Re: Is this anti-homophobia tactic sound?

kellan <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.politics.leftists.monkeyfist
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I think as tactic to get a person to talk about their homophobia and work
through it, this would be a bad one.  Not something you want to use next
time your leading a mens group.

However, a public mailing list is not going to be the place to have that
conversation, and someone posting under the moniker "Uncle Bob" hasn't
exactly approached the group with any sort of trust, and desire to learn.

I think its a fine tactic to use in a hostile situation, and one that
injects a bit of humor (at least on our side) into the situation.  It
turns, as Bijan points out, on ones one conception of homosexuality, it
would *never* occur to me that pointing to this statistic is homophobic,
and certainly not on Bonobos.  (Where we have just been subjected to one
of the more subversive critiques of Christianity I've run into recently :)

Also, I think it would be false to put it in some ghetto as a "gay only
tactic", that merely plays into the idea that there is some strong divide
between straight and gay.  If society looks at you and sees "straight
man", maybe it time to show up to a few more ActUp events, and keep them
guessing, until they stop perceiving a dichotomy.

kellan

(who just noticed that the aspell/ispell dictionary doesn't know the words
homosexual, homosexuality, or homophobic)

On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Kendall Clark wrote:

> Now what concerns me is that, while I mean this response sincerely, it
> may cheapen or inappropriately problematize the real struggle gay men
> sometimes go through in accepting their sexuality. Josh Baugher just
> pointed to an APA study[1] that seems to show conclusive evidence for the
> Freudian idea that extreme homophobia is a repression mechanism for
> dealing with homosexual desire.
>
> So I'm wondering about this tactic... Should I as a straight man use
> it or not? Should anyone use it? Does it "feel" weird or inappropriate
> to others?
>
> Best,
> Kendall Clark
>
> Footnotes:
> [1]  http://www.apa.org/releases/homophob.html
>
> _______________________________________________
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>

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