I’ve always felt the way society treats gay men is different to how it treats gay women.
Both are uniquely homophobic.
Women are seen as innocently gay; it’s just a phase, or childhood crush, they’ll grow out of it, it’s nothing, she’s just being silly.
Homophobia intersects with misogyny, that women are weak and their feelings of love for fellow women are consequently trivialised.
We don’t see this for gay men, who are guilty of being gay. It’s not a phase for them. It’s an ‘abomination’, for which he will be persecuted.
Here we see the all-too-familiar label of male guilt, male inhumanity and male danger, intersecting with and becoming part of male homophobia.
We see this unique set of experiences in the history books too (despite nobody wanting to point it out), because it was British *men* who were criminalised for being gay, not women.
The same was true with the Nazis too.
The irony that much of this anti-male bigotry is spat from the mouths of those who with their next breath vow to protect gay men is not lost on me.
“Men are dangerous”, “animals”, “villains” and the rest – to see how the normalised hating of men does its most horrifying damage, you only need to look at how it impacts those most vulnerable, such as gay men (and the same can be said for the vilification of Black men too.)
So is it time we saw men and women’s experience of homophobia as more different than we once thought?
Is it time we explored intersectionality for men?
~
Criminal Law Ammendment Act https://tinyurl.com/2s3cpu2e
Gay men persecuted UK https://tinyurl.com/2p93fkfd
Gay men persecuted Nazi Germany https://tinyurl.com/bdftza4c
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum https://tinyurl.com/6cychz3n
Gay men less accepted https://tinyurl.com/2p93jkyw