Why Do They Hate Me?

Two weeks ago the Russian parliament passed a bill that bans what it describes as “gay propaganda” which effectively makes it illegal to be an openly gay person in the Russian Federation. Not one member of parliament voted against it and it was subsequently signed into law by President Putin.

In Hungary, Poland and Turkey elected leaders consistently use the boogeyman of gays vs. traditional Christian and Muslim families to rouse their supporters while inciting hatred and violence against gay men and lesbians.

Across the United States, Republican legislators have tabled over three hundred anti-LGBTQ bills in 2022 alone. In the run up to the 2022 midterms Republican candidates spent tens of millions of dollars on political ads attacking the LGBTQ community. This was all part of an escalating gay panic campaign to gin up their base and foment hatred and violence against gay Americans.

In Africa, nation after nation is adopting laws that outlaw homosexual behaviour and enforce that prohibition with jail time and, in some cases, death.

And across the Muslim world gays are hunted down, persecuted, whipped, tortured, imprisoned and murdered for no other reason than their sexual orientation.

Three weeks ago a man armed with a semi automatic rifle and a handgun entered a Colorado Springs gay club and killed five patrons while injuring eighteen others before being taken down by some of the other patrons and, ultimately, the police.

On June 12, 2016 a man entered a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida and killed forty nine people and wounded fifty three.

Even in New York, that bastion of liberal tolerance, attacks on the gay community are increasing.

Which brings me back to the questions: why do they hate me? What have I and my fellow gay men and lesbians done to deserve this response?

Fifty years ago this year I came to understand and accept that I was gay. And just to be clear, I didn’t choose that sexual orientation. It was just the way I was. This was only three years after the Stonewall riots that, symbolically at least, unleashed the gay rights movement in the United States, and three years after Canada, thanks to Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau and John Turner, removed its laws making sexual relations between consenting adults of the same sex illegal.

In the half century since then I have encountered my share of discrimination and homophobic hate although I never let it define me or limit my life and career ambitions. I have tried to be a good citizen of Canada; paying my taxes, taking part in the political processes that shape our democracy, supporting causes and charities where there was a need, speaking out on issues affecting us all and generally being a law abiding citizen of my city, province and country.

And yet I have always known I don’t have to go too far to encounter people who hate me because of who I am. I know I’m fortunate to live in Canada where tolerance of this hatred has diminished significantly over the past fifty years although there’s still a pretty significant gap between feeling it and saying it. And I’m grateful for the institutional and legal progress that has made life for gays and lesbians in Canada easier.

But I’m still stuck with the question: why do they hate me and everyone like me?

I’m as familiar as anyone with the standard answers to that question: the proscriptions in the three major Abrahamic religions; the insecurity of some heterosexual men; the surfeit of testosterone in young men and their need to demonstrate their virility; the shameless behaviour of politicians who, regardless of their private lives and beliefs, use the anti gay trope to incite and motivate their supporters; the legacies of colonialism in Africa and parts of Asia; the belief that gay men particularly lead privileged lives and look down on the rest of society without doing their fair share to support it; the fear that children will somehow be attracted to, or groomed for, a gay life ending the hopes of their parents for future generations. All of the above or just some of them.

I’m not going to spend time responding to, or commenting on, these motivating factors. Others have done so quite effectively. But what I’m still left with is “why the deep, murderous, animus”? And even when one or more of these factors explains particular behaviours or actions, they don’t explain the hatred because, ultimately, there is nothing rational about that hatred at all. And yet it continues.

Human societies are complex organisms and, in many respects, not that far removed from tribalism although one of the hopeful developments in the twenty first century is the emergence of multi cultural and multi ethnic societies, like Canada’s, that push back against that tribalism. For whatever reason, tribes don’t like outsiders and the more different a person is the the more likely he or she is going to be seen as an enemy. This is particularly true when the tribe comes under stress and looks for scapegoats. Often, although not always, the first scapegoat is gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians, followed at least in Western history, by Jewish people.

I am in the final decades of my life and I am deeply troubled to see the wheel of prejudice and discrimination against gay people and lesbians coming back around, not because it will have much effect on me (it won’t), but because it lays waste all the optimism that we as a species can get beyond the nightmares of our past and exposes our savage, cruel animal nature.

Not exactly something to be proud of.

Just sayin

G

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