K.M. Soehnlein

To Be Gay With You

This week’s gruesome and brutal murder of a gay 19-year-old in Puerto Rico, George Jorge Mercado (pictured), is the latest horrifying reminder that violence against LGBT people is on the rise worldwide. Is there any consensus on why this is happening? Conventional wisdom says that the growth of the international queer movement, pushing visibility and civil rights, has intensified the backlash, but the sheer dehumanizing ugliness of the attack in Puerto Rico—which makes Matthew Shepard’s murder 11 years ago seem nearly tame in comparison—makes me wonder, do we really even understand homophobic violence?

This question had been on my mind since last week, when I saw a San Francisco performance by the British group DV8 called To Be Straight With You. DV8 combined its hallmark physical theater with audio culled from man-on-the-street interviews spouting blatant homophobia, and more personal testimony from people who had been victimized by anti-gay violence. Some of the victims were refugees from countries like Iraq, Zimbabwe and Jamaica, where anti-gay hostility is so culturally accepted that queer people are often forced to seek asylum in places like the U.S. and Britain, which offer some degree of legal protection.

The vocal collage in To Be Straight With You created for me a sense that anti-LGBT violence is a global crisis, something akin to “ethnic cleansing.” (Indeed, in Jamaica, where homophobic culture flourishes through the hatred inspired by murder music from singers like Buju Banton, one community recently declared a Gay Eradication Day, demanding that gays and lesbians leave the town or "suffer the consequences.") Is there any other population in the world today who can be put to death in 7 countries, as LGBT people can in Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and parts of Nigeria and Somalia? That these seven countries are all Islamic and bound to Sharia law explains why DV8 put a particular, though not exclusive, focus on homophobia among Britain’s large Muslim population. The question of how organized religions promulgate this global crisis was the underlying thesis of the entire piece.

Religions are kept alive within the structure of the nuclear family. What DV8’s stage piece drove home was how the nuclear family is more often than not the conduit for organized religion to transmit homophobia. The strongest moment of To Be Straight With You featured one dancer jump-roping nonstop (above) while voicing the reminiscence of a Muslim queer boy in England who, after coming out, was chased down and stabbed by his father, with the help of his older brother. The boy survived, retaining enough sassiness and strength to find his way to gay pride parade at age 14.

Familial homophobia is the subject of writer Sarah Schulman's new book, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, which Doug Ireland in Gay City News has dubbed "one of the most exciting gay liberation texts to appear in years." The same night I was watching DV8 in San Francisco, Schulman (pictured) was delivering the prestigious Kessler Lecture in New York City. Among Schulman's assertions is that homophobia—long understood to originate from the fear of one’s own innate or latent attraction to one’s gender—is not a phobia at all, but a "pleasure center." She writes:

"...homophobes enjoy feeling superior, rely on the pleasure of enacting their superiority, and go out of their way to resist change that would deflate their sense of superiority. Homophobia makes heterosexuals feel better about themselves. It’s not fear—it’s fun."

I think Schulman's on to something, but I think there's more going on. The attack in Puerto Rico, the Shiite death squads who patrol Baghdad for queers to torture and kill, and the exhortations to violence by Jamaican dancehall singers are all based on something that seems deeper than “enacting superiority.” The leap to violence might best be understood by research done at the University of Arkansas in 2002. Psychologists noted that anti-gay feeling is often less a matter of  fear than of disgust. Homophobes have been trained to see gay people as dirty and contagious—something diseased than can spread. Arkansas researcher Jeffrey Lohr notes,

"While fear causes a 'get me away from that' reaction, disgust manifests as 'get that away from me.' These different emotional reactions can lead to very different behaviors, according to Lohr. 'The same emotions that mediate attitude can mediate behavior,' he said. 'If fear mediates avoidance, other emotions may mediate attack.'"

The oft-quoted Bible verse used to support violence against gays, from Leviticus, refers to man-lying-with-man as an "abomination," with its connotation of disgust and loathing, and says, “blood shall be upon them.” Does anyone need any clearer example of how a religion can propagate anti-gay violence—comparing the way some people naturally love with a disease that needs to be wiped out? In DV8’s piece, a young woman from South London claims not to be prejudiced but says of gay sex, “It’s nasty." Disgust like hers is the end result of ancient tribal dogma turned into scripture by organized religion, propagated within family structures and unquestioned at the street-level by poorly educated youth.

Can art adequately address this kind of entrenched disgust? One of the feelings I was left with, amid many, after watching the DV8 show, was that it had created an argument for the importance of tough penalties for hate-based violence. The good news is that after years of trying to enact federal hate crimes laws, our Democrat-controlled Congress finally succeeded. Last month, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Just as significantly, Obama signed legislation that finally lifted the ban on HIV-positive travelers entering the U.S., a law that had been on the books for 22 years. For all the shortcomings of the Obama's actions on gay civil rights, these two laws strike me as an especially important tandem victory, as strong a stance as any world leader has taken to ensure not just that gay people are protected under the law but that this country actually can serve as a kind of safe haven for those who have nowhere else to go.

After signing the Hate Crimes Act—which, it's worth noting, also includes religious belief as a protected class—Obama spoke from the podium [video], saying,

"You understand, that we must stand against crimes that are meant not only to break bones but to break spirits. Not only to inflict harm but to instill fear...No one in America should ever be afraid to walk down the street holding the hand of the person they love."

I was particularly moved by his inclusion of that final phrase. Perhaps the best way to confront the global crisis of hate that we are facing is to remember we are fighting for our right to express our love.

Learning to Love Your Work

Learning to love your own work--it's a struggle for a lot of writers I know. You get a burst of first-draft energy, blast out a few pages, print them and walk away smiling. And then after the celebratory beer, or a restful night of sleep, you go back and look at what you've written, and you question what the f@#* you were thinking. The prose seems lifeless, or cliché, or confusing. Characters who were so alive in your mind are inert on the page. The euphoria of composition flattens out under the weighty need for revision. So you get to work again, but the deeper you get into it, the less sure you are of yourself. In your uncertainty, you turn against the writing--or rather, you feel that it has turned against you. Instead of a beautiful bloom you've planted, it's a poisonous plant that will kill you if you get too close. Maybe you abandon the whole thing to a folder on your desktop. Maybe you keep at it, draft after draft, remembering the delight you took in that initial blossoming but, as in a relationship whose passion has wilted, wondering if you'll ever feel the early excitement again.

During the four years I spent writing Robin and Ruby, I suffered this in a big way. I started the book as a kind of challenge to myself: to write from Ruby MacKenzie's point of view, rescuing her from her "supporting" status in The World of Normal Boys, giving her the star treatment I always thought she deserved. I loved the idea of writing from a young woman's point of view, something I hadn't done much of before. I liked the idea of taking a break from the "gay fiction" of my previous two novels. And I was excited to set a story in the mid-1980s, amid New Wave music and Reagan-era politics and all that uptight fashion.

But somewhere along the way, I lost my trust in the story. What I thought would be a short novel was growing into something full-length. In order to tell Ruby's story, I needed her brother Robin, and suddenly he was taking over (it seemed I had a gay male protagonist, after all). The '80s turned out to be pretty complicated, too: I had to go back to the terrors of AIDS, to the confusions of emerging identity politics, to places in my own youth that weren't comfortable.

Worst of all, writing a sequel was hard work. Though I wasn't making up characters from scratch, I did have a lot of back-story to fill in (the two books take place eight years apart). In letting the characters grow up, I questioned if I was being true to them. Would readers of the first book--many of whom had written to me over the years, asking for a sequel--connect with this story? Would I let them down? The pressure of expectations started to overshadow the writing of the story, and I lost track of what I wanted to say and why I was even bothering. I fell out of love with Ruby and with Robin, and in the darkest hours, I lost faith in myself as a writer.

The key was perseverance--and the support of some of my close friends, who read the early drafts and encouraged me even when I was resistant to believing them. Along the way, it was important to take some time away from the manuscript, letting it solidify away from my judgmental editorial eye. There's really no better way to see your own work clearly than to leave it alone for a while. It's much easier to revise a chapter if the memory of having spent an entire weekend working on it isn't so immediate.

Last week I received the typeset page-proofs of Robin and Ruby (title page pictured above). It's finally starting to look like a novel. I can see how all that struggle, support and perseverance has created something concrete. The story is much bigger than I imagined it would be--and also more emotionally intimate. I think I might even be falling back in love with it again.