A Guide For the Naïve Homosexual
page 29
Gays As a Minority Group


Again it is not the transvestite who is sick, it is our society. It was once said that the Puritans left England for America not because they were persecuted for their religious beliefs, but that they were prevented from persecuting others. This attitude that you are morally justified in persecuting those people who are not exact carbon copies of yourself, grew up with North America.

My old English teacher (whom I tease to this day about the portrait is his basement) wrote me a letter after I told him I was gay. He ended it with Fritz Perls’ prayer for Gestalt therapy:

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.

I would ask that you take that for a credo and think about it the next time you get the urge to denounce transvestites, sadists, butch lesbians or effeminate gays.

Gays As a Minority Group

If we really are the harmless people I have made us out to be in the previous part of this essay, then why are we so violently hated by some straights?

Perhaps they are afraid homosexuals will convert heterosexuals and thus put an end to the reproduction of the human race. This is absurd for two reasons:

  1. We don’t need or even want to convert straights for we are not starved for sex partners.
  2. Heterosexuality is a durable biological urge that has nothing to fear from other forms of sexual response. In fact a society which represses other forms of sexual response creates the anxieties which threaten the enjoyment of heterosexual love.

Or perhaps it is because people tend to see their own faults most easily in others. People who try to hide and suppress their gay longings (remember 60% of all males have such feelings at some time during post-adolescence) become bitterly and irrationally anti-homosexual. You, my poor fellow gay, are the scapegoat for their self-hatred. We are the only group left who will allow ourselves to be used as scapegoats. We are the only minority group left about whom it is socially chic to make public jest.

You might be surprised to hear me speak of homosexuals as an oppressed minority group, as I might speak of the American Negro, hut here is my train of reasoning. We are ridiculed and caricatured as limp-wristed lisping faggots who work as hairdressers, arrange flowers as a hubby, read romantic poetry and are active in the women’s liberation movement. The American Negro was similarly caricatured as a lazy and sex-crazed version of ’Lil Abner. We are called pejorative nouns like queer, dyke, faggot, homo or fairy. Even the word gay has nasty connotations in the straight world. The Negro was called disparaging names like nigger and darky. Furthermore, high school students are shown, anti-gay films depicting us as degenerates. How is a young gay boy (much less a straight one in the normal homosexual phase) going to feel? He has enough needless guilt already without the schools piling on more.) Similarly American school children were taught that Negroes were inferior as well as dangerous. Many learned papers are written on the sickness of homosexuality. Have a look at the scientific studies that were gone to prove the Negro was inherently inferior to the white. The Negro actually believed these studies until recently.

Why have we believed similar nonsense? Why have we not risen up as well? A Negro cannot hide the fact he is black. He personally east face the discrimination and abuse heaped upon his race. But the homosexual can easily hide the fact that he is homosexual; he simply does not tell anyone he is gay. If every homosexual in the world woke up one morning to find his right hand had turned green, then we might get some action. As it is, the average homosexual avoids the abuse in a cowardly way allowing all the shit to be dumped on those unfortunate effeminate homosexuals who cannot hide.

Better Latent Than Never

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