What's so bad about hate
Matthew Malthouse
[The New York Times Magazine, Sept 26/99]
_What's So Bad About Hate_
An unsentimental reflection on schoolyard shootings, Matthew Shepard,
genocide and the easy consensus on hate crimes.
By ANDREW SULLIVAN
I.
I wonder what was going on in John William King's head two years ago when
he tied James Byrd Jr.'s feet to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him
three miles down a road in rural Texas. King and two friends had picked up
Byrd, who was black, when he was walking home, half-drunk, from a party. As
part of a bonding ritual in their fledgling white supremacist group, the
three men took Byrd to a remote part of town, beat him and chained his legs
together before attaching them to the truck. Pathologists at King's trial
testified that Byrd was probably alive and conscious until his body finally
hit a culvert and split in two. When King was offered a chance to say
something to Byrd's family at the trial, he smirked and uttered an
obscenity.
We know all these details now, many months later. We know quite a large
amount about what happened before and after. But I am still drawn, again
and again, to the flash of ignition, the moment when fear and loathing
became hate, the instant of transformation when King became hunter and Byrd
became prey.
What was that? And what was it when Buford Furrow Jr., longtime member of
the Aryan Nations, calmly walked up to a Filipino-American mailman he
happened to spot, asked him to mail a letter and then shot him at
point-blank range? Or when Russell Henderson beat Matthew Shepard, a young
gay man, to a pulp, removed his shoes and then, with the help of a friend,
tied him to a post, like a dead coyote, to warn off others?
For all our documentation of these crimes and others, our political and
moral disgust at them, our morbid fascination with them, our sensitivity to
their social meaning, we seem at times to have no better idea now than we
ever had of what exactly they were about. About what that moment means
when, for some reason or other, one human being asserts absolute, immutable
superiority over another. About not the violence, but what the violence
expresses. About what exactly hate is. And what our own part in it may
be.
I find myself wondering what hate actually is in part because we have
created an entirely new offense in American criminal law a "hate crime"
to combat it. And barely a day goes by without someone somewhere declaring
war against it. Last month President Clinton called for an expansion of
hate-crime laws as "what America needs in our battle against hate." A
couple of weeks later, Senator John McCain used a campaign speech to
denounce the "hate" he said poisoned the land. New York's Mayor, Rudolph
Giuliani, recently tried to stop the Million Youth March in Harlem on the
grounds that the event was organized by people "involved in hate marches
and hate rhetoric."
The media concurs in its emphasis. In 1985, there were 11 mentions of "hate
crimes" in the national media database Nexis. By 1990, there were more than
a thousand. In the first six months of 1999, there were 7,000. "Sexy fun is
one thing," wrote a New York Times reporter about sexual assaults in
Woodstock '99's mosh pit. "But this was an orgy of lewdness tinged with
hate." And when Benjamin Smith marked the Fourth of July this year by
targeting blacks, Asians and Jews for murder in Indiana and Illinois, the
story wasn't merely about a twisted young man who had emerged on the scene.
As The Times put it, "Hate arrived in the neighborhoods of Indiana
University, in Bloomington, in the early-morning darkness."
But what exactly was this thing that arrived in the early-morning darkness?
For all our zeal to attack hate, we still have a remarkably vague idea of
what it actually is. A single word, after all, tells us less, not more. For
all its emotional punch, "hate" is far less nuanced an idea than prejudice,
or bigotry, or bias, or anger, or even mere aversion to others. Is it to
stand in for all these varieties of human experience and everything in
between? If so, then the war against it will be so vast as to be quixotic.
Or is "hate" to stand for a very specific idea or belief, or set of
beliefs, with a very specific object or group of objects? Then waging war
against it is almost certainly unconstitutional. Perhaps these kinds of
questions are of no concern to those waging war on hate. Perhaps it is
enough for them that they share a sentiment that there is too much hate and
never enough vigilance in combating it. But sentiment is a poor basis for
law, and a dangerous tool in politics. It is better to leave some
unwinnable wars unfought.
II.
Hate is everywhere. Human beings generalize all the time, ahead of time,
about everyone and everything. A large part of it may even be hard-wired.
At some point in our evolution, being able to know beforehand who was
friend or foe was not merely a matter of philosophical reflection. It was a
matter of survival. And even today it seems impossible to feel a loyalty
without also feeling a disloyalty, a sense of belonging without an equal
sense of unbelonging. We're social beings. We associate. Therefore we
disassociate. And although it would be comforting to think that the one
could happen without the other, we know in reality that it doesn't. How
many patriots are there who have never felt a twinge of xenophobia?
Of course by hate, we mean something graver and darker than this kind of
lazy prejudice. But the closer you look at this distinction, the fuzzier it
gets. Much of the time, we harbor little or no malice toward people of
other backgrounds or places or ethnicities or ways of life. But then a car
cuts you off at an intersection and you find yourself noticing immediately
that the driver is a woman, or black, or old, or fat, or white, or male. Or
you are walking down a city street at night and hear footsteps quickening
behind you. You look around and see that it is a white woman and not a
black man, and you are instantly relieved. These impulses are so
spontaneous they are almost involuntary. But where did they come from? The
mindless need to be mad at someone anyone or the unconscious eruption
of a darker prejudice festering within?
In 1993, in San Jose, Calif., two neighbors one heterosexual, one
homosexual were engaged in a protracted squabble over grass clippings.
(The full case is recounted in "Hate Crimes," by James B. Jacobs and
Kimberly Potter.) The gay man regularly mowed his lawn without a grass
catcher, which prompted his neighbor to complain on many occasions that
grass clippings spilled over onto his driveway. Tensions grew until one
day, the gay man mowed his front yard, spilling clippings onto his
neighbor's driveway, prompting the straight man to yell an obscene and
common anti-gay insult. The wrangling escalated. At one point, the gay man
agreed to collect the clippings from his neighbor's driveway but then later
found them dumped on his own porch. A fracas ensued with the gay man
spraying the straight man's son with a garden hose, and the son hitting and
kicking the gay man several times, yelling anti-gay slurs. The police were
called, and the son was eventually convicted of a hate-motivated assault, a
felony. But what was the nature of the hate: anti-gay bias, or suburban
property-owner madness?
Or take the Labor Day parade last year in Broad Channel, a small island in
Jamaica Bay, Queens. Almost everyone there is white, and in recent years a
group of local volunteer firefighters has taken to decorating a pickup
truck for the parade in order to win the prize for "funniest float." Their
themes have tended toward the outrageously provocative. Beginning in 1995,
they won prizes for floats depicting "Hasidic Park," "Gooks of Hazzard" and
"Happy Gays." Last year, they called their float "Black to the Future,
Broad Channel 2098." They imagined their community a century hence as a
largely black enclave, with every stereotype imaginable: watermelons,
basketballs and so on. At one point during the parade, one of them mimicked
the dragging death of James Byrd. It was caught on videotape, and before
long the entire community was depicted as a caldron of hate.
It's an interesting case, because the float was indisputably in bad taste
and the improvisation on the Byrd killing was grotesque. But was it hate?
The men on the float were local heroes for their volunteer work; they had
no record of bigoted activity, and were not members of any racist
organizations. In previous years, they had made fun of many other groups
and saw themselves more as provocateurs than bigots. When they were
described as racists, it came as a shock to them. They apologized for poor
taste but refused to confess to bigotry. "The people involved aren't
horrible people," protested a local woman. "Was it a racist act? I don't
know. Are they racists? I don't think so."
If hate is a self-conscious activity, she has a point. The men were
primarily motivated by the desire to shock and to reflect what they thought
was their community's culture. Their display was not aimed at any
particular black people, or at any blacks who lived in Broad Channel
almost none do. But if hate is primarily an unconscious activity, then the
matter is obviously murkier. And by taking the horrific lynching of a black
man as a spontaneous object of humor, the men were clearly advocating
indifference to it. Was this an aberrant excess? Or the real truth about
the men's feelings toward African-Americans? Hate or tastelessness? And how
on earth is anyone, even perhaps the firefighters themselves, going to know
for sure?
Or recall H.L. Mencken. He shared in the anti-Semitism of his time with
more alacrity than most and was an indefatigable racist. "It is
impossible," he wrote in his diary, "to talk anything resembling88 discretion
or judgment into a colored woman. They are all essentially childlike, and
even hard experience does not teach them anything." He wrote at another
time of the "psychological stigmata" of the "Afro-American race." But it is
also true that, during much of his life, day to day, Mencken conducted
himself with no regard to race, and supported a politics that was clearly
integrationist. As the editor of his diary has pointed out, Mencken
published many black authors in his magazine, The Mercury, and lobbied on
their behalf with his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. The last thing Mencken
ever wrote was a diatribe against racial segregation in Baltimore's public
parks. He was good friends with leading black writers and journalists,
including James Weldon Johnson, Walter White and George S. Schuyler, and
played an underappreciated role in promoting the Harlem Renaissance.
What would our modern view of hate do with Mencken? Probably ignore him, or
change the subject. But, with regard to hate, I know lots of people like
Mencken. He reminds me of conservative friends who oppose almost every
measure for homosexual equality yet genuinely delight in the company of
their gay friends. It would be easier for me to think of them as haters,
and on paper, perhaps, there is a good case that they are. But in real
life, I know they are not. Some of them clearly harbor no real malice
toward me or other homosexuals whatsoever.
They are as hard to figure out as those liberal friends who support every
gay rights measure they have ever heard of but do anything to avoid going
into a gay bar with me. I have to ask myself in the same, frustrating kind
of way: are they liberal bigots or bigoted liberals? Or are they neither
bigots nor liberals, but merely people?
III.
Hate used to be easier to understand. When Sartre described anti-Semitism
in his 1946 essay "Anti-Semite and Jew," he meant a very specific array of
firmly held prejudices, with a history, an ideology and even a
pseudoscience to back them up. He meant a systematic attempt to demonize
and eradicate an entire race. If you go to the Web site of the World Church
of the Creator, the organization that inspired young Benjamin Smith to
murder in Illinois earlier this year, you will find a similarly bizarre,
pseudorational ideology. The kind of literature read by Buford Furrow
before he rained terror on a Jewish kindergarten last month and then killed
a mailman because of his color is full of the same paranoid loopiness. And
when we talk about hate, we often mean this kind of phenomenon.
But this brand of hatred is mercifully rare in the United States. These
professional maniacs are to hate what serial killers are to murder. They
should certainly not be ignored; but they represent what Harold Meyerson,
writing in Salon, called "niche haters": coldblooded, somewhat deranged,
often poorly socialized psychopaths. In a free society with relatively easy
access to guns, they will always pose a menace.
But their menace is a limited one, and their hatred is hardly typical of
anything very widespread. Take Buford Furrow. He famously issued a "wake-up
call" to "kill Jews" in Los Angeles, before he peppered a Jewish community
center with gunfire. He did this in a state with two Jewish female
Senators, in a city with a large, prosperous Jewish population, in a
country where out of several million Jewish Americans, a total of 66 were
reported by the F.B.I. as the targets of hate-crime assaults in 1997.
However despicable Furrow's actions were, it would require a very large
stretch to describe them as representative of anything but the deranged
fringe of an American subculture.
Most hate is more common and more complicated, with as many varieties as
there are varieties of love. Just as there is possessive love and needy
love; family love and friendship; romantic love and unrequited love;
passion and respect, affection and obsession, so hatred has its shadings.
There is hate that fears, and hate that merely feels contempt; there is
hate that expresses power, and hate that comes from powerlessness; there is
revenge, and there is hate that comes from envy. There is hate that was
love, and hate that is a curious expression of love. There is hate of the
other, and hate of something that reminds us too much of ourselves. There
is the oppressor's hate, and the victim's hate. There is hate that burns
slowly, and hate that fades. And there is hate that explodes, and hate that
never catches fire.
The modern words that we have created to describe the varieties of hate
sexism," "racism," "anti-Semitism, "homophobia" tell us very little about
any of this. They tell us merely the identities of the victims; they don't
reveal the identities of the perpetrators, or what they think, or how they
feel. They don't even tell us how the victims feel. And this simplicity is
no accident. Coming from the theories of Marxist and post-Marxist
academics, these "isms" are far better at alleging structures of power than
at delineating the workings of the individual heart or mind. In fact, these
"isms" can exist without mentioning individuals at all.
We speak of institutional racism, for example, as if an institution can
feel anything. We talk of "hate" as an impersonal noun, with no hater
specified. But when these abstractions are actually incarnated, when
someone feels something as a result of them, when a hater actually
interacts with a victim, the picture changes. We find that hates are often
very different phenomena one from another, that they have very different
psychological dynamics, that they might even be better understood by not
seeing them as varieties of the same thing at all.
There is, for example, the now unfashionable distinction between reasonable
hate and unreasonable hate. In recent years, we have become accustomed to
talking about hates as if they were all equally indefensible, as if it
could never be the case that some hates might be legitimate, even
necessary. But when some 800,000 Tutsis are murdered under the auspices of
a Hutu regime in Rwanda, and when a few thousand Hutus are killed in
revenge, the hates are not commensurate. Genocide is not an event like a
hurricane, in which damage is random and universal; it is a planned and
often merciless attack of one group upon another. The hate of the
perpetrators is a monstrosity. The hate of the victims, and their
survivors, is justified. What else, one wonders, were surviving Jews
supposed to feel toward Germans after the Holocaust? Or, to a different
degree, South African blacks after apartheid? If the victims overcome this
hate, it is a supreme moral achievement. But if they don't, the victims are
not as culpable as the perpetrators. So the hatred of Serbs for Kosovars
today can never be equated with the hatred of Kosovars for Serbs.
Hate, like much of human feeling, is not rational, but it usually has its
reasons. And it cannot be understood, let alone condemned, without knowing
them. Similarly, the hate that comes from knowledge is always different
from the hate that comes from ignorance. It is one of the most foolish
cliches of our time that prejudice is always rooted in ignorance, and can
usually be overcome by familiarity with the objects of our loathing. The
racism of many Southern whites under segregation was not appeased by
familiarity with Southern blacks; the virulent loathing of Tutsis by many
Hutus was not undermined by living next door to them for centuries. Theirs
was a hatred that sprang, for whatever reasons, from experience. It cannot
easily be compared with, for example, the resilience of anti-Semitism in
Japan, or hostility to immigration in areas where immigrants are unknown,
or fear of homosexuals by people who have never knowingly met one.
The same familiarity is an integral part of what has become known as
"sexism." Sexism isn't, properly speaking, a prejudice at all. Few men live
without knowledge or constant awareness of women. Every single sexist man
was born of a woman, and is likely to be sexually attracted to women. His
hostility is going to be very different than that of, say, a reclusive
member of the Aryan Nations toward Jews he has never met.
In her book "The Anatomy of Prejudices," the psychotherapist Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl proposes a typology of three distinct kinds of hate:
obsessive, hysterical and narcissistic. It's not an exhaustive analysis,
but it's a beginning in any serious attempt to understand hate rather than
merely declaring war on it. The obsessives, for Young-Bruehl, are those,
like the Nazis or Hutus, who fantasize a threat from a minority, and
obsessively try to rid themselves of it. For them, the very existence of
the hated group is threatening. They often describe their loathing in
almost physical terms: they experience what Patrick Buchanan, in reference
to homosexuals, once described as a "visceral recoil" from the objects of
their detestation. They often describe those they hate as diseased or sick,
in need of a cure. Or they talk of "cleansing" them, as the Hutus talked of
the Tutsis, or call them "cockroaches," as Yitzhak Shamir called the
Palestinians. If you read material from the Family Research Council, it is
clear that the group regards homosexuals as similar contaminants. A recent
posting on its Web site about syphilis among gay men was headlined,
"Unclean."
Hysterical haters have a more complicated relationship with the objects of
their aversion. In Young-Bruehl's words, hysterical prejudice is a
prejudice that "a person uses unconsciously to appoint a group to act out
in the world forbidden sexual and sexually aggressive desires that the
person has repressed." Certain kinds of racists fit this pattern. White
loathing of blacks is, for some people, at least partly about sexual and
physical envy. A certain kind of white racist sees in black America all
those impulses he wishes most to express himself but cannot. He idealizes
in "blackness" a sexual freedom, a physical power, a Dionysian release that
he detests but also longs for. His fantasy may not have any basis in
reality, but it is powerful nonetheless. It is a form of love-hate, and it
is impossible to understand the nuances of racism in, say, the American
South, or in British Imperial India, without it.
Unlike the obsessives, the hysterical haters do not want to eradicate the
objects of their loathing; rather they want to keep them in some kind of
permanent and safe subjugation in order to indulge the attraction of their
repulsion. A recent study, for example, found that the men most likely to
be opposed to equal rights for homosexuals were those most likely to be
aroused by homoerotic imagery. This makes little rational sense, but it has
a certain psychological plausibility. If homosexuals were granted equality,
then the hysterical gay-hater might panic that his repressed passions would
run out of control, overwhelming him and the world he inhabits.
A narcissistic hate, according to Young-Bruehl's definition, is sexism. In
its most common form, it is rooted in many men's inability even to imagine
what it is to be a woman, a failing rarely challenged by men's control of
our most powerful public social institutions. Women are not so much hated
by most men as simply ignored in nonsexual contexts, or never conceived of
as true equals. The implicit condescension is mixed, in many cases, with
repressed and sublimated erotic desire. So the unawareness of women is
sometimes commingled with a deep longing or contempt for them.
Each hate, of course, is more complicated than this, and in any one person
hate can assume a uniquely configured combination of these types. So there
are hysterical sexists who hate women because they need them so much, and
narcissistic sexists who hardly notice that women exist, and sexists who
oscillate between one of these positions and another. And there are
gay-bashers who are threatened by masculine gay men and gay-haters who feel
repulsed by effeminate ones. The soldier who beat his fellow soldier Barry
Winchell to death with a baseball bat in July had earlier lost a fight to
him. It was the image of a macho gay man and the shame of being bested by
him that the vengeful soldier had to obliterate, even if he needed a gang
of accomplices and a weapon to do so. But the murderers of Matthew Shepard
seem to have had a different impulse: a visceral disgust at the thought of
any sexual contact with an effeminate homosexual. Their anger was mixed
with mockery, as the cruel spectacle at the side of the road suggested.
In the same way, the pathological anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany was
obsessive, inasmuch as it tried to cleanse the world of Jews; but also, as
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen shows in his book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners,"
hysterical. The Germans were mysteriously compelled as well as repelled by
Jews, devising elaborate ways, like death camps and death marches, to keep
them alive even as they killed them. And the early Nazi phobia of
interracial sex suggests as well a lingering erotic quality to the
relationship, partaking of exactly the kind of sexual panic that persists
among some homosexual-haters and anti-miscegenation racists. So the concept
of "homophobia," like that of "sexism" and "racism," is often a crude one.
All three are essentially cookie-cutter formulas that try to understand
human impulses merely through the one-dimensional identity of the victims,
rather than through the thoughts and feelings of the haters and hated.
This is deliberate. The theorists behind these "isms" want to ascribe all
blame to one group in society the "oppressors" and render specific
others the "victims" completely blameless. And they want to do this in
order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it doesn't take
a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own form of bias.
It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people white
straight males for example purely because of the color of their skin or
the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly ascribe
innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does: it
hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity.
And it postures morally over the result.
In reality, human beings and human acts are far more complex, which is why
these isms and the laws they have fomented are continually coming under
strain and challenge. Once again, hate wriggles free of its definers. It
knows no monolithic groups of haters and hated. Like a river, it has many
eddies, backwaters and rapids. So there are anti-Semites who actually
admire what they think of as Jewish power, and there are gay-haters who
look up to homosexuals and some who want to sleep with them. And there are
black racists, racist Jews, sexist women and anti-Semitic homosexuals. Of
course there are.
IV.
Once you start thinking of these phenomena less as the "isms" of sexism,
racism and "homophobia," once you think of them as independent
psychological responses, it's also possible to see how they can work in a
bewildering variety of ways in a bewildering number of people. To take one
obvious and sad oddity: people who are demeaned and objectified in society
may develop an aversion to their tormentors that is more hateful in its
expression than the prejudice they have been subjected to. The F.B.I.
statistics on hate crimes throws up an interesting point. In America in the
1990's, blacks were up to three times as likely as whites to commit a hate
crime, to express their hate by physically attacking their targets or their
property. Just as sexual abusers have often been victims of sexual abuse,
and wife-beaters often grew up in violent households, so hate criminals may
often be members of hated groups.
Even the Columbine murderers were in some sense victims of hate before they
were purveyors of it. Their classmates later admitted that Dylan Klebold
and Eric Harris were regularly called "faggots" in the corridors and
classrooms of Columbine High and that nothing was done to prevent or stop
the harassment. This climate of hostility doesn't excuse the actions of
Klebold and Harris, but it does provide a more plausible context. If they
had been black, had routinely been called "nigger" in the school and had
then exploded into a shooting spree against white students, the response to
the matter might well have been different. But the hate would have been the
same. In other words, hate-victims are often hate-victimizers as well. This
doesn't mean that all hates are equivalent, or that some are not more
justified than others. It means merely that hate goes both ways; and if you
try to regulate it among some, you will find yourself forced to regulate it
among others.
It is no secret, for example, that some of the most vicious anti-Semites in
America are black, and that some of the most virulent anti-Catholic bigots
in America are gay. At what point, we are increasingly forced to ask, do
these phenomena become as indefensible as white racism or religious
toleration of anti-gay bigotry? That question becomes all the more
difficult when we notice that it is often minorities who commit some of the
most hate-filled offenses against what they see as their oppressors. It was
the mainly gay AIDS activist group Act Up that perpetrated the hateful act
of desecrating Communion hosts at a Mass at St Patrick's Cathedral in New
York. And here is the playwright Tony Kushner, who is gay, responding to
the Matthew Shepard beating in The Nation magazine: "Pope John Paul II
endorses murder. He, too, knows the price of discrimination, having
declared anti-Semitism a sin. . . . He knows that discrimination kills. But
when the Pope heard the news about Matthew Shepard, he, too, worried about
spin. And so, on the subject of gay-bashing, the Pope and his cardinals and
his bishops and priests maintain their cynical political silence. . . . To
remain silent is to endorse murder." Kushner went on to describe the Pope
as a "homicidal liar."
Maybe the passion behind these words is justified. But it seems clear
enough to me that Kushner is expressing hate toward the institution of the
Catholic Church, and all those who perpetuate its doctrines. How else to
interpret the way in which he accuses the Pope of cynicism, lying and
murder? And how else either to understand the brutal parody of religious
vocations expressed by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of gay
men who dress in drag as nuns and engage in sexually explicit performances
in public? Or T-shirts with the words "Recovering Catholic" on them, hot
items among some gay and lesbian activists? The implication that someone's
religious faith is a mental illness is clearly an expression of contempt.
If that isn't covered under the definition of hate speech, what is?
Or take the following sentence: "The act male homosexuals commit is ugly
and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink
and take drugs to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and
they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy." The thoughts
of Pat Robertson or Patrick Buchanan? Actually that sentence was written by
Gertrude Stein, one of the century's most notable lesbians. Or take the
following, about how beating up "black boys like that made us feel good
inside. . . . Every time I drove my foot into his [expletive], I felt
better." It was written to describe the brutal assault of an innocent
bystander for the sole reason of his race. By the end of the attack, the
victim had blood gushing from his mouth as his attackers stomped on his
genitals. Are we less appalled when we learn that the actual sentence was
how beating up "white boys like that made us feel good inside. . . . Every
time I drove my foot into his [expletive], I felt better?" It was written
by Nathan McCall, an African-American who later in life became a successful
journalist at The Washington Post and published his memoir of this "hate
crime" to much acclaim.
In fact, one of the stranger aspects of hate is that the prejudice
expressed by a group in power may often be milder in expression than the
prejudice felt by the marginalized. After all, if you already enjoy
privilege, you may not feel the anger that turns bias into hate. You may
not need to. For this reason, most white racism may be more influential in
society than most black racism but also more calmly expressed.
So may other forms of minority loathing especially hatred within
minorities. I'm sure that black conservatives like Clarence Thomas or
Thomas Sowell have experienced their fair share of white racism. But I
wonder whether it has ever reached the level of intensity of the hatred
directed toward them by other blacks? In several years of being an openly
gay writer and editor, I have experienced the gamut of responses to my
sexual orientation. But I have only directly experienced articulated,
passionate hate from other homosexuals. I have been accused over the years
by other homosexuals of being a sellout, a hypocrite, a traitor, a sexist,
a racist, a narcissist, a snob. I've been called selfish, callous, hateful,
self-hating and malevolent. At a reading, a group of lesbian activists
portrayed my face on a poster within the crossfires of a gun. Nothing from
the religious right has come close to such vehemence.
I am not complaining. No harm has ever come to me or my property, and much
of the criticism is rooted in the legitimate expression of political
differences. But the visceral tone and style of the gay criticism can only
be described as hateful. It is designed to wound personally, and it often
does. But its intensity comes in part, one senses, from the pain of being
excluded for so long, of anger long restrained bubbling up and directing
itself more aggressively toward an alleged traitor than an alleged enemy.
It is the hate of the hated. And it can be the most hateful hate of all.
For this reason, hate-crime laws may themselves be an oddly biased category
biased against the victims of hate. Racism is everywhere, but the already
victimized might be more desperate, more willing to express it violently.
And so more prone to come under the suspicious eye of the law.
V.
And why is hate for a group worse than hate for a person? In Laramie, Wyo.,
the now-famous epicenter of "homophobia," where Matthew Shepard was
brutally beaten to death, vicious murders are not unknown. In the previous
12 months, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found east of the town with 17
stab wounds. Her 38-year-old boyfriend was apparently angry that she had
refused an abortion and left her in the Wyoming foothills to bleed to
death. In the summer of 1998, an 8-year-old Laramie girl was abducted,
raped and murdered by a pedophile, who disposed of her young body in a
garbage dump. Neither of these killings was deemed a hate crime, and
neither would be designated as such under any existing hate-crime law.
Perhaps because of this, one crime is an international legend; the other
two are virtually unheard of.
But which crime was more filled with hate? Once you ask the question, you
realize how difficult it is to answer. Is it more hateful to kill a
stranger or a lover? Is it more hateful to kill a child than an adult? Is
it more hateful to kill your own child than another's? Under the law before
the invention of hate crimes, these decisions didn't have to be taken. But
under the law after hate crimes, a decision is essential. A decade ago, a
murder was a murder. Now, in the era when group hate has emerged as our
cardinal social sin, it all depends.
The supporters of laws against hate crimes argue that such crimes should be
disproportionately punished because they victimize more than the victim.
Such crimes, these advocates argue, spread fear, hatred and panic among
whole populations, and therefore merit more concern. But, of course, all
crimes victimize more than the victim, and spread alarm in the society at
large. Just think of the terrifying church shooting in Texas only two weeks
ago. In fact, a purely random murder may be even more terrifying than a
targeted one, since the entire community, and not just a part of it, feels
threatened. High rates of murder, robbery, assault and burglary victimize
everyone, by spreading fear, suspicion and distress everywhere. Which crime
was more frightening to more people this summer: the mentally ill Buford
Furrow's crazed attacks in Los Angeles, killing one, or Mark Barton's
murder of his own family and several random day-traders in Atlanta, killing
12? Almost certainly the latter. But only Furrow was guilty of "hate."
One response to this objection is that certain groups feel fear more
intensely than others because of a history of persecution or intimidation.
But doesn't this smack of a certain condescension toward minorities? Why,
after all, should it be assumed that gay men or black women or Jews, for
example, are as a group more easily intimidated than others? Surely in any
of these communities there will be a vast range of responses, from panic to
concern to complete indifference. The assumption otherwise is the kind of
crude generalization the law is supposed to uproot in the first place. And
among these groups, there are also likely to be vast differences. To equate
a population once subjected to slavery with a population of Mexican
immigrants or third-generation Holocaust survivors is to equate the
unequatable. In fact, it is to set up a contest of vulnerability in which
one group vies with another to establish its particular variety of
suffering, a contest that can have no dignified solution.
Rape, for example, is not classified as a "hate crime" under most existing
laws, pitting feminists against ethnic groups in a battle for recognition.
If, as a solution to this problem, everyone, except the white straight
able-bodied male, is regarded as a possible victim of a hate crime, then we
have simply created a two-tier system of justice in which racial profiling
is reversed, and white straight men are presumed guilty before being proven
innocent, and members of minorities are free to hate them as gleefully as
they like. But if we include the white straight male in the litany of
potential victims, then we have effectively abolished the notion of a hate
crime altogether. For if every crime is possibly a hate crime, then it is
simply another name for crime. All we will have done is widened the search
for possible bigotry, ratcheted up the sentences for everyone and filled
the jails up even further.
Hate-crime-law advocates counter that extra penalties should be imposed on
hate crimes because our society is experiencing an "epidemic" of such
crimes. Mercifully, there is no hard evidence to support this notion. The
Federal Government has only been recording the incidence of hate crimes in
this decade, and the statistics tell a simple story. In 1992, there were
6,623 hate-crime incidents reported to the F.B.I. by a total of 6,181
agencies, covering 51 percent of the population. In 1996, there were 8,734
incidents reported by 11,355 agencies, covering 84 percent of the
population. That number dropped to 8,049 in 1997. These numbers are, of
course, hazardous. They probably underreport the incidence of such crimes,
but they are the only reliable figures we have. Yet even if they are faulty
as an absolute number, they do not show an epidemic of "hate crimes" in the
1990's.
Is there evidence that the crimes themselves are becoming more vicious?
None. More than 60 percent of recorded hate crimes in America involve no
violent, physical assault against another human being at all, and, again,
according to the F.B.I., that proportion has not budged much in the 1990's.
These impersonal attacks are crimes against property or crimes of
"intimidation." Murder, which dominates media coverage of hate crimes, is a
tiny proportion of the total. Of the 8,049 hate crimes reported to the
F.B.I. in 1997, a total of eight were murders. Eight. The number of hate
crimes that were aggravated assaults (generally involving a weapon) in 1997
is less than 15 percent of the total. That's 1,237 assaults too many, of
course, but to put it in perspective, compare it with a reported 1,022,492
"equal opportunity" aggravated assaults in America in the same year. The
number of hate crimes that were physical assaults is half the total. That's
4,000 assaults too many, of course, but to put it in perspective, it
compares with around 3.8 million "equal opportunity" assaults in America
annually.
The truth is, the distinction between a crime filled with personal hate and
a crime filled with group hate is an essentially arbitrary one. It tells us
nothing interesting about the psychological contours of the specific actor
or his specific victim. It is a function primarily of politics, of special
interest groups carving out particular protections for themselves, rather
than a serious response to a serious criminal concern. In such an endeavor,
hate-crime-law advocates cram an entire world of human motivations into an
immutable, tiny box called hate, and hope to have solved a problem. But
nothing has been solved; and some harm may even have been done.
In an attempt to repudiate a past that treated people differently because
of the color of their skin, or their sex, or religion or sexual
orientation, we may merely create a future that permanently treats people
differently because of the color of their skin, or their sex, religion or
sexual orientation. This notion of a hate crime, and the concept of hate
that lies behind it, takes a psychological mystery and turns it into a
facile political artifact. Rather than compounding this error and extending
even further, we should seriously consider repealing the concept altogether.
To put it another way: violence can and should be stopped by the
government. In a free society, hate can't and shouldn't be. The boundaries
between hate and prejudice and between prejudice and opinion and between
opinion and truth are so complicated and blurred that any attempt to
construct legal and political fire walls is a doomed and illiberal venture.
We know by now that hate will never disappear from human consciousness; in
fact, it is probably, at some level, definitive of it. We know after
decades of education measures that hate is not caused merely by ignorance;
and after decades of legislation, that it isn't caused entirely by law.
To be sure, we have made much progress. Anyone who argues that America is
as inhospitable to minorities and to women today as it has been in the past
has not read much history. And we should, of course, be vigilant that our
most powerful institutions, most notably the government, do not actively or
formally propagate hatred; and insure that the violent expression of hate
is curtailed by the same rules that punish all violent expression.
But after that, in an increasingly diverse culture, it is crazy to expect
that hate, in all its variety, can be eradicated. A free country will
always mean a hateful country. This may not be fair, or perfect, or
admirable, but it is reality, and while we need not endorse it, we should
not delude ourselves into thinking we can prevent it. That is surely the
distinction between toleration and tolerance. Tolerance is the eradication
of hate; toleration is co-existence despite it. We might do better as a
culture and as a polity if we concentrated more on achieving the latter
rather than the former. We would certainly be less frustrated.
And by aiming lower, we might actually reach higher. In some ways, some
expression of prejudice serves a useful social purpose. It lets off steam;
it allows natural tensions to express themselves incrementally; it can
siphon off conflict through words, rather than actions. Anyone who has
lived in the ethnic shouting match that is New York City knows exactly what
I mean. If New Yorkers disliked each other less, they wouldn't be able to
get on so well. We may not all be able to pull off a Mencken bigoted in
words, egalitarian in action but we might achieve a lesser form of
virtue: a human acceptance of our need for differentiation, without a total
capitulation to it.
Do we not owe something more to the victims of hate? Perhaps we do. But it
is also true that there is nothing that government can do for the hated
that the hated cannot better do for themselves. After all, most bigots are
not foiled when they are punished specifically for their beliefs. In fact,
many of the worst haters crave such attention and find vindication in such
rebukes. Indeed, our media's obsession with "hate," our elevation of it
above other social misdemeanors and crimes, may even play into the hands of
the pathetic and the evil, may breathe air into the smoldering embers of
their paranoid loathing. Sure, we can help create a climate in which such
hate is disapproved of -- and we should. But there is a danger that if we
go too far, if we punish it too much, if we try to abolish it altogether,
we may merely increase its mystique, and entrench the very categories of
human difference that we are trying to erase.
For hate is only foiled not when the haters are punished but when the hated
are immune to the bigot's power. A hater cannot psychologically wound if a
victim cannot psychologically be wounded. And that immunity to hurt can
never be given; it can merely be achieved. The racial epithet only strikes
at someone's core if he lets it, if he allows the bigot's definition of him
to be the final description of his life and his person if somewhere in
his heart of hearts, he believes the hateful slur to be true. The only
final answer to this form of racism, then, is not majority persecution of
it, but minority indifference to it. The only permanent rebuke to
88homophobia is not the enforcement of tolerance, but gay equanimity in the
face of prejudice. The only effective answer to sexism is not a morass of
legal proscriptions, but the simple fact of female success. In this, as in
so many other things, there is no solution to the problem. There is only a
transcendence of it. For all our rhetoric, hate will never be destroyed.
Hate, as our predecessors knew better, can merely be overcome.
--
"Nice boy, but about as sharp as a sack of wet mice."
-- Foghorn Leghorn
http://www.calmeilles.demon.co.uk
James Harvey
Matthew Malthouse <use...@calmeilles.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:slrn7v11ep...@special.guardian.co.uk...
(text cut to avoid unpopularity)
Thank you for that Matthew: I thought that was a very good article, well
thought out and argued.
James
Ashley Campbell
Matthew Malthouse wrote in message ...
>
>[The New York Times Magazine, Sept 26/99]
>
OK,
I've been lurking here for a couple of months, 'cos this is such a bloody
nice newsgroup, that it's too hard to resist, really.
But I lurk no more.
This was the most brilliant piece of writing and psychological analysis
(sorry David!) I have read for a long time.
But why was it posted only to nz.soc.queer? it would (for example) make
nz.politics a much more interesting place to be.
Ashley
G.A.Radford
> Matthew Malthouse wrote in message ...
> >
> >[The New York Times Magazine, Sept 26/99]
> >
> <snip total, utter, brilliance>
>
> OK,
>
> I've been lurking here for a couple of months, 'cos this is such a bloody
> nice newsgroup, that it's too hard to resist, really.
>
> But I lurk no more.
>
> This was the most brilliant piece of writing and psychological analysis
> (sorry David!) I have read for a long time.
>
> But why was it posted only to nz.soc.queer? it would (for example) make
> nz.politics a much more interesting place to be.
Welcome to the wondrous uk.gay-lesbian-bi
fraternity/sorority/transformity (or whatever the hell the term
is). AFAICT, this is also going to can.motss, though I can't welcome
you to that, as I don't regularly post there. :)
Hey, well done for delurking anyway, some people find it a very hard
thing to do, and remember that messages don't always end up where you
think they do.
Feel free to keep posting on uk.glb though, you won't be the only
non-brit around...
TTFN,
Moof - sorry, I couldn't resist <g>
--
G. A. Radford, Moofing at you from Canterbury, UK.
"The Internet is not a network of computers - it is a network of humans...
we are the network, and you *will* be assimilated" - Rik van Riel
James Harvey
Ashley Campbell <ashle...@xtra.co.nz> wrote in message
news:7sq1k2$8hql6$1...@titan.xtra.co.nz...
>
> Matthew Malthouse wrote in message ...
> >
> >
>
> OK,
>
> I've been lurking here for a couple of months, 'cos this is such a bloody
> nice newsgroup, that it's too hard to resist, really.
>
> But I lurk no more.
Welcome! Nice to have you here.
James
Watman
Malthouse) wrote:
>[The New York Times Magazine, Sept 26/99]
>_What's So Bad About Hate_
>
Thanks for posting that Matthew. Very profound and thought
provoking, need to read it again to digest it all.
Paul, learning more about people - but knowing less.
--
P
ps...@hotmail.com
Matthew Malthouse <use...@calmeilles.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:slrn7v11ep...@special.guardian.co.uk...
>
>
> I wonder what was going on in John William King's head two years ago when
> he tied James Byrd Jr.'s feet to the back of a pickup truck and dragged
him
> three miles down a road in rural Texas.
The murder actually took place in June '98, and It's pretty clear that he
thought he was killing a man because he was black.
> It's an interesting case, because the float was indisputably in bad taste
> and the improvisation on the Byrd killing was grotesque. But was it hate?
Yes it was.
> For hate is only foiled not when the haters are punished but when the
hated
> are immune to the bigot's power. A hater cannot psychologically wound if a
> victim cannot psychologically be wounded. And that immunity to hurt can
> never be given; it can merely be achieved.
Except that we are not talking about calling people names here, are we? We
*are* talking about people being ripped to pieces and having their brains
bashed out.
> Hate can be overcome.
Yes, by legislation to combat discrimination, which helps to change the
climate of opinion within society; so that bigotry and prejudice are no
longer acceptable. The court judgement on the armed forces sends a clear
signal that discrimination is wrong.
While it's true that a murder is a murder, and that there is no difference
between, for example, the worth of a gay or straight victim, hate crimes
legislation can have a similar effect in helping to change peoples views.
Some, at least, will come to see that it is wrong to target minorities, just
because they may be different.
Paul
JohnM
<ashle...@xtra.co.nz> writes
>
>Matthew Malthouse wrote in message ...
>>
>>
>
>OK,
>
>I've been lurking here for a couple of months, 'cos this is such a bloody
>nice newsgroup, that it's too hard to resist, really.
>
>But I lurk no more.
>
>(sorry David!) I have read for a long time.
Hello swdi
I agree with you that it was the most brilliant piece I have read
for a long time; I always enjoy reading Andrew Sullivan's essays
which, from the analysis angle are excellent.
Whether I agree with what he writes is another matter - and I do not
mean pedantic comments like - ahem - his considering 'homophobia' an
'ism'.
Andrew Sullivan's point of view during his life is and has been
conservative - with a small 'c' - and as such he leads to a conclusion
that the state can do little to eradicate hate which is consistent with
the standard conservative view that the state can and should do nothing
regards an unbridled self-correcting free market. He thus reaches the
profoundly depressing conclusion that 'A free country will always mean a
hateful country'. I happen to believe in human beings and in the
inherent goodness of Man, which is why I am a socialist and why I can
not accept Christianity's 'we are all born sinners'. I accept the
existence of Evil - itself another subject - and human imperfections and
foibles which cause harm, hate, distress even genocide and mass murder;
but the proposition of the inevitability of a hateful society seems to
me to be both misanthropic and dogmatic.
I do not disagree that Andrew Sullivan homes in to define the general
concept of 'hate' better than anyone else; it was what he leaves OUT
that is interesting. For amongst his definition of visceral, hysterical
and narcissistic hate, he also pips in that 'It is one of the most
foolish cliches of our time that prejudice is always rooted in
ignorance, and can usually be overcome by familiarity with the objects
of our loathing'. He then proceeds to give examples of the Serbs and
Kosovars who hate each other after knowing each other rather too well.
What he omits to say, coz it would affect all his thesis is that hate,
is _taught_. Contrast this with Nelson Mandela's dictum (which I have
used in my South African travelogue): 'Deep down in every human heart,
there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person
because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion.
People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be
taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than
its opposite'.
And there, comes the role of the State, the Law and Education which
overcomes the ignorance which causes prejudice which causes hate. It is
not ignorance of race, or sexual orientation or ethnic group but simply
that - Ignorance, to use the abstract nouns of Andrew Sullivan's.
If you want to define it further, it is ignorance of compassion,
ignorance of fairness, ultimately ignorance of love itself.
And it is here that society/the State/each one of us can contribute
to eradicate hate and prejudice: both individually by keeping our own
small corners clean, as a society by transcending hate (and in this I
agree with Andrew Sullivan) and ultimately as a State by imbuing the
values of tolerance, compassion and respect to the young.
--
JohnM (ever an optimist)
What people write on CVs #6
"Please disregard the attached resume -- it is terribly out of date."
Web site http://www.scroll.demon.co.uk/spaver.htm
South African travelogue http://www.scroll.demon.co.uk/za.htm
Matthew Malthouse
JohnM <jo...@scroll.demon.co.uk> wrote:
} Andrew Sullivan's point of view during his life is and has been
} conservative - with a small 'c' - and as such he leads to a conclusion
} that the state can do little to eradicate hate which is consistent with
} the standard conservative view that the state can and should do nothing
} regards an unbridled self-correcting free market.
Interestingly in "Virtually Normal" Sullivan reasons from the principal
that the state should not intervene in the private sector that a government
has no right to impose equal treatment for gays in the workforce _except_
in government emplyoment where it has a _duty_ to regulate against
discrimination.
My then lover was a serving officer in HM armed forces and Sullivan's
proposal would have had the curious effect of reversing the ban on gays
serving in the military but offered me, in the private sector, no recourse
if discriminated against fro my sexualtiy.
In conversation with him I questioned how permiting discrimination could be
morally acceptable. He didn'd argue a case, just said that it was "a tough
one to call".
He seems persuaded of his conservatism but decidedly uncomfortable when it
conflicts with his own interests on such issues.
Matthew
--
Ecce Eduardus Ursus scalis nunc tump-tump-tump occpite gradus pulsante...
http://www.calmeilles.demon.co.uk/index.html
Reeshar
> On Tue, 28 Sep 1999 09:15:40 BST, use...@calmeilles.demon.co.uk (Matthew
> Malthouse) wrote:
>
> >He reminds me of conservative friends who oppose almost every
> >measure for homosexual equality yet genuinely delight in the company of
> >their gay friends. It would be easier for me to think of them as haters,
> >and on paper, perhaps, there is a good case that they are. But in real
> >life, I know they are not. Some of them clearly harbor no real malice
> >toward me or other homosexuals whatsoever.
>
> nice ones that is
> rich ones that is
> .... educated and conservative ones that is.
>
> >They are as hard to figure out as those liberal friends who support every
> >gay rights measure they have ever heard of but do anything to avoid going
> >into a gay bar with me. I have to ask myself in the same, frustrating kind
> >of way: are they liberal bigots or bigoted liberals?
>
> this is a facile comparison
There's an interesting discussion at the mo on a poly list I'm on
about one of our hettie members' fear of going into gay bars. Those of
us who are of a gayer persuasion have been exploring quite what he's
so worried about. His main concern seems to be not knowing how to deal
with being chatted up.
Huh! He should be so lucky!
Have you noticed how str8 men think that by walking into a gay bar
they will become irresistably attractive to blokes? Back against the
wall, chaps, and hands over crutch?
Funny when you consider how difficult we all find it approaching
someone we quite like...
Richard
Reeshar
wrote:
> And it is here that society/the State/each one of us can contribute
> to eradicate hate and prejudice: both individually by keeping our own
> small corners clean, as a society by transcending hate (and in this I
> agree with Andrew Sullivan) and ultimately as a State by imbuing the
> values of tolerance, compassion and respect to the young.
I totally agree. :-)
Richard
valleyrider
JohnM <jo...@scroll.demon.co.uk> wrote
> hateful country'. I happen to believe in human beings and in the
> inherent goodness of Man,
the notion of "man" being the neutral, unmarked category and "Woman" some
kind of tack-on that is supposedly included.
Moz (Chris Moseley)
valleyrider <valle...@eudoramail.com> wrote
> If you mean humans, why not use that word, or humankind. It just re-iterates
> the notion of "man" being the neutral, unmarked category and "Woman" some
> kind of tack-on that is supposedly included.
What's almost is good is using them the other way round. "when I say women, of
course I mean to include men as well".
Moz
Tom Jordaan
> There's an interesting discussion at the mo on a poly list I'm on
> about one of our hettie members' fear of going into gay bars. Those of
> us who are of a gayer persuasion have been exploring quite what he's
> so worried about. His main concern seems to be not knowing how to deal
> with being chatted up.
You'd think he'd be intelligent enough to say, "Sorry, I'm straight,"
wouldn't you?
> Huh! He should be so lucky!
>
> Have you noticed how str8 men think that by walking into a gay bar
> they will become irresistably attractive to blokes? Back against the
> wall, chaps, and hands over crutch?
Then again, straights have been known to give off "you interested? I
am."
signals, even when they were just being friendly.
(I *thought* pulling someone male at a straight event - "GLAM on tour"
in
Brookes' main venue - was too much to hope for... music was great,
though...)
> Funny when you consider how difficult we all find it approaching
> someone we quite like...
He's probably quite glad I didn't try to kiss him on the dancefloor...
now *that* would have been amusing...
--
"You'd better stop - Hasukawa's eyes are about to pop right out."
www.phlebas.demon.co.uk for Banana Fish, Ultraviolet, This Life
JohnM
<valle...@eudoramail.com> writes
>
>JohnM <jo...@scroll.demon.co.uk> wrote
>> hateful country'. I happen to believe in human beings and in the
>> inherent goodness of Man,
>the notion of "man" being the neutral, unmarked category and "Woman" some
>kind of tack-on that is supposedly included.
Well, because I think humankind is a bit forced and did
not fit with the tone of my post. But if you insist, I will
go into pedantic mode and say that, but, of course, Woman
has always been inherently good! It's Man we are debating :-)
--
JohnM
What people write on CVs #7
"Work Experience: Dealing with customers' conflicts that arouse."
ps...@hotmail.com
Reeshar <cat...@freeuk.com> wrote in message
news:J5zzN4fvMUUTsR...@4ax.com...
> On Wed, 29 Sep 1999 15:48:05 BST, ne...@druidic.isles.net (MYM) wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 28 Sep 1999 09:15:40 BST, use...@calmeilles.demon.co.uk (Matthew
> > Malthouse) wrote:
> >
> > >measure for homosexual equality yet genuinely delight in the company of
> > >their gay friends. It would be easier for me to think of them as
haters,
> > >and on paper, perhaps, there is a good case that they are. But in real
> > >life, I know they are not. Some of them clearly harbor no real malice
> > >toward me or other homosexuals whatsoever.
> >
> > rich ones that is
> > .... educated and conservative ones that is.
> >
every
> > >gay rights measure they have ever heard of but do anything to avoid
going
> > >into a gay bar with me. I have to ask myself in the same, frustrating
kind
> > >of way: are they liberal bigots or bigoted liberals?
> >
>
> about one of our hettie members' fear of going into gay bars.
So, if he's so terrified why does he want to go into gay bars?
>Those of us who are of a gayer persuasion have been exploring quite what
he's
> so worried about. His main concern seems to be not knowing how to deal
> with being chatted up.
>
> Huh! He should be so lucky!
>
> Have you noticed how str8 men think that by walking into a gay bar
> they will become irresistably attractive to blokes? Back against the
> wall, chaps, and hands over crutch?
>
> Funny when you consider how difficult we all find it approaching
> someone we quite like...
>
Well, it seems to be the idea that all gay men will find any straight man
irresistable, just because he's a man. Stangely, it's usually those who have
been overlooked by nature who seem to be the most worried.
Paul
Reeshar
>
> Reeshar <cat...@freeuk.com> wrote in message
> news:J5zzN4fvMUUTsR...@4ax.com...
> >
> > There's an interesting discussion at the mo on a poly list I'm on
> > about one of our hettie members' fear of going into gay bars.
>
> So, if he's so terrified why does he want to go into gay bars?
More he gets *dragged* into them by female friends! ;-)
> > Funny when you consider how difficult we all find it approaching
> > someone we quite like...
> >
> Well, it seems to be the idea that all gay men will find any straight man
> irresistable, just because he's a man. Stangely, it's usually those who have
> been overlooked by nature who seem to be the most worried.
I know it's not a universal truth, but some of the str8 blokes who
seem most at ease about going into gay places are those who are most
comfortable with being str8 ie they're not remotely phased if a bloke
comes and chats them up - amused, maybe!
Richad