Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David A. B. Murray is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Graduate Program in Women's Studies at York University in Toronto. He is the author of Opacity: Gender, Sexuality, Race, and the "Problem" of Identity in Martinique.

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Homophobias

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface.......................................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction David A. B. Murray..............................................................................................................................................11 Can There Be an Anthropology of Homophobia? Don Kulick....................................................................................................................192 Homophobia at New York's Gay Central Martin F. Manalansan IV..............................................................................................................343 "It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" What's at Stake in the Construction of Contemporary American Christian Homophobia Constance R. Sullivan-Blum.....................484 The Homosexualization of Pedophilia The Case of Alison Thorne and the Australian Pedophile Support Group Steven Angelides................................................645 Stolen Kisses Homophobia as "Racism" in Contemporary Urban Greece Brian Riedel...........................................................................................826 Not Quite Redemption Song LGBT-Hate in Jamaica Suzanne LaFont............................................................................................................1057 The Emergence of Political Homophobia in Indonesia Masculinity and National Belonging Tom Boellstorff....................................................................1238 Homo Hauntings Spectral Sexuality and the Good Citizen in Barbadian Media David A. B. Murray.............................................................................1469 Lucknow Noir Lawrence Cohen...............................................................................................................................................162Epilogue: What Is to Be (Un)Done? David A. B. Murray.........................................................................................................................185Bibliography..................................................................................................................................................................193Contributors..................................................................................................................................................................221Index.........................................................................................................................................................................223

Chapter One

Don Kulick

THE END OF 2004 was marked by a horrific tragedy. An undersea earthquake o the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra set into motion a massive tidal wave, a tsunami, that smashed into coastal areas across the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Over 160,000 people, most of them local inhabitants, but many of them tourists, are known to have perished. In the midst of this devastating human loss, the Westboro Baptist Church in the American state of Kansas posted this notice on its home page, www.godhatesfags .com:

... Do you realize that among the dead and missing are 20,000 Swedes and over 3,000 Americans? ... We sincerely hope and pray that all 20,000 Swedes are dead, their bodies bloated on the ground or in mass graves or floating at sea feeding sharks and fishes or in the bellies of thousands of crocodiles washed ashore by tsunamis. These filthy, faggot Swedes have a satanic, draconian law criminalizing Gospel preaching, under which they prosecuted, convicted and sentenced Pastor ke Green to jail-thereby incurring God's irreversible wrath [Sweden's law prohibiting hate speech extends to speech that denigrates or incites violence against homosexuals. In 2004, pastor ke Green, who in his sermons used language not unlike that found in this Internet posting, was convicted of hate speech against homosexuals and sentenced to a month in prison].

... America ... is awash in diseased fag feces & semen, and is an apostate land of the sodomite damned. ... Let us pray that God will send a massive Tsunami to totally devastate the North American continent with 1000-foot walls of water doing 500 mph-even as islands in southern Asia have recently been laid waste, with but a small remnant surviving. God Hates Fag America! ... Thank God for the tsunamis & we hope for 20,000 dead Swedes!!!

Meanwhile, in another place and time, Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe opened the 1995 Zimbabwe International Book Fair with these words:

I find it extremely outrageous and repugnant to my human conscience that such immoral and repulsive organizations, like those of homosexuals who offend both against the law of nature and the morals of religious beliefs espoused by our society, should have any advocates in our midst and even elsewhere in the world. If we accept homosexuality as a right, as is being argued by the association of sodomists and sexual perverts, what moral fibre shall our society ever have to deny organized drug addicts, or even those given to bestiality, the rights they may claim and allege they possess under the rubrics of individual freedom and human rights? (Engelke 1999:299)

And meanwhile, in another place and time, the following brief notice appeared on Friday, November 19, 2004, unobtrusively at the bottom of page six in the Oakland Tribune, a local newspaper from the city whose main claim to fame is as the referent of Gertrude Stein's aphorism "There is no there there":

Philadelphia 11-year-old boy charged with rape An 11-year-old boy sexually assaulted another boy in a middle-school stairway after chasing the victim from a bathroom, authorities said. A school officiate said they would try to determine where employees were at the time of the attack Tuesday meaning. The suspect was charged as a juvenile with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.

This last example might not, at first glance, seem to have much in common with the other two. The report consists of three one-sentence paragraphs reporting on a sexual assault. It is written in dry, telegraphic Associated Press prose that is unremarkable-save for one malignant word occurring right at the end. Deviate.

Grammatically, deviate, like the word involuntary that precedes it, is an adjective, qualifying the type of "sexual intercourse" that occurred. "Involuntary" clearly refers to the will of the victim and signifies that the intercourse was unwanted. But what is the meaning here of "deviate"? Was the intercourse "deviate" because it was an assault, and to assault someone is to deviate from a statistical norm? In that case, one might wonder why rapes, say, or armed robberies, or murders-never committed by the overwhelming majority of people-are generally not qualified with "deviate" in press reports. Could it be that the word deviate refers to the fact that both persons involved were male, as in the familiar derogatory collocation "sexual deviate"?

The occurrence of the word deviate here signals a denigrating...