Making it better

But the bullying continues, with what seems to be increasing viciousness, and not just in neighborhoods that voted for Rick Perry or Rick Santorum. It happens as nearby as Rutgers or, as Chelsea Jones wrote about two weeks ago in the ‘Prince,’ in Ridgefield, Conn., where kids at her high school created a Twitter account called “Namethatfag,” and did just that.

I grew up only a couple towns away from Ridgefield but hadn’t heard about the event until Jones’ column. I’m still struck by the incident, not just by the crassness and cruelty of it, but by how outdated it seems. The boys’ actions come about in a time in which homophobia is very clearly against the rules. But “gay” and its uglier synonyms are still the go-to slurs, especially among boys. “Gay” is the ultimate way to say, “you’re not one of us.”

Kids make their peers feel alienated in a variety of ways, but sexuality is different. It’s not like race, ethnicity or ability. A black kid doesn’t respond to a racist remark with denial. A Jewish kid doesn’t respond to an anti-Semitic remark with denial. But the “gay” boy? His immediate response is to deny the “accusation,” to insist that he is not, God forbid, actually gay.

For young boys, homosexuality is a differentness they cannot name, a differentness they don’t want to name. Homosexuality isn’t a behavior for them, but a way of being. And it often has less to do with sexuality than rigid perceptions of gender and masculinity.

Many of the boys who have committed suicide in the wake of bullying are not actually out, possibly not even gay themselves — as in, sexually attracted to men. They were merely perceived to be gay. Conservative politicians like to say they don’t hate homosexuals, they just hate homosexual acts, but kids are more forthright. They just hate “gays,” who they see as effeminate or flamboyant men. The bullying has nothing to do with who these kids are sleeping with; after all, few boys — either gay or straight — are having sexual relations that young anyway.

The homophobic bullying that we see in places like Ridgefield High School is a witch-hunt. There is no response to the accusation of homosexuality, no hope for “conversion,” not even a fake one. These kids — both the bullies and their victims — view homosexuality as biological, genetic and irreversible. Lady Gaga says you were born this way and should embrace it. For young people, you were born this way, so you are irredeemably cursed. You are doomed long before you’ve even committed the sin of homosexual sex, often even before you know you want to commit that sin.

The homophobia — or, better said, anti-femininity — has a lingering effect on the grown-up versions of these kids. Gay men live in a supposedly liberated gay culture that uses “straight-acting” as a synonym for attractive. There’s a division between gays who “pass” and gays who don’t, and the first are almost always considered the ideal, often leaving the second with lingering self-hatred and continued isolation from the mainstream. As the queer activist-filmmaker Yolo Akili said about effeminate gay men: “If we don’t love us, who will love we?”

The rules now say that it’s inappropriate to discriminate against men who have sex with men, or women with women. But the focus on sexuality misses a bigger issue, especially when it comes to bullying. We need to address a more significant fear against a less easily identified difference.

It’s appropriate that the current champion of the gay rights movement is a white woman from upper-middle class New York trained in performance art. She’s not gay, she’s not straight and her latest gimmick is dressing up as a male alter-ego named Jo Calderone. She “rejects labels,” transcending gender and sexuality. For Lady Gaga, it’s all a performance — she can switch her identity as she pleases. And when she takes off the meat dress or the bubble suit, she can pass in any social circle.

Some gay men are like that — their sexuality is confined to their sexual life. But for many queer people — men, women and anyone in between — sexuality has always been something more, though not always identified explicitly. The bullies at Ridgefield High and elsewhere pick up on that.

If we’re really going to make things better, and not just insist that they already are, we need to move beyond a strict rejection of homophobia to a more general embrace of difference and diversity, in which both gender and sexuality are spectra without polar ideals. We have to recognize that a gay rights movement that fails to tackle sexism and gender normativity will leave out large portions of the queer community, including those kids to whom we keep insisting: “It gets better.”

Brandon Davis is a anthropology major from Westport, Conn. He can be reached at bsdavis@princeton.edu.