which has attempted to delineate a natural law to either supplement or replace the divine law of sex. Within this context, the most important form of ‘‘sexology’’ is probably psychoanalysis. Conservatives enjoy quoting from therapists like Charles Socarides, Albert Ellis, and Edmund Bergler to support their notion that homosexuality is ‘‘essentially unhealthy,’’ a contention which leads us back (once again) to the final term in the monstrous equation–AIDS.
It is precisely at this point that most liberals will throw up their hands and condemn the layers of homophobia that appear to make up Western civilization. Yet, to do so would be a profound mistake since none of these layers are actually homophobic in the literal sense of the word, nor do they provide a justification for condemning homosexuals as a uniquely evil element of society. My point here is thus not to engage in the old liberal-conservative debate over biblical literalism and its relation to Christian orthodoxy. I do not see the need to either condemn homosexuality in order to defend Christianity or to condemn Christianity in order to defend homosexuality, since it is an open question whether the homophobic agenda of people like Chilton et al. has much to with religion at all. The prohibition of Lev. 18:22 may apply only to anal intercourse or to sex relations among males in general, but it certainly does not include female homosexuality. Moreover, it is just one part of an enormously complex code of ritual purity to which, one suspects, most American conservatives do not subscribe. The Law is to be taken in its totality and as such is not specifically ‘‘homophobic’’ in our sense of the word. Again 1 Cor. 6:9-10 does not condemn homosexuality by itself, but as part of a vast spectrum of ungodly behavior of which all of us are capable.
Indeed, even the sexology movement hardly saw homosexuality as the worst of the ‘‘perversions,’’ and was at any rate unsure precisely what constituted homosexual behavior in the first place. It was after all Freud’s precursor Richard von Krafft-Ebing who argued as early as the 1890s that homosexuality often did not express itself in anal intercourse at all, while Freud himself asserted in 1915 that ‘‘psycho-analytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character.’’ Whatever solace cultural conservatives can get from sectaries like Bergler, Socarides, and Ellis, their opinions are hardly that of psychoanalysis as a whole. Indeed, these writers in particular may be accused of distorting Freud’s original hypothesis that homosexuality leads to mental illness only when it is repressed, an idea they have replaced with the notion that homosexuality is itself a form of mental illness.
It is precisely because neither the Old Testament, the New Testament, nor the sexologists are really homophobic that we remain in the dark over why gay people must be constituted as a unique political category and a demonic one at that. If we really followed biblical principles and removed fornicators from the army and thieves from politics, we would have few soldiers and even fewer politicians. But perhaps the real sin of homosexuals has been that, unlike fornicators and thieves, gay people alone have constituted themselves as a political force. Dennis Altman has thus argued that ‘‘one of the reasons that … AIDS has been so closely linked to gay men is that no other affected group has comparable political will and resources to deal’’ with it. But would they have developed this collective will if they had not already been uniquely singled out for condemnation? In a recent study of homosexuals in the Second World War, Allan Bérubé has shown how the stigmatization of gay men and women by psychiatrists and others in the military bureaucracy forced gays to confront their sexuality as a collective reality. What had originally been an individual peculiarity became a social fact. By subsuming one-time, part-time, and full-time homosexuals under the same category, the self-appointed guardians of traditional values have greatly increased the potential number of ‘‘gays.’’ In a sense, conservatism has created the very homosexual minority it now wants to wish away.
II
In the context I have been developing above, the strategy of cultural conservatives is clear. They wish to drive a wedge between homosexuals on the one side and women, Blacks, Jews, and other ‘‘minorities’’ on the other. The appeal to the Old Testament, for example, suggests a forced alliance between orthodox Jews and conservative Christians. Moreover, as Andrea Dworkin has pointed out, the Right has offered Jews an opportunity to redeem their lost masculinity by hating homosexuals.
A perfect example of the cultural Right’s tactics is illustrated by ex-Congressman William Dannemeyer’s opposition to the so-called Hate Crimes Bill of 1988. The bill, which called for ‘‘the Justice Department to collect state and local statistics about crimes based on race, religion, and ethnicity,’’ angered Dannemeyer because it also included crimes based on sexual preference. But this argument against including gay victims had a ring of insincerity about it. While Dannemeyer might have developed a conservative critique of victimology in general, he instead shed crocodile tears over the fact that now ‘‘homosexuals will grab all the headlines, while Blacks, Jews, and others will seem less and less unfairly victimized by comparison.’’ Moreover, Dannemeyer’s argument also depends on the questionable distinction between homosexuals who are ‘‘discriminated against because of what they’’ have ‘‘somehow become’’ and genuine minorities who are ‘‘discriminated against because of what they’’ are. The very awkwardness of this phrasing suggests that Dannemeyer and his fellow travellers are all too well aware of how thin and wavering the line is between these two categories of victims. After all, homosexuals may be persecuted for characteristics they have exhibited since childhood while Jews and Blacks may sometimes ‘‘pass’’ for White Christians.
Another example of questionable tactics on the Right may be found in Chuck and Donna McIlhenny’s recently published account of their fight with several gay groups in San Francisco. At one point, the authors cite statistics suggesting that ‘‘the average homosexual couple has a far better standard of living than the average American family’’ in order to demonstrate that gays hardly need ‘‘special legal protections as a minority group.’’ There is, of course, little logic in such an argument since several legally protected groups (Jews, Asians) also have per capita incomes above the national average. Instead, the authors’ point seems, once again, to drive a wedge between the poor and homosexuals by portraying the latter as jaded members of the elite. We are thus treated to the curious spectacle of so-called conservatives attempting to stir up the very kind of class envy that they would condemn elsewhere. They thus construct a kind of homophobic populism strangely reminiscent of the anti-Semitic populism of yore.
But if Liebman is correct about the cultural Right’s tactics, what is its strategy? To answer that question it is necessary to recognize that conservatives as a whole idolize the fifties as an American version of traditional society. For them, it was the age of ‘‘Leave it to Beaver,’’ the last great epoch of the bourgeois nuclear family when gays were securely locked in their closets and women knew their place. Unfortunately, this vision of the fifties is in many ways an illusion. Cultural conservatives may want to join cultural radicals in asserting that the sexual revolution was a creation of the sixties; if so, they are both wrong. For that revolution is far more deeply rooted in Western civilization than most of us care to admit.
For many ages, a ‘‘holism’’ in which the individual was limited by gender and caste has gradually been replaced by an ‘‘individualism’’ in which personal idiosyncracies have become an end in themselves. In the course of Western history, the democratic ideal (if not the reality) implicit in the medieval relationship between vassals was slowly extended to property owners, then to workers, and then at last to women. The extension of the democratic model to relations between the sexes was thus the precondition for the socalled sexual revolution whose first manifestations were not in the hippie movement of the sixties, nor even the flaming youth of the twenties, but the advent of the New Woman in the 1890s. It is precisely our sense that the disintegration of the nuclear family represents the extension of the democratic model to its furthest limits which gives the whole sexual question its apocalyptic character. But because our society suffers from a kind of cultural amnesia, this process of sexual homogenization appears to cultural conservatives as the imposition of an alien and malevolent conspiracy.
To understand conservatives’ fears, we must remember Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that American democracy was founded on the basis of individualism among family heads but holism within families. An ideology of social equality thus comfortably coexisted with a conception of biological inequality. Indeed, this juxtaposition of ‘‘separate spheres’’ was bound up with the creation of the United States which, as Louis Hartz reminded us, was the bourgeois society par excellence. But the rise of an international economy has apparently fueled the disintegration of the family by appealing directly to its members as individuals. Commercials reach into the home, seducing children into buying toys. Luxuries are rapidly turned into necessities, requiring both parents to work in order to preserve a higher standard of living. The ‘‘Buchananist’’ attempt to restore a vanishing sexual holism in an ever more individualistic society is thus not without its dangers. Louis Dumont, a modern day disciple of Tocqueville, has defined totalitarianism as ‘‘the attempt, in a society where individualism is deeply rooted … to subordinate it to the primacy of the society as a whole.’’ Within this context, any attempt to restore the holism of the nuclear family in a fully individualistic society might well require a new version of totalitarianism.
If Dumont is correct totalitarianisms, or better, total ideologies, are caricatures of tradition rather than tradition itself. This realization in turn sheds some light on Western political thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Total ideologies like Marxism and Hitlerism were not so much new religions as secular substitutes of religion, which sought to prevent the spread of individualism by imposing an ersatz spirituality. As such, they unconsciously incorporated many of the features of the Christianity they sought to replace. Particularly significant is the way in which total ideologies deal with the problem of evil. Like traditional Christianity, the ersatz Christianities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have rejected (and continue to reject) the Manichean notion of a ‘‘creative’’ evil. Rather, evil is conceptualized as a vampiristic or parasitical force which, having no real life of its own, can only live off the lives of others. ‘‘Capital,’’ Marx wrote, ‘‘is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,’’ while Hitler time and again branded the Jews as parasites and vampires. Moreover, this secularization of the notion of evil transformed it into something unnatural. Marx thus used Aristotle to imply that capitalism (chrematistics) is ‘‘contrary to Nature’’ since it is the art of making money in order to make more money without any natural end, while Hitler regarded the Jews as a vampiristic force in opposition to the natural order of history itself. It is in this context that we must understand the central place of homosexuality in the discourse of contemporary Right. We are dealing with a new (if embryonic) form of total ideology.
But how could an ideology that often calls itself Christian itself be a modern substitute for Christianity? The answer to this question was, quite unwittingly, recently provided in The National Review by the well-known scholar Daniel Pipes. An expert in Middle Eastern affairs, Professor Pipes argued that Islamic ‘‘fundamentalism represents a thoroughly modern effort to come to terms with the challenges of modernization.’’ The operative phrase here is ‘‘thoroughly modern.’’ As a ‘‘modern’’ phenomenon, Pipes argues, the Islamic movement is ‘‘an ideology’’ which ‘‘can claim none of the sanctity that Islam the religion enjoys.’’ But certainly the same thing can be said about the so-called religious right.
So now the grand strategy of Congressman Dannemeyer and his fellow travellers becomes clear. They are more or less attempting to restore a vanishing holism in the realm of sex. But in order to accomplish this, they are also (perhaps without quite realizing it) contributing to the formation of a potential totalitarianism in which the homosexual would take the place of the Jew as the vampire whose existence is contrary to nature. Just as Marx could accept progress only by expelling the capitalist, and Hitler could accept capitalism only by expelling Judaism, so the cultural Right can only accept globalism by expelling homosexuality. Hitler’s use of the Jew to unite the German classes is thus mirrored by the Right’s use of the homosexual to unite the plethora of races, ethnicities, and interest groups which make up the contemporary United States.
Against this background, we need only highlight the tendency of certain cultural conservatives to stress the vampire-like character of homosexuality. The cultural Right seems almost unanimously committed to the theory that homosexuality is acquired. On the most basic level, the notion of same-sex behavior as an acquired ‘‘taste’’ allows cultural conservatives to freely condemn gay people for what appears to be a matter of choice. But on a deeper level, the environmental theory brands homosexuality as an unnatural perversion passed on from individual to individual like a disease. In this context, the debate over nature versus nurture as a cause of homosexuality ignores the fact that there are actually opposing theories supporting the nurture position. Sexual science has long possessed three separate accounts of homosexual desire, the first contrasting natural heterosexuality with acquired homosexuality, the second regarding homosexually as just as natural (if somewhat less mature) as heterosexuality, and the third viewing both heterosexuality and homosexuality as acquired. But cultural conservatives have deliberately conflated the first and the third theories in order to discredit the second. They thus regularly quote sexologists who believe homosexuality is acquired, without telling us that these same sexologists believe that heterosexuality is acquired also. In the same way, the sexual Right regularly argues that homosexual behavior is addictive, ignoring the fact that all sexual behavior may be addictive.
But why would the construction of a new totalitarianism depend on homosexual behavior being acquired when Hitlerism depended on the notion that Jewishness was congenital? Precisely because the dehumanization of a group depends on its isolation as a separate species. Since Jews can reproduce and homosexuals cannot, making Jewishness congenital had the effect of setting the Jewish people apart while making homosexuality congenital has the opposite effect of reintegrating homosexuals into their biological families and thus society. Conversely, to make homosexuality acquired is to turn the homosexual into a separate species which reproduces asexually in the manner of the vampiristic AIDS virus. The congenital homosexual may be your son or younger sister; the acquired homosexual is the child-molester next door.
III
In his autobiography, Liebman recalls that ‘‘in the Spring of 1990 when bigotry publicly came out of its closet again’’ he ‘‘felt like a Jew in Germany in 1934.’’ And while it may be true that we have not arrived at our ‘‘1934’’ yet, it is not for lack of trying. A new total ideology now exists, if only in embryonic form. But precisely why that ideology must be directed against the homosexual still somewhat eludes us. We see the tactical and even the strategic necessity, and yet still search for the final determination. Just as good Germans once asked ‘‘why the Jews?’’ so we ask ‘‘why the homosexuals?’’ Not because of the Bible, nor because of sexology, but because of something more central to our experience today.
Freud once described a ‘‘narcissism of minor differences’’ which allows people to project their own self-hatred on others most like themselves. The mirror, in other words, makes a convenient target. The history of German-Jewish animosity was thus grounded on a profound similarity. One might even say that German racial nationalists had come to see certain ‘‘Jewish’’ characteristics among the Germans that they wished to excise. By analogy, we can also say that as our society appears to be more sexually homogenized, conservative ideologues have confused this homogenization with what Dennis Altman has called ‘‘homosexualization,’’ a homosexualization which they must banish by projecting it on a monstrous but strangely familiar ‘‘other.’’
It is thus gay people, and not all of us, who must pay for the sins of the American ‘‘Sodom.’’ The use of the word ‘‘Sodomite’’ to describe homosexuals is emblematic not only of certain Rightist attempts to selectively interpret scripture but of the conservative project of turning gay men and women into literal ‘‘scapegoats.’’ One need not deny the homosexual tendencies of the biblical Sodomites in order to recognize that these were not their only tendencies. Anyone who has ever read the Old Testament prophets will remember the people of Sodom condemned above all for their hardness of heart, their cruelty, and their distortion of justice. But for the opportunists of the Right who have long majored in that hardness of heart that constitutes the real essence of ‘‘Sodomy,’’ it is understandable that the story of Sodom is reduced to a lecture on something called ‘‘unnatural vice.’’ Strange that the same people who uncritically champion the ‘‘unnatural’’ economics of capitalism condemn the equally ‘‘unnatural’’ sexuality which arose out of it. Strange that the same party that supports economic globalism attacks the breakdown of the family that a global economy has helped produce. But is not the acceptance of individual ‘‘preferences’’ the logical completion of the capitalist revolution? Tactically necessary, strategically essential, the homosexual becomes the demon within all of us, the dirty little secret of the hyper-sexualized age of global consumption.
This observation dovetails nicely with Dumont’s theory of totalitarianism. After all, if total ideologies are attempts to preserve holism by those cultures long ‘‘infected’’ by individualism, homophobia is an effort to preserve the family by people already imbued with the culture of its disintegration. Cultural conservatives have thus accepted female heterosexuality (which strikes at the family by revealing marriage to be a mere contract between two individuals of equal wills) only to pull back to the last redoubt by defending themselves against homosexuality. This acceptance of female sexuality is merely the last word in conservative realpolitik; straight women are being encouraged to join men in damning their homosexual brothers and sisters. Hence, even the ferocious attacks on Kinsey recently launched by the erotic Right have spared him for endorsing the clitoral orgasm. Phyllis Schlafly in the forum and the clitoris in the bedroom are a cheap enough price to pay for millions of conservative antigay women.
But when even the distinction between male and female breaks down, there is only the individual. When women begin to look at men as men have looked at women, then both sexes become equally vain and narcissistic. When desire and marketability are core values, then even the most abandoned promiscuity becomes a secret virtue. It is precisely at this point that the heterosexual-homosexual distinction becomes the last apparent barrier against anarchy. Society thus comes to hate the homosexual in proportion to its own ‘‘homosexualization’’; it is the homosexual alone and not society as a whole which is ‘‘narcissistic’’ and ‘‘promiscuous.’’ The homosexual-seducer thus becomes the scapegoat for a consumer society which feels no qualms about seducing little children into buying products they do not need. The charge of child molestation has merely become for gays what the blood libel once was for Jews. If the people must accept being dissolved in a global economy, they at least need a victim.
Meanwhile, most Americans remain complacent. This, after all, is not Germany. Yet, to return momentarily to Reverend Chilton, America may yet become Germany. Explaining why AIDS kills some people who have never engaged in homosexuality, Chilton quotes R. J. Rushdoony to the effect that ‘‘wherever a society refuses to exact the required death penalty, there God exacts the required death penalty on that society.’’ Thus, ‘‘every state … faces a choice: to sentence to death those who deserve to die, or to die themselves.’’ If Chilton does not explicitly call for the execution of every person in the United States who engages in homosexual behavior, he certainly implies it.
Of course, complacent liberals say, these are merely words. But remember that for many years respectable European scholars wrote elegant expositions of Jewish treachery, and humane philosophers deplored the evils of an accursed race. Not every anti-Semite was a thug, and few wanted violence. And, but for an accident of history, their quackish theories of social hygiene would have been forgotten. But the accident did happen, and the harmless anti-Semites of the nineteenth century are now damned as monsters. Somehow modern societies seem imbued with what might be called a ‘‘will to Auschwitz, a will to the camps.’’ Homophobia, the anti-Semitism of the late twentieth century, need not ever become a holocaust. But who is to say it will not? In the meantime, we must ask ourselves whether the cultural Right is not offering us another form of ersatz Christianity masquerading as tradition but actually infected by the virus of modernity.