Gay Bashing
Garvey, John
T he murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming brought back a sharp and sad memory. When I was about to go to college, a friend of the family gave me a gift--a book of Rilke's poems--and...
...I don't think that's always the case, though...
...At the same time, space is made for these acts by the discomfort we feel for the different, for the people who make some of us uncomfortable...
...I am not sure what anyone can do about this, but the churches have sent mixed messages...
...I d i d n ' t understand it, and I had been the object of a couple of homosexual passes, one from a priest in the high school I attended...
...If the only form of sexual activity we can bless is monogamous heterosexual marriage, we must still make some distinctions...
...At the same time, I have heard people I respect say that they are troubled by homosexuality because of its otherness, because they can't identify with it, because they can't imagine themselves there...
...What this has in common with any murder based on racial grounds, or because someone belongs to a despised religion, is scorn, and the belief that some people are fair game solely because of who they are, or how they are perceived, and because there is a certain sort of person who enjoys causing pain as long as there will be no penalty for it...
...I remembered feeling sick...
...Think of the masked murders in Northern Ireland and in Rwanda...
...By associating it with fear or some other irrational emotional reaction, we dignify it...
...I did feel, in an oblique sort of way, harmed by someone willing to beat people, someone willing to be violent because...
...When I was about to go to college, a friend of the family gave me a gift--a book of Rilke's poems--and I appreciated it deeply...
...People who oppose homosexual marriage are unfairly put in the same corral with Shepard's murderers, on the one hand, and on the other, anyone who tries to suggest that many of society's attitudes and fears about homosexuality are exaggerated and even dangerous are called enemies of the family...
...There may be simply evil acts, enjoyed because they can be done with no risk...
...Evil is about making everything nothing...
...This was a man I had liked, and now I knew he could never be my friend, and I could never again respect him...
...I understand that some people, ambivalent about their own sexual identity, feel so threatened by homosexuality that they react violently...
...He had always impressed me as being one of our family's more interesting friends, which, when you are at the late adolescent stage, is to say that he shared some of my interests...
...It is distressing, though probably not surprising, that sex is a more compelling interest for religious people than compassion...
...He was telling me what a good time I would have in college...
...Our culture, at every level, has done a lot to mess us up in almost every conceivable way, where sexuality is concerned, and being clear about any of this will have to involve a lot more than hate legislation...
...One night I was at a party at his house, and he was in a confiding mood...
...We should resist a culture (gay or straight) which allows us to define the totality of another person in terms of sexual orientation...
...In one sense, the murder of Matthew Shepard is like the death of the homeless men who have been set on fire by kids who thought they could get away with it...
...Commonweal 8 November20,1998...
...I think he knew he could get away with this...
...Then, at a signal, they would rise, beat up the homosexuals, and leave...
...I found it harder to understand than homosexuality, which, though it made me uncomfortable, didn't harm me...
...Because why...
...The scorn, the cruelty, the willingness to beat up homosexuals distressed me...
...I didn't know, then, that one of my best friends was gay...
...It may have been caused by the murderer's own sexual ambivalence, but it could also have come from the enjoyment of, the delight in, contempt...
...With regard to homosexuality, there is now a crude either/or which no one addresses very well...
...I don't think he felt threatened...
...He made himself an alien...
...But our discomfort should not be the standard we use in approaching our many complicated heterosexual and homosexual fellow Christians...
...But, that wasn't the point...
...Homosexuality, and people I knew at that time to be homosexual, made me uncomfortable...
...You can get away with it, given what's in the air...
...And that it might be helpful to suggest its possibility...
...In the case of our family friend it had to do with a sanctioning of cruelty which would never otherwise be accepted, a cruelty he enjoyed...
...The church should be humble about what it can and can't say here...
...It is the murder of someone considered not to be like us, someone we make to be not like us by showing them the ultimate contempt, by trying to make them not be at all...
...Shouldn't we bring compassion to all of this, even as we say that sexual asceticism (meaning the possibility of celibacy, as difficult as that idea is) may be demanded of some of those who make up the church...
...To act as if a gay married couple living together faithfully for twenty years were no different from someone involved in a promiscuous bathhouse scene or, for that matter, to think of a promiscuous heterosexual as somehow healthier than a faithful homosexual--is really perverse...
...I had the same odd feelings about homosexuality most straight kids do...
...I would put in a word for divorce as the family's greatest enemy, but too many politicians who are at risk in that area prefer to target gays...
...Many churchgoers are more tolerant of young unmarried heterosexuals (unmarried often because of the broken marriages they have lived through) who live together than they are of gay couples under any circumstances...
...He talked, laughing at the memory, about how he and his friends would go to a bar, "a fairy hangout," he called it, and allow the homosexual patrons to buy them drinks...
Vol. 125 • November 1998 • No. 20
