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Category Archives: Homophobia
Longest-Running Study of Same-Sex Parented Families – in This Case, Planned Lesbian Families – Yields Very Interesting Results
The study, which was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, appears to debunk the myth so often promulgated by opponents of marriage equality that lesbian and gay parents are more likely to abuse their children sexually. Not a single child in the study reported being physically or sexually abused by one or both of their lesbian parents or, for that matter, any other caregiver.
The review of the literature that the authors conduct in the introduction to the article is fascinating and, for me at least, being as unfamiliar as I am with this field, a little overwhelming. Here, though, is the abstract:
This study assessed Kinsey self-ratings and life– time sexual experiences of 17-year-olds whose lesbian mothers enrolled before these offspring were born in the longest-running, prospective study of same-sex parented families, with a 93% retention rate to date. Data for the current report were gathered through online questionnaires completed by 78 adolescent offspring (39 girls and 39 boys). The adolescents were asked if they had ever been abused and, if so, to specify by whom and the type of abuse (verbal, emotional, physical, or sexual). They were also asked to specify their sexual identity on the Kinsey scale, between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual. Lifetime sexual behavior was assessed through questions about heterosexual and same-sex contact, age of first sexual experience, contraception use, and pregnancy. The results revealed that there were no reports of physical or sexual victimization by a parent or other caregiver. Regarding sexual orientation, 18.9% of the adolescent girls and 2.7% of the adolescent boys self-rated in the bisexual spectrum, and 0% of girls and 5.4% of boys self-rated as predominantly-to-exclusively homosexual. When compared with age-and gender-matched adolescents of the National Survey of Family Growth, the study off-spring were significantly older at the time of their first heterosexual contact, and the daughters of lesbian mothers were significantly more likely to have had same-sex contact. These findings suggest that adolescents reared in lesbian families are less likely than their peers to be victimized by a parent or other caregiver, and that daughters of lesbian mothers are more likely to engage in same-sex behavior and to identify as bisexual.
That summary of the findings in the last sentence is deceptive in its straightforwardness, not because the findings are not straightforward, but because any discussion that takes place about them is likely to be very complex. Here, for example, is one of the possible explanations the authors offered for the findings related to sexual abuse:
One possible explanation…might be that most of the adolescents [in this study] grew up in households in which no adult males resided. Since the sexual abuse of children that occurs within the home is largely perpetrated by adult heterosexual males…growing up in lesbian-headed households may protect children and adolescents from these types of assault. (My emphasis)
The authors follow this, of course, with the entirely necessary caveat that theirs is the first study to attempt to measure such things and so “it will be interesting to see whether future studies of same-sex parented families yield similar results.” Still, these results do throw into stark relief the fact that male heterosexuality is implicated in most cases of the child sexual abuse that takes place in a child’s home. The questions that arise from that fact are difficult to ask and perhaps even more difficult to answer – and, I will add, should not be used to obscure the fact that children are also sexually abused by women – but they are questions that need to be explored and perhaps the results of studies like this one, assuming they are corroborated over time, will provide the kind of contrasting perspective that will bring greater clarity, if not greater ease, to that exploration.
FCKH8
OKCupid Mines Its Own Data to Compare Gays and Straights & An Erotic Music Video (Definitely NSFW) I Wanted To Like a Lot More Than I Did
Browsing this morning through Google Reader as a way of procrastinating – I have some mundane but important work I need to finish today and I just don’t want to do it – I found two posts from Violet Blue that intrigued me. One pointed towards dating-site OkCupid’s blog, OkTrends, and what it learned from mining the data it has collected from gay and straight members who have come to the site looking to meet people. Like Violet Blue, I found the “Gay Curious” map perhaps the most interesting piece in the post, and I will let it speak for itself:
The other thing Violet Blue pointed me towards is an explicit erotic music video by the group The Good The Bad, whose music, now that I’ve listened to a bit of it, I like a lot, especially the fact that it is all instrumental. The video, however, which starts out as compellingly sexy, devolves into cliché when a porn-star-orgasmic-voice-over intrudes into what might have been a really interesting exploration – to the degree one could do this in a music video – of the woman’s relationship to music and to the guitar as her instrument. Here it is so you can decide for yourselves:
‘030’ by The Good The Bad (UNCUT) from 030 on Vimeo.
Church in Florida to Host “International Burn the Quran Day” to Commemorate the September 11 Attacks
The poet Kazim Ali posted this to his Facebook page, saying that he thought it “had to be a myth,” and that is what it sounds like at first, but the Dove World Outreach Center is indeed inviting people to burn a Quran on September 11, 2010. It’s easy to dismiss this as quackery, as not worth giving the attention that it got through CNN’s coverage, but the truth is that if we don’t pay attention to it, if we don’t call it out for what it is – and it’s gratifying to see that the Facebook page protesting the event has close to twice as many fans as the Facebook page announcing the event – it will spread. More than that, though, it will become – it already has become, actually, and this is kind of frightening – part of the way perceptions of Islam are framed by our national rhetoric. Here’s the video:
Rick Sanchez, I think, proves himself to be a particularly inept interviewer here – I don’t watch him, so I don’t know if he’s usually better than this – but one of the things that disturbs me about the way he tries to respond to Terry Jones, Dove World Outreach’s pastor, is his but-there–are–moderate-muslims-out-there tone, as if those “moderate Muslims” – and more about that phrase in a moment – are somehow the exception to the rule. Or as if they are, you know, out there, but really well hidden, and so you have to know the secret code or something to get them to reveal themselves. Equally troubling to me, though, is the way the phrase “moderate Muslims” has taken on the same descriptive weight and authority as, say, Orthodox Jew or Evangelical Christian, as if “moderate” were somehow actually a sect of Islam. Well-meaning as it may be, the phrase actually contributes to rather than deconstructs the way in which Islam is being defined as a profoundly hostile theologically-informed, we-want-to-rule-the-world political stance towards the West, broadly speaking, and the United States in particular, rather than as a religion. This is to me – and I’d be interested to hear what other people think of this – very similar to the way in which the antisemitic rhetoric of Europe framed Judaism from the 18th century, and certainly the 19th century on, and it is certainly one of the underlying assumptions – i.e., that the Jews want to rule the world – of the “World Zionist Conspiracy” theories.
It’s also worth noting that Jones and his group also declared August 2 “No Homo Mayor” day, a day to protest Gainesville’s openly gay mayor. Both groups – Muslims and homosexuals – are godless according to Jones, a logic similar to the one that created the association between being Jewish and homosexuality, to mention being communist, Jewish and homosexual, that was an important point of antisemitic rhetoric in this country during 50s, 60s and even 70s.
It’s easy to dismiss Terry Jones and his church as a bunch of nuts, especially when his arguments for why Islam is a devil’s religion, as quoted in the text accompanying the Rick Sanchez video, include doozies like this:
“I mean ask yourself, have you ever really seen a really happy Muslim? As they’re on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real religion of joy?” Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.
“No, to me it looks like a religion of the devil.”
The problem is that Jones and company are only giving expression to the logical conclusion of what an awful lot of people in the United State., consciously or not, already believe. The term Islamophobia may be relatively new, but the (often racialized and racializing) hatred of Muslims has a long history in this country – and that is something I will perhaps write about in another post – a history that predates the September 11th attacks not by decades, but by centuries, and its assumptions, its images, its rhetoric is/has been as much a part of our culture as the assumptions, images, rhetoric of, say, racism.
I am not an alarmist, though I do think there is a comparison to be made between the way in which antisemitic rhetoric was deployed so as to make the Nazi’s campaign against the Jews and the way Islamophobic rhetoric has been more and more making its way into our public discourse. Indeed, I think this comparison would probably work with the rhetoric of any genocidal campaign, though I do not think and I am not implying that this is the beginning of some kind of anti-Muslim government action. Rather, I think, plain and simple, that those comparisons should make clear to us how imperative it is not to let the actions and the rhetoric of people like Terry Jones go unanswered.
Constructions of masculinities in Islamic traditions, societies and cultures, with a specific focus on India and Pakistan between the 18th and the 21st century
This is the title of a PhD thesis written by Dr. Amanullah De Sondy, who has just accepted a position at Ithaca College. According to Joan McAlpine, who profiled Dr. De Sondy for The Sunday Times, several leading publishers are competing to buy the thesis and publish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should consider the title she suggested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very interested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:
It challenges assumptions about what it means to be a Muslim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patriarch with several wives and dozens of children. There are dysfunctional families in Islamic tradition, he says, prophets without father figures and revered holy men who led “effeminate” lifestyles. Most controversially, he challenges homophobia in Islam. “Homosexuality is not incompatible with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The important thing is to link it with living a good life and creating a good society.”
Later in the article, De Sondy is quoted as saying:
“In the 16th-century Punjab, there lived a Sufi saint and poet called Shah Hussain who is greatly venerated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pilgrims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore district even today, but some people want to rewrite history, saying the boy was in fact a girl.”
He also points to the presence of “antinomian Sufis in the Indian subcontinent — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.
In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the conservatives who disagree with him use – that of God’s decision to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhabitants – he says the story “is really about [God’s] disapproval of the rape of young boys that was happening in the place,” which is very different from saying that God disapproves of homosexuality.
I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the complexities of what Islam has to say about homosexuality, but I do know that scholarship like this, which at the very least highlights the degree to which ideas about masculinity, manhood and male sexuality are contested ideological territory, showing that the traditional view is only one of the possibilities that exist, is very, very important.
Two Articles, One About Abortion and One About Women, Gender, Sexuality and Medicine
First, from The New York Times, The New Abortion Providers:
[After Roe vs. Wade,] the clinics also truly came to stand alone. In 1973, hospitals made up 80 percent of the country’s abortion facilities. By 1981, however, clinics outnumbered hospitals, and 15 years later, 90 percent of the abortions in the U.S. were performed at clinics. The American Medical Association did not maintain standards of care for the procedure. Hospitals didn’t shelter them in their wings. Being a pro-choice doctor came to mean referring your patients to a clinic rather than doing abortions in your own office.
This was never the feminist plan. “The clinics’ founders didn’t intend them to become virtually the only settings for abortion services in many communities,” says Carole Joffe, a sociologist and author of a history of the era, “Doctors of Conscience,” and a new book, “Dispatches From the Abortion Wars.” When the clinics became the only place in town to have an abortion, they became an easy mark for extremists. As Joffe told me, “The violence was possible because the relationship of medicine to abortion was already tenuous.” The medical profession reinforced the outsider status of the clinics by not speaking out strongly after the first attacks. As abortion moved to the margins of medical practice, it also disappeared from residency programs that produced new doctors. In 1995, the number of OB-GYN residencies offering abortion training fell to a low of 12 percent.
“Under pressure and stigma, more doctors shun abortion,” wrote David Grimes, a leading researcher and abortion provider of 38 years, in a widely cited 1992 medical journal article called “Clinicians Who Provide Abortions: The Thinning Ranks.” In a 1992 survey of OB-GYNs, 59 percent of those age 65 and older said that they performed abortions, compared with 28 percent of those age 50 and younger. The National Abortion Federation started warning about “the graying of the abortion provider.” In the decade after Roe, the number of sites providing abortion across the country almost doubled from about 1,500 to more than 2,900, according to the Guttmacher Institute. But by 2000 the number shrank back to about 1,800 — a decline of 37 percent from 1982.
There’s another side of the story, however — a deliberate and concerted counteroffensive that has gone largely unremarked. Over the last decade, abortion-rights advocates have quietly worked to reverse the marginalization encouraged by activists like Randall Terry. Abortion-rights proponents are fighting back on precisely the same turf that Terry demarcated: the place of abortion within mainstream medicine. This abortion-rights campaign, led by physicians themselves, is trying to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link of abortion to a strong one. Its leaders have built residency programs and fellowships at university hospitals, with the hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.
Second, from Newsweek.com, The Anti-Lesbian Drug:
Genetic engineers, move over: the latest scheme for creating children to a parent’s specifications requires no DNA tinkering, but merely giving mom a steroid while she’s pregnant, and presto — no chance that her daughters will be lesbians or (worse?) ‘uppity.’
Or so one might guess from the storm brewing over the prenatal use of that steroid, called dexamethasone. In February, bioethicist Alice Dreger of Northwestern University and two colleagues blew the whistle on the controversial practice of giving pregnant women dexamethasone to keep the female fetuses they are carrying from developing ambiguous genitalia. (That can happen to girls who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic disorder in which unusually high prenatal exposure to masculinizing hormones called androgens can cause girls to develop a deep voice, facial hair, and masculine-looking genitalia.) The response Dreger got from physicians and scientists who were outraged over this unapproved use of dexamethasone caused her to dig deeper into the scientific papers of the researcher who has promoted it.
Dreger is one of the women who brought the clitoral surgeries performed by Dr. Dix Poppas to light.
Fragments of Evolving Manhood: The Violence In Me 1
Serious domestic/intimate partner violence trigger warning in the first few paragraphs of this post.
Sitting on my bed with her back against the wall, my lover — who’s come to visit during my first year of graduate school — tells me that she’s at last made her decision: she’s going to study fine art. I should be happy for her, but I’m suddenly listening from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leaving her mouth no longer coalesce into meaningful units. There is a moment of blankness, and then, as if someone else has taken control of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself getting up from the chair where I’ve been sitting, putting one hand around my lover’s throat, holding her against the wall, and slapping her face back and forth with my other hand until she is senseless and bloody. I see myself screaming in her ear, letting her drop to the floor, and kicking her in the stomach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.
Unaware that I’ve stopped hearing what she has to say, my lover continues talking, gesturing to emphasize the importance of her words, imploring me with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the violence in my mind begins again. Realizing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bathroom. Locking the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. I wait till I feel certain the vision will not return, and I flush the toilet and go back to the bedroom where, thankfully, my lover notices it’s time for me to go to class. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, knowing that I need some time alone to sort out what has just happened, tell her I have work to do in the library and therefore won’t be back until just before we’re supposed to go out for dinner.
The afternoon sun is warm on my face, and so I decide to walk to class instead of taking the bus. After a couple of blocks, however, again from out of nowhere, I see once more the images of myself doing violence to the woman I love, and again it is as if some outside force has taken control of my brain and forced me to watch. Nearly paralyzed with fear and guilt, I find a bench and sit down. There’s no way I want to chance having this vision start again while I’m in class, so I go straight to the library instead. My idea, as I settle into one of the chairs on the second floor, is to write out what I’m feeling, a strategy that has helped me figure things out in the past. When I put my pen to the page, however, what comes out of me is the beginning of a poem:
I want a bearded man, shirtless,
in faded jeans, to come one barefoot night
and take me in his mouth.
Like the violence I saw in my head, the words seem to come from someone other than myself, but the shock of recognition I feel when I read them – not only did I write them; on some level, I meant them – is in direct contrast to the sense of alienation I experienced while waiting in my bathroom to make sure that when I went back to where my lover was waiting for me I would not do to her what I’d seen myself doing. I also realize I am suddenly calm, as if I have found what writing was supposed to help me look for, and I am certain – I don’t know how I know this, but I know this – that in these lines lies the key to understanding why that vision of violence came to me.
If Iranian Lesbian Kiana Firouz is deported from the U.K., she faces certain death in Iran.
From the EveryOne website:
Kiana Firouz, 27 years old, actress and lesbian activist from Teheran, Iran, has long been engaged in the battle against the discrimination and persecution of homosexuals by the Ahmadinejad régime. After photograms of her video documentary on the condition of lesbians and gays fell into the hands of the Iranian intelligence, agents began to follow and intimidate her. Concerned about her safety, Kiana left Teheran and sought refuge in the U.K., where she could continue her work and studies.
She filed for asylum but her application was rejected by the Home Office even though the Ministry recognized her being persecuted for her sexual orientation and despite the fact that the Ministry is well aware that under Islamic law homosexuality is considered a heinous crime punishable by hanging and that gays and lesbians are enemies of Allah. In Iran, punishment for an adult consenting lesbian of healthy mind and is 100 whippings. If the act is repeated three times and punished each time, the death sentence is applied the fourth time (Art. 127, 129, 130).
Hat tip: thefbomb
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Evangelical Christians Are Shocked – Shocked, I Tell You! – To Find Out Their Anti-Gay Rhetoric Might Encourage Uganda’s Push To Make Homosexuality A Capital Offense
Jeffrey Gettleman, in this New York Times article, writes about how three Evangelical Christians from the United States–Scott Lively (click here to read quotes from his talk in Uganda), Caleb Lee Brundidge and Exodus International board member Don Schmierer – are now trying to distance themselves from an event in Uganda at which they spoke about “how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how ‘the gay movement is an evil institution’ whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.’ The reason for their backpedaling is that the event contributed to the climate that led to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which would make homosexuality a capital crime. In a rhetorical move that is remarkably similar to the ways in which the religious right tries to distance itself from people who murder doctors that perform abortions, each of these men or their organizations has issued statements about how their message is one of love and compassion, not hatred and violence. Read the article and follow some of the links. Their hypocrisy speaks for itself.
I do have to share, though, my favorite quote from Gettleman’s article. Referring to the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Schmierer says, “That’s horrible, absolutely horrible. Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.” (Makes me wonder if any of them are Black.)