LIFE
Strong Gay Men
Where do they come from?
There’s been talk and controversy about Douglas Murray having written a book somewhere between disrespectful and dismissive of LGBTQ people, among other groups. The book is The Madness of Crowds, appropriately named for the range of people he puts in his sites.
Murray is a gay man himself, so why does he shoot arrows at “his own people?” For one thing, it isn’t at all unheard of for gay men to act antagonistically to gay life, but it usually happens before they’re willing to admit their own truth. If they feel safer inside their closet, then denigrating gay people and gay lifestyles is like putting a padlock and “no faggots here” sign on that closet door. Closeted politicians are the worst offenders.
Actually, Murray’s book is an equal opportunity discourse on all manner of identities. Besides gays, he’s also down on racial, feminine, and especially trans identities. And God help you, if you’re an intersectional mixture of more than one of these.
But Murray doesn’t hide his own sexual orientation, though he is not especially forthcoming on details of how he expresses it. He’s private, so okay. He just doesn’t give any evidence of taking any pride in being gay. He seems to be accepting of what he is, but ambivalent or unconcerned about why he is or what the social implications of being gay are for others. He is distancing himself from the madness of this particular crowd.
His motives for dismissing identity based grouping (other than white, educated, conservative men) rely on a distinction he makes between the human right of gay people to be gay and the fatuousness of the idea of gay as a valid identity, as something you might take pride in or base your politics around. He writes for instance: “being gay is an unstable component on which to base an individual identity and a hideously unstable way to try and base any form of group identity.” Hideously, really? Not motivated or legitimate in any way? It’s like he doesn’t know any other gay men.
This is offensive, not so much because he’s dismissive about the admittedly messy and complex dynamics of gay identity, but because he’s purposely ignorant of the need for that identity.
Gay people do have to contend with bigotry lodged firmly in American and British societies, not to mention the threats, intimidation, and violence they’re subjected to in many countries around the world. How exactly do you fight these alienating and hateful attitudes alone? Don’t you need an identity and a group structure to protect yourself better from hate and from physical and psychological violence? Safety in numbers kind of thing.
Murray thinks gay people have won their human rights battle. We’ve got gay marriage and gay parenting and gay politicians and gay entertainers, so now it’s just carping to continue to ask for more. He asks if gay people think they’re better than straight people now and the lobbying we do is for some kind of reparations, payback for all the fire we’ve had to walk through. But he neglects to mention that the things straight people can take for granted, like holding hands on the street, are things a gay couple will still get clobbered for. Just think of the icks and eews that two men kissing provokes in so many straight men.
Hilary Mantel in her memoir says that “if you’re weak, it’s childish to pretend to be strong.” I admit personally to being neither weak nor strong. I see myself as somewhere in the middle. I’m well aware, though, that some people, friends even, think of me as one or the other. I’m still weak because I do not hold hands with my partner in public, except at gay pride events. There my identity as a gay man and my affirmation of membership in the LGBTG world is safe. I like feeling safe, but I would also like to feel safe in other contexts as well.
I’d prefer to see myself as gay and strong, but I’m not there yet and running out of time. I don’t yet have enough faith in a strong, out me. But on the plus side, this dithering about who is the essential me gives me some discernment over those who are actually strong versus those who are not at all.
I don’t brew all gay people the same tea I drink, meaning I’m willing to give credit and support to those who do the heavy lifting. But Douglas Murray gets my weak, caffeine-free, generic teabag tea to match the weakness I see in him.
He wraps himself in his British aristocratic traditions of good breeding and sophistication from which he casts a critical eye on those whose lesser attributes don’t come with the protections he’s afforded in his exclusive clubs. A little hypocritical, I’d say, to be condemning marginalized people for the groupings they prefer, when he’s stickily embedded in his more exclusive silo, making no provision for those with lesser talent and privilege.
So that’s a pretty strong statement on my part. Maybe I do have what it takes to hold hands with my partner in public. Some day.
I think about what forces made me so tentative today, but I can only speculate. In my case I think it has to do precisely with having been born gay in 1943. That was a war year, even though I have no memories of it. It was when men, real men, men who didn’t dither, went into battle, got injured, and died in Europe and the South Pacific. It was also when the mother who was carrying me was doing it while her husband was in the Army. A stressful pregnancy in stressful times.
It didn’t matter whose side they were fighting on, the results were the same for many of those who made it back home. Not always pretty. Many brought back the memories of the inhumanity war inflicted on them, as well as what they had inflicted on others. Those memories manifested in PTSD and an inability to talk about their wartime experience.
They may have left for war as seemingly strong men, but it’s likely they were just on their way to becoming strong. In any event many came back weakened. It was important for those who received them back and had to nurse them and share their pain to try and restore them to the strong men they thought they once were.
So here comes the speculative part. The belief that you could remake and heal what had been damaged got generalized to those just coming along, the baby boomers. We could be molded to be strong too. As it became evident as the years passed that some of us were failing to become strong boys and men of the classical off-to-war sort, we got looked on as damaged or deficient. Parents and society in general had clear feelings (also highly speculative and suspect) that gay people fell on some spectrum from odd to diseased to disgusting. You sensed it from your parents, your peers, your teachers, your priests, your government, your police, your courts, your psychiatrists. That is one whole lot of shit to try and dig your way out of.
You survive it all by orienting to a manageable position, somewhere between rejecting and affirming yourself. I think most gay men of my generation scooted toward the middle and tried to live a double life, between one you didn’t want to live and one which was dangerous to live.
I get annoyed at those who say being gay is a choice. Even Murray recognizes the falsity of that statement, though he seems to wish it were so. He wonders how we actually know for sure that it’s not a choice? There are one or two cases he cites as possible counter examples. But generalizing from his couple of anecdotes, he asks how can we be so sure that someone in all honesty cannot become straight just by force of will, by convincing themselves that they can? Praise be Jesus, right? But the statistics of wrecked and scarred lives of those who were coerced into converting made even the psychiatric profession later reject the idea that conversion was a legitimate therapy. So statistics or anecdotes? Let’s put to bed the notion, please, that gay men are not God-given the way we are.
The younger generation of gay boys and men are coming along in a different atmosphere than the boys of my generation. What’s different for them is that they can, if they choose, embrace their identity and find supports in their community to affirm it. There is no madness in that identity, in the way that Murray sees it. There’s compassion and nurturing.
Out of identity comes self-love and better people. It’s hard to achieve that when you feel yourself on a raft in the middle of the ocean alone with the sharks circling.
Murray’s book generated a more in depth review in the Guardian by William Davies. He called the book a rightwing diatribe. I recommend the review more than the book.
