Who's Afraid to be Gay?

This week I taught ninth grade boys about gender stereotypes as a volunteer for Communities in Schools. Going into the room, I thought the boys would be most bothered by being thought too feminine (and many of them had clearly not blossomed into manhood, to say the least). However, I was surprised to learn that they were much more worried about being thought gay. Frightened of it. Terrified, even.

But one of them didn’t even know what “fag” meant (back to that later).

Why are these boys so afraid of being gay that they don’t want to even stand near a gay man? What is it our society has now connected with being gay that fourteen-year-old boys have internalized? Just at the moment when it seems the majority of society is at least willing to relinquish its ridiculous anti-gay assault (which perhaps peaked near the beginning of the AIDS scare), I’m disturbed to simply not know the why these boys are so afraid.

Personally, I was never afraid of being thought gay. At times I have wished I were gay (Twenty years ago I even wrote about wanting to be a gay black woman). My desire to be gay had nothing to do with desiring homosexual experiences – rather I wanted a reason to be as angry as I always was (and, thanks to the right confluence of events six years ago, no longer am). Yet gay men are not portrayed as angry men in the media. They are portrayed as victims. Is that what these boys are afraid of? Being victims – or, better yet, victimized? That makes sense. After all, no one in our society is so often shown to be victimized (though the poor single Latina mother is much more likely to be a victim of U. S. society).

Still, these boys were taught to be tough – never victims. They can’t admit to their inner emotional turmoil. They can’t admit to be sexually confused. They can’t suggest to friends or family how difficult life might be. And they surely can’t be seen to lust after the guy in the next shower stall.

These weaknesses are caused by society as a whole (not just parents or peers or churches or media, but all of these things). And these weaknesses hurt society as a whole (just like patriarchy). Feminism can be the saving grace here again – and men talking to men the way Tony Porter and A Call To Men talk to men can make significant differences. And we should – this anti-gay backlash among our youth simply cannot be tolerated.

Now back to the missing link: what does “fag” mean? The boy who admitted to simply not knowing the meaning of the word was certain that it was terrible. He admitted to having used it as a pejorative term on several occasions. But he was surprised that it simply meant “gay man.” It somehow had to be something worse. Knowing a tad about rhetorical moves in language shifts, I immediately began trying to find a similar example of a word that would become too terrible to be used by certain groups while being celebrated (reclaimed?) by other groups. The obvious example is “nigger” – a word used to great sarcastic effect by Dave Chappelle but a word that makes me uncomfortable to use even in an academic analysis like this one.

Just at the moment when “gay” is scaring fourteen-year-old boys (a few of whom must have been homosexual),“Fag” has become like “nigger”: a word one should never use. Do these rhetorical and psychological shifts have anything to do with one another? I don’t know. But I’m curious.