Internalized Homophobia and the Archetypal Feminine

There was always, back then when I was seven or eight, my "good" clothing and my "street" clothing, and my mother said that I looked good in both, but my mother really liked the way I looked in my little boy's camel hair knee length coat and camel hair pants, along with a matching camel hair cap with a little camel hair peak at the front, and a little camel hair button right on the top.  I hated that coat and pants, and I hated that cap even more.  She always dressed me up in it whenever we went "out", which usually meant into Manhattan, and I knew that it made my secret less secret, and that people would know that I was different.  They would know that I had something terrible to hide at all costs, and the camel hair ensemble gave it away, I thought, especially the cap, because I was not wearing my button-fly Levi's for kids.  By then, age seven, I knew what my secret was.  It had a name.....sissy.  I actually knew it, like so many of us, at the age of five, and I also knew I was one of them.  From ages one through four, I was aware of being different somehow from other human beings, afraid of other boys, not wanting to play their games mostly because I had no interest in them, but also because balls of any kind coming toward me, especially toward my face, frightened the shit out of me.  But, I had no name for it until I was five, and I knew that this thing that made me so different, that thing called "sissy" was the thing which was the terrible secret which shamed me the most about myself in the whole wide world.  I knew I was a sissy.  I knew I was despicable, at least back then I knew that.

I know where this shame, self-loathing, called internalized homophobia, came from in me, where it comes from still in Queer youth as well as Queer adults.  When I knew I was "different" at age three, and at age five knew I was "gay" (called sissy and faggot), how could I have known that pain of internalized homophobia, how could I have known when certainly no one, especially my parents, sat me down one day and said to me, anything like "You know, Roger, there are people in this world called homosexuals, and they are disgusting people and really don't deserve to live. They are men who act like women and women who act like men, and that's not only only wrong but also immoral.  It is against God's will and God hates them.  They are always miserable, these people, never finding happiness nor love in life, effeminate boys and men and mannish girls and women who do absolutely disgusting things in bed together, always the men with men and the women with women, and I pray to God that you don't ever become (sic!) one of those horrible men."  No one ever said anything like that to me.

I remember hearing my aunt and uncle talking about what to do on a Saturday afternoon in the summer, and they decided to go see "the dykes and fairies" play softball on Fire Island at Cherry Grove, and I knew that I wanted to be there with those people, and I also felt very ashamed because I thought my aunt and uncle knew that I was one of those fairies  I remember when I would spend summers at their home with my beloved cousin and friend Peter, sleeping in his room, and my uncle would say, "watch out for your cousin Roger during the night, Peter....he's a faggot, you know, and he also needs a brassiere" (I was, after all, a very fat Queerboy-child).  No one thought much about lesbians back then.  So, anyway, getting back to internalized homophobia, I know that no one ever said any Queer-violent words to me.  Who even talks about any kind of sex at all to any child either Queer or straight at age five?  So where did I learn this homophobia?  Where did it come from?

I cannot prove my theories, but I believe that we learn our internalized homophobia in the womb. We experience through psyche our parents' homophobia, eat  our mothers' homophobic amniotic fluid containing our fathers' homophonia as well.  We are born not only homosexual, but also homophobic.  If this were not true, how could I have known that my difference must be kept quiet at all costs when no one had said anything to me about that?  I just knew it somehow.  I knew it in my cell structure.  I knew it in my unconscious and lived it in consciousness long before I even knew what being Gay was.  Queers know only too well what homophobia is---we have it in us.

There have been some studies done by fascist right-wing so-called Christians to figure out if being Queer is a choice or if it is God-made, and they decided, of course, with their biased and bogus so-called scientific methods, that it is a choice and therefore changeable.  Interesting, isn't it, that there have been no studies to figure out if straight people made a choice to be straight or if they were created that way by the Creator?  It seems to them that we are all born straight and that somehow at a very young age we make a conscious decision not to be, at least in their minds, and the absurdity of this form of rationalization of hatred makes my mind boggle and split into pieces with utter disbelief that people could be so self-deluded.  And, of course, those "Christian" studies decided in favor of "nurture" not "nature".  According to them, God could not possibly make us purposefully.  Most every Queer knows, however, that it is not a choice to be made, that it is not even in consciousness until maybe three years old, and how can a three year old make such a choice?  But those fascists?  They think they were just born that way, the "way God wants it."  It is very dangerous thinking.  Mostly fundamentalist thinking, fundamentalists from any religion think we made a choice to be Queer, of course.  How do they know?  Did they make a choice?  Who would choose to be Queer in such an oppressive society and culture, filled with venom, hatred, and violence toward us?  Thanks be, that there are countless hundreds of thousands of us who would make that choice if there is any Queer Consciousness at all, if there is any kind of real understanding of what if means to be Queer.  If I, like so many of my Brothers and Sisters, were told to swallow a pill that would make me straight or that if I didn't I woujld be shot, I think I would rather be shot.

To be Queer is such a vibrant gift, to be drawn to the "softer" things like the arts, textures and textiles, writing, colors and patterns, poetry, design, the theater, the auditoriums and museums and galleries, to nature in its stunning splendor, to composed sonic grandeur even at its quietist, to asceticism, to the "hard" sciences,and "soft" sciences in special Queer ways, to the so-called "menial" jobs of labor and manufacturing, drawn to the professions of law and medicine, drawn to the social strands of non-violence and peace-making, to compassion and loving kindness and understanding without any strings attached, to volunteerism and altruism, and these are only a few examples of that which is Queerness or, at least, all those things that can be Queerness, that of which we are capable, although not even often nor necessarily do we live that out.  In fact, in our internalized homophobia, in our Queer communities, we often treat each other in terrible and pain-filled ways, ways that separate us one from the other breaking down community rather than building up, which is politically just what the straight bigoted world would have us do, that is, divide us and conquer.  But, building is our work: to fly with great speed to those things which make community among strangers, things of which we are naturally capable as Queers, things for which the larger society must work very hard, things which are foundational to our identity as Queers and are, therefore, easier with which to connect, without so much external noise telling us how to be on top, how to succeed and even telling us what success is, to be selfishly consumerist, materialistic, and power-hungry at other peoples' expense, to be greedy and unjust.  

As Queers, we can see the world differently than the larter majority.  We can look over and beyond the seeming reality to what is really real, to non-djualistic structures.  Our Transgender Brothers and Sisters in their wisdom have shown us and the world that even the basic former dualistic assumption of only two genders does not bare close scrutiny anymore, that there is so much more possibility than that.  Queers have shown that truth to the world.  We Queers can look like the yin/yang symbol, fully balanced with its even and seductive sweep of line between the dark and the light, with a solid, dark circle in the middle of the light mass, and a solid light circle in the middle of the dark mass, and all of it making a serene circle as a whole, indivisible and filled with an early Truth, a Truth to which we have better access than the larger majority, a Truth of balance, a Truth of balanced relationship that if we want to survive as a Queer culture, with our own language, rituals, symbols, and mythology, we must hold fast to and not let go of these things in the tidal wave of public opinion and public hatred.

If we want to survive, if the entire world wants to survive, we must remember the Eternal Feminine, the Female Archetype embodied in Goddess, the nurturer, the Earth, the Mother, the compassionate One.  She who brings life, the One who makes us feel safe, the One upon whose shoulder we can cry and know that our tears and our pain will be lovinglyreceived with no recrimination.  She is the One, along with the Father, who loves us unconditionally.  She is the Hebrew Scriptural El Shaddai, the large, big-breasted eternal woman who holds the world to her bosom, protecting it and us in Her Wisdom.  She is the Shekhina, the Sabbath Queen, in the Jewish tradition.  She is Inanna, the Goddess who lives in the light on the surface bringing life. She is Kali, the giver of life in the Northern Hindu tradition of Tantra.

But, we must also remember the shadow side, the dark side, of the Eternal Feminine, of Goddess, the seeker of revenge, the jealous One, Erishkigel the dark sister of Inanna, that dark sister who lives under the surface of the Earth in the darkness, the dark sister who would tear off our skin and cause us pain but in the process re-skin us to make us able to return to the surface, to the light.  She is Kali, not just the giver of life, but also the bringer of death and destruction with a necklace of skulls around her neck and a sword in her hand, the One with words of low self-esteem and the feeling of being nothing, no-thing, and the consequent fright, abandonment, and emptiness we feel inside our hidden wounded little children whom we carry into our adult lives. How many of us remember the harsh, embarrassing, shameful worlds of our mothers when we were children, words from her own shadow?  Words of death, words of destruction.  I suspect that most of our childhoods contained even some pain from our parents and siblings and even our extended families.  For those of you fortunate enough to have never experienced such a childhood, you are blessed indeed.  Among other things, it is the pain of the little boy or little girl who was homosexual and homophobic, and all the terror that brings.  I believe it is important to allow ourselves to feel that pain and walk through it, not around it, and not to just put our foot in it to test the temperature of that particular water, but to walk right into the fear of the pain, believing that "perfect love casts out fear" (1 John  4:18) and thus regain the yin/hang balance of it all, all of Creation of which we are a most important part--light within darkness and darkness within light. The perfect circle of the Universe.

I knew this truth about who I really am at age 18 in 1965, one semester after I set foot on the Oberlin College campus in my first year.  It was a Truth about myself as a Queerman, a Truth about the yin/yangness of it all, the wholeness and beauty of it all.  I had to come to love myself on this Earth particularly as a Queerman with a Queer identity, or die by my own hand.  I had to come out of my imprisonment in a very deep dark and terrifying closet, and find a Truth about my innate goodness and lovableness, a Truth that all of us who have ever made the liberating move out of our secrets knows, and that Truth is that as Queers we are lovingly crafted by the Great Lover with a purpose on the Earth as teachers, as teachers of life and all of its possibilities.  In 1965 I had to pierce my ears.  I had to make a visible sign during that time of general rebellion that I was not like all other men.  There were no men on campus who had pierced ears.  Were there very many anywhere back then?  I had to make a strong statement.  I was absolutely public in my sexuality, the first man at Oberlin in it entire history to be so.  When  I was in a course in American Literature and we were talking about Gertrude Stein and her writing, I would raise my hand and push the professor to explain why we were not talking about stein's sexuality as a Lesbian woman and her very long term relationship with Alice b. Toklas.  Why were we not talking about how their relationship effected their salons where so many great writers and artists and dancers would gather to discuss beauty.  In Art History when we were having conversations about the David Hockney paintings of beautiful young men in the skimpiest of swim trunks,diving into the crystaline, chlorinated water of the pool while other equally near-naked youngmen languidly lay around the pool sipping cocktails,  I would ask assertively why we were not discussing Hockney's homosexuality and how it manifested in his magnificent paintings.  We are here to teach.  That is our purpose in Queerlife.  We are here to teach peace0making, compassion, generosity, understanding, loving-kindness, altruism, and mutual relationship wherein no on has more power than the other.  We are here to declare with all celebfation who we really are.  Indeed, politically, economically, militarily, and socially we are here to teach a kind of life that is not based on whose cock is bigger, about who can wield dit as the greater weapon, about who can piss farther (the Whie House had been have that contest with the world for the past eight years).  This can occur easily among straight men, Gaymen, straight women, or Lesbians, bisexual, or Transgender people, whomever has bought into the great lie of what it means to be on top and have more at the expense of people who have less, and are forced to stay stuck on the bottom of the quagmire of a classist, racist, ageist, homophobic, heterosexist, and sexist world.

The good news is that Queers are here to teach, to fan the flames of justice, but first we must learn to love ourselves as unashamed Queer peoples, a Tribe of many tribes with a Queer history made up of many Queer histories, a Queer spirituality consisting of many Queer spiritualities, and one unique Queer legacy before we can even begin to love our neighbors and make then not our enemy.  All the great spiritual paths have taught this: the idea of no-enemy--the wise child-prophet Micah said it in the Hebrew Scripture.  Jesus taught this as primary in the "Gospels", Mohammed taught it in the Koran, the Buddha taught it in the Sutras.  We find it in the various Gitas of Hinduism, in the Tao Te Ching of Lao-tzo, and the Inner Chapters of Chuang Tsu.  They can't all be make the same mistake.  Thousands of years of wisdom can't be all wrong.  We are deceiving ourselves if we think they are.