Section 4: Homophobia

Humans vary in a myriad ways, and most of the time, the differences are not contentious. Some people are short, others tall. Some are pious, others not. Some like jazz, others prefer classical.

It can be argued that homosexuality is in a different class of issues, because it pertains to sex, and sex is a very basic and emotive aspect of our humanness. There is certainly some truth to that, but it still does not explain much. For humans also differ in many ways when it comes to their sex lives, and again most of these differences are non-contentious, or only moderately so. Some people are faithful to their partners, others not. Some don't venture beyond the missionary position, others love kinky role-plays. Some people choose spouses of the same race as themselves, others marry out of their race. Some people believe a divorce is a cleaner way out of an unhappy marriage, others think marriage should be for life.

But in terms of the venom in the debate, even to the extent of violence in some societies ("gay-bashing") and the use of the state's powers to criminalise a whole class of persons, few things sexual reach the same level of antipathy as homophobia.

Why is that so?

Given the limited space we have, we can only explore two possible explanations. The first is a thesis that homosexuality is perceived as subversive to male superiority. The second is drawn from the psychology of some heterosexual males.

Homosexuality subversive to male superiority

That homosexuality is seen as subversive to male superiority is pretty obvious, especially when one thinks in terms of the effeminate or cross-dressing males, even though cross-dressers are nowadays considered more as transgender than homosexual. However, as explained in Section 1, many societies historically saw homosexuality as virtually synonymous with effeminacy or cross-dressing.

The macho males saw the effeminate ones as traitors to their power status. They saw their behaviour as overturning proper gender roles, which called into question how artificial was the power position of macho males.

Across history and cultures, there seemed to be two broad responses to this threat.

Response: extinguish homosexuality

Firstly, some cultures tried to extinguish homosexual affection and effeminate behaviour. To the extent that religion grew out of codifying cultural practices, this response has come down to us as religious injunctions against "homosexuality" - never forgetting though that the "homosexuality" of then was quite different from what we now understand by "homosexuality". Examples of cultures that responded in this way to the threat of effeminate males include the Middle East civilizations, and the injunctions seen in Christianity, Judaism and Islam are the present-day consequences of that.

Response: segregate homosexuality

Secondly, some cultures segregated the effeminate males conceptually into a third sex, so that whatever these "wierdos" got up to would be considered irrelevant to masculinity, and therefore not undermine male superiority. This type of response can be seen across all the indigenous cultures of Southeast Asia, where effeminate males are tolerated and have a place in society, carefully distinguished from the masculine males. There is a rich vocabulary in Southeast Asian languages to describe this third sex: gathoey (Thai), bakla (Tagalog), achaut (Burmese), waria (Javanese), bapok or pondan (Malay).

In India, the third sex are called hijra, and they too have a role in social customs and sometimes in folk religions.

Traditionally, Chinese culture generally followed the second type of response. Female impersonators on the opera stage, boys-for-hire and palace eunuchs all had their place in society. At times, eunuchs, of which Admiral Zheng-he was one, achieved high positions in government, and female operatic impersonators had star value. Moreover, Chinese culture tended to define masculinity in familial and economic terms, as opposed to sex roles. It didn't matter much what one preferred in bed. So long as one was a good economic provider and sired a few sons (through the arranged marriage to a woman one never loved), all power to you! Male superiority was thus divorced from erotic preference.

Negotiable and non-negotiable homophobia

This explains why today many of the most extreme homophobic responses draw inspiration from the religions that originated from the Middle East. Non-Muslim and non-Christian Asians, even if traditional-minded, express their homophobia in milder, less apocalyptic terms. They tend to say, "keep it private, don't embarrass the family, be a filial son/daughter and a good provider." In other words, their kind of homophobia is negotiable. The religious kind of homophobia tends to be non-negotiable, expressed in terms of good and bad, right and wrong.

Homophobia as panic and revulsion

There is another, completely different approach to an understanding of homophobia. The clue to this lies in minute observations that each of us can make if we're observant enough.

A journalist in a local newspaper wrote to the writer recently about the hate mail she had seen:

"Judging from all the letters I've seen, the issue isn't so much about gay rights or even gay parades but the abhorrence of the homosexual act. Many repeatedly stressed that they had nothing against gay people nor their right to exist. They were just repulsed by the thought of two men together. Interestingly, like Peter Wong's example of two men kissing, it is always the idea of two men together that they object to, never two women.

"I don't know why men perceive this as alarming, maybe even threatening. Perhaps as a woman, I never will. My husband is no help, he doesn't feel alarmed and can't explain why other men react so. Which is very curious as most of these men probably would have no objection to two women getting it on together. After all, lesbian acts are a big part of straight porn."

Indeed, lesbian acts figure strongly in many heterosexual men's fantasies.

The Henry Adams study

In 1996, Henry Adams and his research collaborators announced some stunning results from their study of 64 heterosexual men. In their study, they first assessed each subject through a questionnaire to determine their attitudes to homosexuality. Based on this questionnaire, they divided the group into the homophobic (35 men) and non-homophobic (29 men).

These men were then shown pornographic films while wearing penile gauges.

They were shown lesbian porn, to check that they were heterosexual. Researchers have long known that a positive response to lesbian porn is one of the most reliable indicators for separating heterosexual men from homosexual men.

Then the participants were shown male-female porn and male-male porn. Of the 29 men in the non-homophobic group. 34% experienced moderate to significant penile erection while watching homosexual porn. Of the 35 men in the homophobic group, 80% experienced moderate to significant penile erection watching the same homosexual porn.

That's right. Two-thirds of non-homophobic men had no reaction to watching male-male sex. By contrast, four-fifths of homophobic men were aroused by male-male-sex, even though attitudinally, they had disapproved of it.

Homophobia as repressed homosexual inclinations

Although it is not conclusive -- and the researchers were careful to state that other explanations may be possible - the explanation that the results point to is that homophobia may be a redirection of repressed homosexual desires. It seems to support the hypothesis made half a century ago by Alfred Kinsey that the male population in their natural state may actually contain a large number of bisexually-oriented people. Perhaps only a minority of males are exclusively heterosexual. Many of these bisexually-oriented males are then acculturated by our culture to abjure their homosexual side. This deeply-buried denial then manifests as a fear of and antipathy to, homosexuality in others.

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Appreciation and closing

This long essay was commissioned by a teacher for the General Paper class in Victoria Junior College. The writer wishes to thank him for this opportunity.

Although, prima facie, the discussion is about homosexuality, in fact, it is about knowledge, awareness and understanding in general. The writer hopes to have shown how fascinating is the quest for knowledge. It leads us from one discipline to another - biology, psychology, history, cultural anthropology, even politics. We must be careful about definitions, especially as these evolve through time and space. How we think of something, in this case, "homosexuality", was not how historical cultures thought of it, and may not be how contemporaneous societies in a culture different from ours, see it. We must be prepared to interrogate the sources and if called for, to take their findings as tentative. Too often, people interrogate the science, but not the cultural or scriptural bases (or biases), which they take as either infallible or unchanging (a constant). They are neither. Even more mind-blowing, we need to interrogate our own subjectivity. Each of us is different. We are biologically unique, our brains are hard-wired differently, and our patterns of thought individualised by our life experiences. Never assume that other people think like us, feel like us, are clones of us. We're all different, and yet we have to make a better world together.

Section 1: Orientation or lifestyle?
Section 2: The science to date
Section 3: Norms, censorship and history
Section 4: Homophobia