I was walking across campus with a friend the other day, when my friend spotted someone he knew walking in the other direction. They both waved to each other, and we walked on.
“Who was that?” I inquired.
“Oh, just someone I know,” my friend replied.
“Where do you know him from?” was the next question.
“Oh, we’re both involved in the GLSU,” he said.
“What’s the GLSU?” came the inevitable reply.
“The Gay and Lesbian Student Union.”
Stunned silence.
“You mean you’re . . . you’re . . .”
“Gay?” he supplied, trying to be helpful.
Extreme consternation.
“But . . . but, I never would have suspected.”
And there’s the problem. Society has stereotyped that if you’re a gay male you lisp, have limp wrists, wear women’s clothes at least half the time, and are constantly chasing small boys. And if you’re a gay female, you are an ultra-masculine woman who wears men’s clothes and have your hair in a tight crew cut.
This delightful and completely inaccurate stereotype, I found, is perpetuated to a large degree by all the friendly folks over at the Moral Majority, and similiar god-squad groups.
* * *
First, let’s look at the facts. In 1948, a professor named Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University published a book called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Kinsey discovered that human sexuality is not a binary attitude. Human sexuality is not an “all-or-none” proposition—either completely heterosexual or completely homosexual. In fact, human sexuality encompasses the full range of sexual preference between the two extremes.
In order to make studying sexuality easier, Kinsey proposed a scale, from zero to six, with zero representing exclusive heterosexuality and six representing exclusive homosexuality. A one on the Kinsey scale thus represents someone who is “predominantly heterosexual,” a two represents someone who is “only incidentally homosexual,” a three is “equally heterosexual and homosexual,” and a four, for example, is “predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual.”
The results of the surveys and interviews are surprising. Kinsey summarized all the data collected in the following way:
These statistics are surprising, but they have been born out by subsequent research. Kinsey’s work remains a landmark in its field, because it is the first objective piece of research done on the subject without preconceptions.
Similiar research has been conducted on the sexuality of women, with comparable percentages of lesbians in the general population.
* * *
It is extremely difficult, I have learned, to understand what people go through when they realize that they are more, or equally, interested in people of their own sex instead of just the opposite sex. Since early childhood, we have all been carefully programmed to emulate heterosexual society. Just examine the words we use to describe someone as gay: fruit, faggot, queer, pervert, lezzie, dyke, butch . . .
Self-loathing, doubts of your sanity, feelings of worthlessness, lack of self-confidence, depression and other problems are often encountered by those attempting to deal with their sexuality.
If society in general would just accept the facts and statistics about human sexuality, as revealed by impartial scientific research, there would be no need for people to go through this period of self-doubt.
The degree of negative feeling toward homosexuals in our society is unbelieveable. Identifying homosexuals has become the witch hunt of the past two decades. To help build up their self-assurance, nice “normal” straights go out to “smack around a few queers,” or engage in “fag-bashing.” Ask a heterosexual how he deals with homosexuals, and you’ll often hear that he beats them up, and that’s the only contact he’ll have with faggots.
You constantly hear people decrying the Nazi holocaust of six million Jews, but how many people spoke up when more than 200,000 homosexuals were put to death in the concentration camps first? Everyone thought the Nazis would kill off all the gays and then stop. Look where that kind of tolerance for intolerance got us.
When a guy and a girl hold hands in public, it’s “cute” and “adorable.” Straight couples can virtually fornicate in the open, falling all over each other, hugging, kissing, wrapped tightly around each other, and it doesn’t even get a second glance. But when two guys just hold hands in public, it’s “disgusting,” “immoral,” and “flaunting their sexuality.”
At least once a year, someone writes a letter to the editor decrying the fact that his student activities fee is being spent on activities run by the Gay and Lesbian Student Union. Looking at the above statistics, I doubt if 13 percent of the student activities fee money collected goes to this organization.
Why is the group necessary? What are the Black Student Union and the Jewish Student Union necessary? And likewise, why are they receiving the funds from whites and Christians? Doesn’t the question of funding gays now sound ridiculous?
For any minority group slowly becoming assimilated into mainstream society, a mutual support group is necessary for the mental health of the individuals, and a clearinghouse for accurate information contrary to the popular stereotypes is both necessary and desirable.
The stereotypes that are propagated the widest are usually the least accurate description of homosexual behavior, or for that matter any behavior. The common image of homosexuals as a destructive force in society is largely due to the media’s presentation of them. Think about it. Do the newspaper headlines scream: “Heterosexual murderer rapes and kills victim?” Of course not. How often does a television news show start a story with: “A sexually straight teacher molested a young girl earlier this month. . .?” Not very often. And yet, the crime statistics show that 85 percent of the child molesters are heterosexual. Nice normal people, not queers.
What is needed most by modern society is tolerance. Not only between straights and gays, but between men, women, whites, blacks, Jews, Christians, atheists, and everybody. How can you logically discriminate against someone simply because he is Jewish, or black, or gay? It doesn’t make sense.
People should be accepted as people. Accept them for what they are. No stereotype is universally true. If you know someone who is gay and obnoxious, it is because he or she is obnoxious and happens to be gay. If you know someone who is a black jerk, it is because he is a jerk and happens to be black. There are certainly enough white jerks and obnoxious straights around to strike a balance. Just accept people as people.
Research has shown that homosexuality is normal, and in fact a range of sexuality in an individual is normal. Society’s outdated binary ideas should finally be set aside in an age of logic and reason.
If you learn that someone you know is gay, big deal. He or she is the same person that you knew before; now you simply know one more thing.
Andrew Coile is a junior radio, television and film major.
First published in the Diamondback, the daily student newspaper at the University of Maryland, College Park, on November 22, 1982.
I originally wrote this column very explicitly, and asked the Diamondback to run it under a pseudonym. They refused, because of a blanket policy against pseudonyms.
So I simply reversed the two roles in the first section, to make it ambiguous, and left everything else exactly the same, and said, “Run it!”
Some people caught on quickly, others slowly, depending on their level of denial. One person said, “You can’t be gay; your voice is too deep.” I just about fell over.
Copyright © 1995 by Andrew C. M. Coile, all rights reserved. Please send comments to andrew@coile.com
Return to
Writing page
Return to Andrew’s Home Page