Anti-Gay Double Standard

March 2005

To judge by newspaper and television reports, sexual molestation of our youth is one of our culture’s most pressing concerns. Everywhere you look, you find stories about allegedly overly-amorous priests, coaches, and pop-culture icons. Newspapers devote entire sections to where clerical hands may have wandered decades ago, and the current Michael Jackson case will generate yet more fodder for society’s seemingly insatiable appetite for “news” about the corruption of our youth.

Why this consuming fascination?

Of course, the “protection of children”– from sex or drugs or godless communism– has always been a potent political rallying cry. Some of the perceived increased sexual threat to children and adolescents stems from the prevailing reactionary spirit of the times. But much of the animus for the current mania comes from plain, old-fashioned anti-gay bigotry. Actions that would never be considered criminal if hetero are trumpeted as monstrous evil when homo.

In February, 2002, for example, the Boston Globe ran over three dozen articles about the trial and conviction of Father John Geoghan. Though the accounts were larded with phrases like “child abuse” and “sexual predation,” Geoghan was charged with and convicted of only one offense: touching a boy’s butt at a public swimming pool. For this “crime,” Geoghan was sentenced to a decade in prison, a prison where Geoghan was– with tragic predictability– murdered within months.

That same February, the primetime television show “Malcolm in the Middle” (about suburban parents raising four rambunctious boys) featured an episode in which 15-year-old Reese is corralled by his mom to serve as a dance partner for elderly ladies at the nearby retirement home. Though initially miffed at his new chore, Reese discovers that the old ladies are willing to pay for his attention, and he is soon dancing with financially-induced good humor. The plot twists when younger brother Dewey surreptitiously videotapes Reese’s dancing, planning to blackmail him with threats to show classmates his lovey-dovey antics with the geriatric set. Included on Dewey’s tape is a slow dance wherein one granny enthusiastically gropes Reese’s underage buns.

You will not find one mention of this “child abuse” and “sexual predation” in the Boston Globe’s news or television coverage from that month. That’s because at the Globe, and virtually every other news source in the country, there exists an unstated, unexamined anti-gay bias: exposing “underage” boys to homosex is invariably horrific, but exposing the same boys to heterosex is no big deal, or even a cute introduction to their emerging (presumed hetero-) sexuality. Imagine the uproar had Reese been groped by a randy grandpa!

This bias does not require a generational difference between partners. Television, newspapers, and other pop culture outlets consider teen boys looking for heterosex from teen girls (or even from adult women) as routine; but should those same teen boys be discovered getting it on with each other (or, heaven forfend, an adult man), we will hear about “perpetrators” and “cycles of abuse.” Indeed, some states exempt teenage heterosex from Draconian child rape laws reserved exclusively for teens engaged in homosex; the punishment for a teenager blowing an underage male depends on the gender of the person doing the sucking.

Explosively irrational response accompanies any frank discussion of adolescent homosexuality. Thus, it is perhaps understandable that many gay groups ostensibly dedicated to fair and equitable treatment for homosexuals remain silent, even in the face of such blatent anti-gay bigotry. But until we liberate society from the notion that homosexuality is an evil taint– perhaps to be endured in adults, but from which children must at all costs be protected– we clearly have more work to do.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=B9E5CD90-0CF0-450D-8C945F531E210577>