How to Overcome Homophobia

Don't be Afraid of Your Own Sexuality

In a world in which homophobia manifests as sickening violence and full-fledged sadism, any consideration of its latent source (let alone the following proposal from Canada) may seem beside the point on a good day.

To put it another way, if you're a victim of homophobia, you're probably less concerned with explanations for the phenomenon than freedom from it. Securing this freedom, however, is not simply a matter of avoiding homophobic hotspots or creating positive spaces, though these are necessary and courageous steps.

Homophobia, moreover, exceeds its reality as a spatial - i.e., political - problem. Paradoxically, the psychological dimension of this fear finds fertile ground in Pride parades and legislative processes to which lovers of political freedom (pun intended) owe so much.

Small LGBT Victories Not Enough

Synchronically, victories of LGBT identity politics, beyond affirming the dignity of non-heterosexual lifestyles, are real solutions to injustices such as unacknowledged visitation rights and discriminatory adoption policies; diachronically, they are at best bandaids whose temporary relief to superficial bleeding betrays the underlying hemorrhage.

Below the surface (plastered as it is in Canada with positive space stickers and inclusive posters of all kinds), homophobia still festers on our liberal campuses and moderate religious grounds, in our politically correct schools and community centres everywhere. The explanation is as simple as attacks on sexual freedom are palpable.

Homophobia has never been the fear of its primary targets, LGBT people, per se. It has always been the fear that nobody's sexual identity is absolute, that sexual reality escapes our desire to understand it totally, despite our best and worst efforts to satisfy with our minds this predominantly bodily phenomenon.

The Culture of Homophobia

Every political perspective, progressive and otherwise, tends to naturalize its claims. One reason is that Nature, since the separation of Church and State, has replaced God as the authority before whom we genuflect to gain public legitimacy for even our most private of eccentricities. So when, for example, opponents of same-sex marriage argue that its consummation is "unnatural," gay-rights activists naturally (but in fact culturally) retort that homosexuality is just as natural as heterosexuality and any suggestion to the contrary is "homophobic."

It is time that we recognize this presupposed reduction of sexual reality (nature) to sexual identity (culture/politics) for what it is: the latent source of real homophobia.

This is not at all to say that sexual orientation towards someone of the same sex is not natural, or that the myriad other forms of non-heterosexual identity - too often deemphasized in gay-rights debates - are merely lifestyle choices.

Neither does this recognition denigrate the sacrifices of past and present LGBT activists who have combated heterocentrism, whether unwittingly or pragmatically, on its own terms. It is to say that terms such as "heterosexual," "homosexual," "bisexual," and so forth, belong to the realm of culture; they are not the natural desires that they describe.

In short, to dispense with culture wherein fear makes us identify absolutely with a given term, to build a culture in which we can exchange terms to accommodate the unpredictability of sexual reality, is to secure the political landscape on which freedom is of the mind and body.

An Immodest Proposal

An effective strategy of LGBT campaigns has been to appropriate, and thereby diffuse, disempowering labels like "queer" and "fag." Today's label is "lifestyle choice," a thinly veiled code for "unnatural abomination." Let's affirm the very faculty that distinguishes us from other species: the ability to choose our self-descriptions from experience and not the other (undignified) way around!