by walter meyer not halfway done A-LISTS
“I would come in from my daily run, shirtless;
he would just happen to leave his apartment door open and tell me how good I looked all sweaty.
About the third time this happened, I told him to close his [expletive] door and that if he ever spoke to me again I’d hit him. Of course I feel
bad about this now, he never did speak to me or look at me again.”
CONFESSIONS OF ANEX-HOMOPHOBE My straight roommate asked me, “What is the deal with all these rabidly anti-gay
legislators turning out to be gay?” This was in the wake of the Puerto Rican lawmaker caught on Grindr. Or maybe it was after the Indiana lawmaker got caught hiring a teen- age twink from Craigslist. It’s hard to keep them “straight.” I asked my roommate if he was afraid to be in the room with a half-naked gay man. I
was wearing nothing but gym shorts—which tends to be my work uniform. One thing about working at home, my office has a strict dress code: I must wear something. Some days it’s only socks, but it is something. He asked why he should be afraid? I told him he had no fear because he was not a homophobe in either the literal or figurative sense. He is not afraid of gay people. Often “homophobe” is bandied about for the likes of Karl Rove, who manipulated the Chris- tian Right into voting for his dim-witted candidates by fanning the flames of the fear of homosexuals indoctrinating children. (Watch for a lot of this coming soon with the FAIR Education Act ballot initiative). But Rove is not really a homophobe in the sense that he has a phobia of homosexuals. He was raised by a gay man and has no animus toward that man or those of his ilk, but Rove is amoral enough to sell his wife to a lesbian brothel for a thousand votes. Real homophobes are afraid of gay people—literally afraid of them. I know this, because I was a homophobe. Freud wrote: “All fear is wish and all wish is fear.” I suffer from acrophobia; when I walk across the Golden Gate Bridge it’s a fear of jumping, not a fear of falling that makes me uncomfortable. I explained to my roommate that in my not-yet-out-still-in-self-denial-self-loathing
phase, I hated to be around gay people. When I first moved to California the obviously gay (his apartment was white-on-white) cute Filipino boy across the hall in my apart- ment building started flirting with me. I would come in from my daily run, shirtless; he would just happen to leave his apartment door open and tell me how good I looked all
sweaty. About the third time this happened, I told him to close his [expletive] door and that if he ever spoke to me again I’d hit him. Of course I feel bad about this now, he never did speak to me or look at me again—and I missed the attention and admiration as much as I loathed it. I didn’t fear what he would do to me—he couldn’t really have done anything because he was half my size—I feared what I wanted to do with him (we won’t get into specifics here, but it involved whipped cream and handcuffs). When I was writing for the student newspaper at Penn State, the then-editor wrote
an editorial claiming he was gay. I unmercifully attacked him for this, even once calling him a “faggot” in print. He later wrote that he was not gay and had just written that to take a stand for gay rights—a very courageous position a quarter century and several light years ago. He was not surprised when I came out. (I sent him an apology and my coming out story when it ran in theLos Angeles Times). I explained to my roommate that I understand Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard
et al. (the list is too long for this magazine) and I don’t think Sarah Palin is really a homo- phobe; she has no fear of Todd switching teams anytime soon or of herself being lured into a lip lock with Rachel Maddow. But I think Marcus Bachman, Michele Bachman, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum are homophobes—they fear gay people because they want to join them. (Well Michelle doesn’t, but she knows Marcus does). If they can out- law being gay, they will be safe from the threat of waking up some hung over morning after a drunken night, wearing a dog collar beside a twink in a hot tub. I could see the rainbow-colored light bulb go on above my roommate’s head. He
finally got why the biggest homophobes throughout history from J. Edgar Hoover to have been closet cases themselves. My roommate doesn’t care who or what I do in my bedroom because he has no desire to join in. If he did have those urges, he couldn’t live with me without it driving him crazy, as clearly such urges have driven mad a good number of Republican lawmakers.
NOVEMBER 2011 | RAGE monthly 31
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