Jim Andris, Facebook

The homosexual as liberator

By Jim Andris, For The Alestle

Love and Abbot, in Sappo Was a Right-On Woman, write "To create its own truth, society has built in misery, guilt, neurosis for homosexuals who attempt to exercise liberty outside certain authorized boundaries. Clearly, it is a clever trick when victims of injustice are made to look guilty."

They see the homosexual's problems as sociological ones. This society is an authoritarian, patriarchal soceity dominated by a white male power elite. This elite group keeps women, blacks and homosexuals in their place by selective sanctions.

For example, women are stereotyped as passive and weak, blacks as lazy and stupid, and homosexuals as sick and morally degenerage. What perfect stereotyping to keep the power located where it now is!

Dr. Weinberg has noted that psychiatry once wrongly stereotyped the cause of male homosexuality as having a dominating mother and a weak father. In their labeling homosexuality as sickness two blows were accomplished at once; the mother was told "don't be too assertive" and the homosexual was told "don't choose to be other than what your father was." So women and homosexuals were kept in their (lower) place.

They claim that Lesbians are a special threat to this power elite, because they are saying with their choice "We are not dependent on men for our sexual gratification or our livelihood". On this view, homosexuals are just as interested in what caused the "ruling elite" to take on their limited and repressive views of sexuality, as the "ruling elite" are interested in how homosexuals got to be the way they are.

Lesbians are also ,a threat to the argument that homosexuals don't reproduce themselves, for Lesbians can easily choose to bear children and to raise them. It was with arguments like these that Lesbians convinced the National Organization of Women that they were the most liberated from the oppresive sexual role stereotyping which characterizes America.

Dennis Altman in Homosexuality: Oppression and Liberation draws on such authors a~ Marcuse, Brown, Reich and Goodman to produce a similar line of argument. Homosexuals have a critical function in society similar to that of the philosopher. Soc- rates was put to death for being the "gadfly" of ancient Greek society. Through questioning his students, he got them to question the raditionaI values of their society.

In a similar way, the homosexual is a living example of a way of life other than the male-female nuclear family. They are living proof that members of the same sex can love each other at all levels and do not have to be set one against the other in a battle for power and control.

In another line of argument of deeper political significance; Altman sees the homosexual as a constant reminder "of the repressed part of human sexuality, not only in his or her interest in the same sex, but also in the variety of non-
conventional sexual behavior that homosexuality implies."

The patriarchal family is economically and historically tied to private property under Western capitalism with home and country as primary values, wealth and power as an individual's greatest goals. He sees sexuals repression as highly functional for the rise and maintainance of such a system.

The price the successful white male has paid for his wealth and power is the repression of much of his sexual potentiality into highly channeled and ritualized ways of expression. Hence, the male homosexual must be repressed. He cannot be granted access to social benefits, since he has not paid the price.

The female homosexual, however, is regarded as a curio. SInce women are already not perceived as vying for power, Lesbians are not seen as threatening.

Thus, on these two views, homosexuals are thrust into a significant, socially liberating role, whether they know it or not.