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.

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 cliche 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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

This certainty, however, does not take me very far, because no matter how I try to connect what I’ve written to what I saw–and I wish I still had the pages I filled up trying to do that–I end up thinking about Brian and how we became friends in our senior year of high school. We were watching a teammate strike out as he tried too hard to hit the ball over the fence during a gym-class softball game. “I don’t get it,” Brian said to no one in particular, shaking his head from side to side as the other boy slammed the bat to the ground and stormed off the field. “I just don’t get it.”

“Get what?” I asked.

We’d been standing next to each other through most of the class, but he looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “What’s the big deal? I mean, it’s not like the guy’s going to fail for striking out.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.”

Brian’s face lit up for a moment, but then, just as quickly, his eyes narrowed. “Yeah, but at least you can hit the ball,” he said. He was not much of an athlete.

“So I can hit the ball. So what?”

And with that question we were friends; and we quickly became best friends. Sadly, though, what I remember most clearly about our friendship is the day it began to end. “You’re just different,” he told me sitting in my room. “I’ve never met anyone like you, and they can’t accept that.”

“I’ve never met anyone like you before either,” I responded, not even bothering to ask him who they were.

“But they’re saying we’re closer than we should be, that we’re not, you know, normal.”

“So? Who cares what they have to say?”

Brian looked so grateful when I said those words that I thought he was going to cry, and his eyes did start to grow big with a feeling that welled up in him, but then he looked away and almost whispered, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are closer than we should be.”

I tried to convince him that he was wrong, but it didn’t work, and from that day on–at least as I recall–he started bringing female friends along whenever we went out, and college applications, yearbook committees, and other graduation-related work suddenly kept him so busy that he didn’t have enough time to see me. The summer after graduation, while I was working at a sleep-away camp in Massachusetts, we wrote letters, but when I came home, he was gone, off to his freshman year at Cornell University. I probably had his phone number and address at school, but I don’t think I ever used them, and I don’t remember receiving either mail or phone calls from him. We did try once to reconnect during the winter break of our freshman year, meeting for a drink at one of the where bars we’d hung out when we were still close. If I remember correctly, he brought his girlfriend, a dark woman who sat silently in her corner of the booth while Brian and I struggled to find things to say to each other. The conversation is lost to me now, but I can still feel the finality of our good-byes, neither of us even pretending that we’d try to see each other again.

At the end of that academic year, while I waited on line to register for my sophomore classes, I met the woman who’d sat next to me in twelfth-grade English. “Whatever happened to your friend Brian?” she asked, making what I thought was going to be small talk to pass the time.

“He’s at Cornell,” I answered, “but I haven’t heard from him in a long while.”

“You know,” she said, “everyone thought you two were gay.”

“I know.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

With cinematic timing my turn to register came next, and I gave her a small, silent wave as I walked to the registrar’s window. My answer, though, has haunted me ever since, not because it was dishonest–I was responding to what she probably wanted to know, which was whether or not Brian and I had had sex–but because if Brian and I did not love each other, we were certainly on the verge of it, or at least I was on the verge of loving him. Answering my former classmate with that unadorned no betrayed that love, and so the moment in which I answered her is a moment I often wish that I could have back, as I still sometimes wish I could have back that moment when Brian decided “they” were right and we were wrong. Not because I think there was anything I could have done to change his mind, and not because I think the answer I wish I’d had the presence of mind to give my former classmate–we did not have sex, but we did love each other–would have made much of a difference to her, but because envisioning how those situations might have turned out differently makes a difference to me, is a gesture of defiance I never want to stop making against what “they” stood, and continue to stand, for.

My lover and I did not go out to dinner that night; we talked instead. She was the one person in my life with whom I had been, with whom I could be, completely honest, and so even though I wanted to, I did not know how to withhold from her what had been going on inside me. I told her what I had seen myself doing to her–though in less detail than I have described here–and how scared I was because I had no idea where the vision had come from, because it had never occurred to me that such violence might be in me; and I am, again, as I write this now, more than twenty five years later, as I am every time I tell this story, awestruck, literally awestruck, by the strength and compassion, by the depth and breadth of the love that my lover showed me that night. It is still hard for me to believe that she did not immediately leave for home when I told her what had been going on inside my head, that she was able to sit alone with me in my bedroom, knowing what I had seen, and feel safe talking with me–and I know she felt safe because she told me so–and we talked until I don’t remember what hour of the morning, but nothing we said brought me any closer to understanding what might have triggered the visions I had seen.

I wish I could remember everything we said to each other that night, because the only thing I do remember, and I have no idea what we were saying that led up to this, is yelling the words I hate you! as loud as I could and then laughing with hysterical relief as I continued to yell them; and in all the seven years this woman and I were together–at least five of which were still to come, and they were seven good years–I don’t think I ever loved her more than I did at that moment. As soon as the first I hate you! left my mouth, I knew she was not the person to whom I was speaking–I had no idea to whom I was speaking–and I don’t know if she believed me when I told her that, but she nonetheless stayed in that room while I yelled those words at her, and when I was done, and I might have been crying, she held me, and we slept; and in the morning when we woke up, I could feel that something in me had been resolved, some tension dissipated.

I started seeing a therapist on campus to try to puzzle out where those violent visions came from and how they were connected to the homoerotic lines that I wrote, but the only thing I learned from that experience was how important it is to find a therapist you can trust. I don’t remember where precisely my lack of trust came from, but it was deep enough that it would be years before I was willing to enter therapy again. Fortunately for me, the second time around was a good deal more successful than the first. I started to understand not only how enraged I was at the world–the reasons for which will unfold over the course of this series of posts–but also how thoroughly I had hidden that rage from myself. As I revisited with my therapist the episode I have described above, I began to be able to point to things in the relationship with my lover that made me angry, in particular the fact that she refused to tell her parents about us because they would not approve of her being with someone who wasn’t Catholic and also the way she saw “us” as a secret haven to which she could escape from the rest of her life; and I could see how each of those angers might have touched the rage I’d been feeling without even realizing I was feeling it, though clearly the violence I’d seen myself doing to her was both wrong on its face and way out of proportion to whatever problems I had with our relationship.

To put it another way, that I should not have hit my lover is something we take for granted; yet taking that for granted very neatly elides the fact that we live in a culture where an awful lot of men with rage not so different from mine do hit their lovers. More to the point, it is a culture where the ubiquitousness of this violence, and of images of this violence, cannot help but shape the forms of expression available to men who feel such rage. To take for granted that I should not have hit my lover, in other words, not to ask why a vision of beating my lover to a pulp was the form my rage took, is also to take for granted that the violence I saw myself doing to her was somehow in the normal order of things. It is to accept that such violence is how men’s rage will, as a matter of course, express itself; and so it is to leave intact the social and cultural structures that normalize men’s violence against women.

Similarly, while there may be any number of therapeutic explanations for the lines of homoerotic poetry that I wrote–perhaps, for example, the bearded, shirtless man was me, and the poem was my way of telling myself that I needed to learn self-love– to see the explicit homosexuality in those lines as merely personal, as being solely a reflection of my psychological state at the time, is to avoid the questions about male heterosexual and gender identity that I think they raise, especially because of the circumstances under which I wrote them.

I’d be lying, for example, if I claimed not to have wondered if writing the poem was my unconscious mind’s way of telling me that I was really gay and that my vision had been as violent as it was because what I wanted, what I needed, was to break out of the “heterosexual prison” I had not realized my relationship with my lover had become. Yet not only did writing those lines not awaken in me a previously hidden and compelling desire for men; not only has the trajectory of my life since then in no way suggested that the poem was, or ought to have been, the beginning of my coming out; writing those lines, as I suggested above, calmed me, gave me a perspective–though I was in no way able to articulate it at the time–that enabled me to go back and talk to my lover, which ultimately strengthened our relationship and my desire for her. In other words, despite the the fact that every social script I know says this should not have been the case, the process of acknowledging my own homoeroticism that writing those lines of poetry began affirmed rather than threatened my sense of myself as heterosexual.

We all know the social scripts I am talking about. A core tenet of conventional heterosexuality, after all, is that a man’s heterosexual feelings should cancel out completely the possibility of any homoeroticism he might otherwise have within him. Or to put it another way, conventional heterosexuality requires of a man the active policing of his own desire so as to eliminate from within himself all traces of homoerotic possibility. Either way, within this framework, to fail to erase one’s own homoeroticism is to fail as a man. Homophobia, in other words, is not simply the fear and hatred of homosexuals; it is also a categorical imperative of conventional manhood. As such, it enjoins heterosexual men to define our sexuality negatively, as what it is not, rather than through an assertion of what it is, and it is that assertion that I guess I have been trying to explore in the two decades since I began writing seriously about masculinity, manhood and male sexuality, though this is the first time I have been able to say it with such clarity.

To examine the violence within myself, in other words, is to examine what it has meant for me, what it means for me, to be a man, not because men are inherently violent or because manhood and masculinity are names for a pathology of violence with which all men are infected, but because I have in my life experienced manhood and masculinity, gender and sexuality, as connected to and through violence; and I am talking here not only about the violence that was done to me in order to make me a man, or in the name of proving manhood–mine or someone else’s–but also about what should have been the unthinkable violence that I saw myself doing to a woman I loved. I am more than grateful for whatever it was in me that kept me from acting out the vision I saw, but I still had that vision; it was as much a part of me–as a memory it still is as much a part of me–as it would have been had I actually punched my lover in the face. Not to examine it, not to pursue that examination wherever it might lead, therefore, is not only to betray the love and compassion my lover showed me when I told her what I’d seen myself doing to her; it is also to betray the humanity I chose when I chose not to hit her.

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 regime. 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

If you have a mind to, please sign the petition.

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.)