GAY HOMOPHOBIA: A Test for Gay Men

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GAY HOMOPHOBIA: A Test for Gay Men

How liberated are you? Or, conversely, how much do you hate homosexuality and homosexuals — including yourself? Here are some specific questions to explore your attitudes. Answers and commentary, and what your score means, appear afterward.

Do you ever refer to gay men as "she"?
Do you believe that ^"opposites attract, likes repel"?
Are your sexual activities styled around role playing —"active"/"passive" or "butch^"/^"fem"?
Do you use expressions like ^"prick^", ^"cocksucker^", ^"It sucks^", and ^"Fuck you!"as putdown or reproach?
When you meet a casual acquaintance, do you give or permit a ^"social kiss^"?
Do you ever wear (a) clothes of the opposite sex? (b) makeup (other than to cover up a black eye or some such temporary facial disaster?
(a) Do you wear fetishistic regalia — black leather motorcycle jackets, chains, cockrings, chaps, hankie-code handkerchiefs, trousers or cutoffs tattered to reveal private parts? (b) Do you participate in sado-masochistic or fetishistic sex, like urolagnia (drinking piss), caprophagy (eating shit), or fistfucking?
Do you (a) believe in your heart that straight men really are more masculine than gay men? (b) seek out straight men in preference to gay men for sex?
Do you go for public sex to places known to be dangerous when nondangerous places offer similar levels of sexual opportunity?
Do you believe that "bisexuality^"is more natural than exclusive homosexuality?
Do you like to "talk dirty^" — contemptuously ordering your sex partner around — or be talked to contemptuously during sex?
Do you seek out men of a different race or age from yourself?
Do you feel that the proper use of gay men^'s political power is to elect women to public office and advance feminism?
If you come across as "nelly", do you do so deliberately or defiantly?
Do you accept (a) the idea that lesbians and homosexual men are the same thing? (b) the notion that lesbians and homosexuals are a "Third Sex^"somewhere between male and female?
Do you believe (a) that "gender" is distinct from biological sex and that one can be "a woman trapped inside a man's body"or vice versa? (b) that one can ^"change his sex"?
Do you immerse yourself in the straight culture, spending enormous amounts of time at straight theater, listening to straight music, reading straight books and magazines, or watching straight television?
Do you travel with "faghags", taking women (straight or lesbian) to gay men's bars, parading down gay streets with women, even taking women to men's sex bars and outdoor sex places as proof that you are "truly liberated" and have nothing against women?
Do you (a) believe that homosexuals are merely "sexually nonconforming" or "liberated" rather than fundamentally different from heterosexuals? (b) participate in heterosexual sex or read or watch hetero pornography as proof to yourself or others that you are "liberated", "bisexual", "kinky" — or anything else — rather than "queer"?
Do you think that sexual liberation means "anything goes"?
Do you tell yourself or anyone else that sex with many is better than love with one — that "monogamy is unnatural" — and use that as an excuse for an inability to love or remain faithful to one?
Are you in the closet", hiding your nature from friends, co-workers — even (or especially) from other gay men — out of fear of disapproval on being "exposed"?
Do you think that all the work of homosexual liberation is done or that what little remains is someone else^'s responsibility?
Do you believe you are destined to die alone and unloved?
If you could convert to heterosexuality, would you?

ANSWERS AND COMMENTARY

All answers are NO. Each numbered item is worth 4 points;
an (a) or (b), thus, is worth 2 points.

A man, of whatever orientation, is always a man: "he".
People are not magnets. The best relationships are between people who have something in common.
Sex is giving and getting. "Homo"sex is giving what you get, with a man, and no one with a one-sided sexual preference is in touch with his needs.
Men who respect their (homosexuality respect their bodies and sexual activities. They are offended by antimale, antihomosexual vulgarity and have a positive attitude toward sex.
In the U.S., social kissing is culturally reserved to women — and men who feel themselves women. To men, touching is the second stage of sexual contact (seeing being the first), and kissing is sexually intimate, especially for homosexual men for whom the mouth is a primary sexual organ. A biological repulsion for sexual contact with nonsexual acquaintances is built into men, and social kissing is most unnatural to men.
(a) Transvestism is always a sign of sexual confusion and self-denial. It is always unhealthy. (b) In the U.S., makeup is culturally reserved to women; any man who says he wears it without subverting his manhood is lying — at least to you and probably to himself too.
(a) Fetishism is a splintering of sex from personality (emotionality) and a diversion of the sexual impulse from seeking out a person to playing with things instead. Sexual preference for things over people is a serious mental disorder. Sado-masochism, like fetishism, reduces people to things; like role-playing, it reduces a person to a peg or a hole — it being vastly easier to find a peg or hole than a complete men who fits emotionally, more than just physically. But sado-masochism adds a twisted self-hatred to fetishism and roleplaying. The masochist feels himself fit only to be despised and abused — punished; the sadist punishes himself in hitting or humiliating his partner, for he identifies with that partner. S&M between men is antihomosexual psychodrama.
(a) All biologically normal men who have an XY chromosome arrangement are equally masculine by nature. If a man is alienated from his manhood it is because he is out of touch with his nature. (b) Truly straight men are not available for sex with men, so any such quest is a self-issued guarantee of unhappiness. Further, there is no reason to seek out straight men save to feel like a woman. Preference for men who want women shows you don't feel yourself a man. You have bought the lie.
People who like themselves protect themselves. Gay men who endanger themselves, not just in public sex but in choosing threatening sex partners, do so from hatred of their orientation: "I deserve trouble for wanting a man."
"Bisexuality is normal" is the most insidious of lies, for it suggests that merely because our bodies can respond to various stimuli, our sexuality must seek out all stimuli. But we are not amebas moving toward warmth or plants growing toward light but men, and sexuality was integrated with and subordinated to emotionality in our species thousands of years ago. Emotionality, not sensory capability. determines what is pleasurable and desirable. and emotional orientation is specific to one gender or the other. since the two sexes are markedly different.
Communication by sound is a natural part of sex. But there's a big difference between sex talk about what is pleasing and sex talk that degrades one's partner. The difference between "I really like that" and "Suck my dick, cocksucker" is by no means subtle.
Homosexuality is self-affirmation: seeking out a man (the Latin sense of '"homo") like yourself (the Greek sense of "homo'). What might revealingly be called "hetero-racism" and hetero-ageism" evidence dislike for oneself. They are distinct from mere openness to the possibility that someone different from you in some regards might be enough like you in others as to make a relationship possible.
The proper use of gay men's political power is to elect gay men to political office so they can speak out for gay men at all levels of government, from city thru Congress and even the Presidency. Gay men who vote for women over men reveal antimale aggressions and confusions. Feminism seeks to advance women at the expense of men. Voting for women does not excuse you in straights' minds from sleeping with them, and it doesn't prove you "normal", only guiltily and confusedly antimale — and thus anti-self.
Not every man moves like John Wayne, but our bodies do give us naturally masculine ways if we let them move as they want to. Nelliness springs from self-doubt. Wanting a man does not make you any the less a man. Sex between men is a fully masculine activity — even, when mutual and not distorted to imitate heterosexuality, a supermasculine, purely masculine activity. You must liberate yourself from feelings of inadequacy dumped onto gay men by malicious people who don't understand homosexuality — perhaps because they don't understand themselves,
(a) A lesbian is not a man and is not attracted to men. A homosexual is not a woman and is not attracted to women. Intrinsically. then, homosexuals and lesbians are as different as two people can be. It is as unreasonable to suggest they should join together because they are "both drawn to their own sex" (and thus away from each other) as it would be to suggest that the Ku Klux Klan and Black Nationalists should unite in a single organization and hold mixed dinner dances because they are "both racists". Homosexuals and lesbians do hold dances together — when neither of them wants to dance with the other! That is just plain nuts. The fact that homosexuals and lesbians are "both attracted to their own sex" is meaningless. Homosexuality and lesbianism could be the same thing in truth only if a gay man having sex with a lesbian would be having homosexual sex. He would not. Men are our lives and our selves. To men alone do we owe dedication of all resources and efforts of gay organizations. (b) There are two sexes, period. While some very rare people have chromosome abnormalities, they are individual freaks of nature, not a third sex with uniform characteristics. Virtually all homosexuals and lesbians are chromosomally normal: XY, male, in the case of homosexuals; XX, female, in the case of lesbians. Even if one were to categorize "sex" by orientation-plus-gender, he would end up with four sexes, not three, with lesbians to the left of straight women and homosexuals to the right of straight men, showing lesbians and gay men as the extreme opposite sexes. However, there are not four sexes, not three, but only two, and chromosomes determine those.
(a) Gender is not a shirt you can put on and take off at will. It is a biological reality indelibly inscribed in our cells, not carelessly written on a daydream. Gender is chromosomal configuration. That someone has been made to feel estranged from his gender does not negate that gender. (b) Like species, gender is genetic, not cosmetic, imaginary, or transitory. If you are born XY, you will remain XY — a man — in every single cell of your body till the day you die. And that is a very good thing.
To be "cultured" in a straight society is to be filled to overflowing with heterosexual images, lyrics, and preconceptions. Impressions made by dazzling — or merely omnipresent — heterosexual culture can overwhelm one sensorily and subject him to grave confusions about who he is and what he wants out of life. Straights go to the (straight) theater, etc., to revel in their orientation, and they find their identities powerfully reinforced; but homosexuals find these same powerful influences subverting their identity, for they are moved to identify with what they are not. Until a culture risen from and reflective of homosexuality fills theaters and television screens, we endanger our self-conception when we immerse ourselves in "culture" — for that culture is heterosexual. not neutral.
Intruding women into gay men's privacy is antihomosexual aggression against men's right to be alone with men. Faghagfags are enormously confused about gender — they think of their faghag friends and themselves as "the girls out on the town"; they use woman as shields against the sex they fear as much as want; they need desperately to reassure themselves that they are "normal"; and they (over)compensate for feelings of inadequacy (they do not feel like men in the presence of men) by flaunting socially-defined superiority: heterosexuality over homosexuality: man-with-women supreme over men-with-men. Faghags and the fags who drag them into places women just do not belong in are pitiful creatures who should not, for pity, be allowed to destroy men's privacy with men. [See "The Faghag-Fag" in HI! Magazine No. 5.]
(a) Sexual activity is the smallest part of sexuality, and our sexual orientation is not floating free but anchored securely to men. Our nature compels us to seek out men, not defy convention. If society were homosexual we would be perfectly happy to conform, as "clone" fashion demonstrates. (b) Homosexuals should admit that their preference for men of necessity, by the very nature of male sexuality, also means distaste for women. (The reverse, a revulsion for men on the part of heterosexual men, cannot be as strong, for it would work against the self, and so is unnatural. One cannot regard himself as attractive to others if he does not feel attractive to himself. Nor could a man function autoerotically if he felt repelled by his (man's) body. A large part of the pleasure any man feels in masturbation is having a cock in his hand and feeling it warm, hard, throbbing with sex and surging with come. There is built into a man's biological nature a sexual tolerance, indeed excitement, for himself and, by extension, others of his gender.) Gay men pay a very high price to be homosexual, and we would not pay anything like that price if we could stand the prospect of living with women and without men. "Bisexuals" are not prepared to pay any price to be homosexual, not because they are not homosexual but because they are selfish. Theirs, however, is a selfishness that disserves the self. Sexual activity with persons of both sexes shows not a healthy regard for both possibilities but rather a tragic failure to achieve personal identity and a low regard for the people one uses for gratification. A person without commitment to one sex or the other cannot be faithful to any person, of either sex. That is assuredly not liberation, for it condemns the "bisexual" to eternal alienation.
Sexual liberation is the ability to do what is right and not feel bad about it. It is being able to give and get, equally, without embarrassment, guilt, or exploitation. Sexual lawlessness — regarding violence, child molestation, fetishism, sado-masochism, bestiality, and every other possible outlet for sexual feelings or aggressions as equally valid is not liberation but psychosis.
Young and inexperienced men may be promiscuous, but men who have "sown their wild oats" need to be involved with one person with whom sex integrates with love. Men are fundamentally marriage-minded. Men have always controlled all societies, and all societies have some form of marriage: ergo, men invented marriage — out of their own needs.
Like most things we don't face, fear of "exposure" builds up in the mind to ridiculous heights; the longer one puts off "coming out", the wilder the imagination can get as to the consequences of such a "rash act". It may well be that the person who most disapproves of homosexuality is the guy in the closet. Well-adjusted straights have too much to think about — bills, the kids, their marriage. etc. — to worry much about whether the guy next door or at the next desk is queer. COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE!
Until all men are free to love men; until no kid anywhere in the world feels himself a monster, utterly alone, unspeakably wicked and depraved for wanting a man; until our institutions are wholesome and self-reinforcing and all gay men are comfortable with themselves and involved happily with one another, that long will there be work to do in the gay movement. The movement needs intelligent, wholesome men who are glad to be homosexual and ecstatic to be men. If that description fits you, work to reform misguided organizations or start new organizations free of error.
The end of promiscuity or "serial monogamy" is dying alone and unloved. Sooner or later the string of partners runs out. If sexuality cannot secure us in loving relationships, then that sexuality is not doing what sexuality was designed to do: make us need someone and bond to him. If you believe that you will fail to get that permanence, you believe, at end, that homosexuality is defective. And if you're afraid nobody will want you when you're old and gay, you'd better work on the negative things in your personality or (more likely) in the gay world that threaten an old age of emptiness.
Finally, if you want to convert to heterosexuality, buddy, please do. You're not fit to be kweer. But if you want to be homosexual, and happy as such, check your score below.

© L. Craig Schoonmaker 1983, 1998

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YOUR SCORE

80-100: Congratulations! You are a homosexual man. You have something to say to others less fortunate, and the movement needs you. But HI! may be the only organization you'll be comfortable in.

60-80: Good. You are well on the way to being the man you should be, a man who accepts himself and seeks good things from life because he feels he deserves them. You can help others but still have some growing to do. HI! might be a good place to do both.

40-80: Hmm. You have a lot of thinking and changing to do to achieve happiness as a homosexual man. You need to read our stuff and talk your problems thru. Contact us.

20-40: It's time to worry. You are seriously disturbed in your attitudes toward homosexuality and yourself. You need to join a gay men's organization or speak with a male counselor. Tho you need to read our publications. it will be a while before you can appreciate them.

0-20: Run, do not walk, to a professional gay male counselor. You are extremely disturbed and may destroy yourself unless you receive help.

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