|
 t
the beginning of Robert Aldrich's 1962 movie Sodom and Gomorrah,
Anouk Aimee sets out to deliver a message to the Elamites. Halfway
across the desert she encounters a stranger, who helpfully warns
her: "Watch out for Sodomite patrols!"
Where is that
guy when I need him? In Tuesday's
column, which was about ballet, I passed a comment on the movie
Billy Elliot, expressing the opinion that it was "not
bad, if you ignored the ingredient of homosexual propaganda that
seems to be compulsory in British movies nowadays." That was
when the Sodomite patrols spotted me.
Not much escapes
those patrols. Anything you say in public that annoys or offends
homosexuals will always draw a bagful of mail from them. Homosexuals,
as anyone who works on a newspaper's op-ed page will tell you, are
persistent and indefatigable writers of letters to the editor, responding
en masse to the merest perceived slight with eight-page self-justifications,
though not necessarily written, as the late Theodore Sturgeon claimed,
in green ink with purple capitals. I must say that my own experience
has been that these screeds are usually polite, written either in
a tone of wounded puzzlement ("How could you be so unkind?")
or with a sort of pedagogical patience, like the devotee of some
minor but respectable religious sect explaining its doctrines to
an unbeliever, or, at loudest, brandishing a kind of spirited defiance:
"I'm gay, and I'm proud, and I don't give a damn what you think!"
(Fine — but then why are you sending me this 2,000-word e-mail?)
Perhaps —
I hope this isn't true, but the possibility can't be altogether
ruled out — perhaps it was the actual topic of my Tuesday piece
that brought a bigger-than-normal response from homosexuals. (All
male, incidentally. I don't think I have ever had a response from
a lesbian to anything I have said about homosexuality. Either lesbians
don't read NRO, or else they really don't give a damn what
I think.) Now, it is a common
stereotype that the world of ballet, and of balletomanes, is
heavily homosexual. My own sources tell me that this is true to
about the following degrees: choreographers — 100 percent,
male dancers — 50 percent, male balletomanes — 25 percent.
(The figure for the general population is much disputed, but the
consensus among the disinterested seems to be two or three percent.)
If those numbers
are correct, it seems to me deplorable. I have expressed my own
love of ballet, and the pleasure it has given to me. I'd be sad
to think that a sphere of activity I admire so much is dominated
by one single self-interested group. Any group — Rastafarians,
alcoholics, conservative Republicans — but especially, of course,
a group defined by behavior I don't much like. However, the injustice,
possibly tragedy, of this imbalance is a topic for another day.
What I want to talk about here is the fact of my disliking homosexuality.
Let me first
take a baseball bat to the pop-Freudianism crowd: "Ah, the
reason you dislike homosexuality is that you yourself are unconsciously
homosexual and haven't the courage to face it." There
has been a slight increase in these kinds of e-mails since my novel
Fire
from the Sun came out. One of the principals in that novel
is a homosexual, and so is one of the secondary characters. Both
are drawn sympathetically (though I kill them both off — gunshot,
AIDS — before the end). Well, at least someone's reading the
thing: but it is an infantile error to deduce anything so direct
about a fiction author from his productions. Charles Dickens was
not an orphan; Daniel Defoe was not a whore; Vladimir Nabokov was
not a child molestor; Robert Graves was not a Roman emperor; Mario
Puzo is not a gangster. As a matter of fact, both my homosexual
characters are Chinese, another thing I am not (except by marriage).
The point of writing fiction is to make stuff up. Freudianism
is crap: Pop-Freudianism is crap Ph.D. (i.e. piled higher and deeper).
My feelings
about homosexuality are in fact rather mild, and are the same as
those held by most of the human race, in most times and places.
Even in modern America, after a 30-year tsunami of relentless pro-homosexual
propaganda from all media outlets, dislike of homosexuality is widespread.
You can see the numbers for yourself on
Gallup. I don't wish homosexuals any harm, and I doubt anyone
but a minority of lunatics does. I do think that homosexuality is
freakish and slightly disgusting, though, and I seem to know a lot
of people — very ordinary, hard-working, thoughtful, and civic-minded
Americans — who, in private, express the same opinion. That
opinion was, after all, well-nigh universal 30 or 40 years ago.
(And please don't drag in analogies with racism — not until
you've tried them out on a roomful of working-class black people.)
What I object
to is the assumption, rapidly becoming universal, that those of
us sharing this opinion should keep their mouths shut if they know
what's good for them, and should feel ashamed of thoughts that seem
to me commonplace and reasonable. To put it another way, I object
to the assault the homosexual lobbies are conducting on our most
fundamental and instinctual feelings, sensibilities, and, yes, religious
beliefs — the relentless effort to portray those feelings,
those sensibilities and those beliefs as illegitimate, deplorable,
and wicked. Distaste for homosexuality is about as fundamental a
feature of human nature as you can find. It is nothing much to do
with Leviticus, whatever the hate-God crowd tell you — it is,
for example, widely felt in China, where nobody has even heard of
Leviticus. The really striking thing about those Gallup graphs is
how flat they are, in spite of all the propaganda. What irritates
and annoys me is the dishonesty of homosexual propaganda
— the massive campaign to pretend that human nature is something
different from what it, in fact, is. I just don't like massive,
organized lying.
All that aside,
though, I can't say I care much about homosexuality one way or the
other. If I examine my own motivations for saying anything at all
on this subject, the main thing I am aware of is just contrarian
cussedness. I get so goddam sick of all the movies, TV shows, and,
yes, e-mails telling me how goddam wonderful homosexuals are, and
how goddam normal homosexuality is, and how goddam cruel
and bigoted and intolerant it must be not to whole-heartedly
approve of homosexuals, and cheer them on, and applaud the things
they do. Well, I know myself well enough to be sure that I am not
cruel, or bigoted, or intolerant. Nor am I aware of anyone who knows
me that believes me to be any of those things. Like Thomas More:
"I wish none harm, I say none harm, I do none harm." Do
as you please in the privacy of your chambers, but for heaven's
sake stop pushing it in my face, stop telling me how
wonderful you are, stop lying about the fact that the things
you do have health consequences (were in fact responsible for introducing
a horrible plague into our society), stop mucking up my language
by introducing illiteracies like "homophobe" and imposing
the stain of salacity on perfectly decent old English words like
"gay", stop telling me that the things I say might
be taken as incitement to crimes of violence. (What words that anyone
says about anything might not be thus taken by some lunatic
somewhere? What would we be permitted to talk about, on that criterion?)
And don't even think about proselytizing your "lifestyle"
to my kids.
All of which
is prefatory to the following little Yuletide olive (not
mistletoe) branch. It really is possible to hate the sin while loving,
or at least not minding, the sinner. If you're homosexual and something
I've written has ticked you off, look at it this way. I am
ticked off, pretty much daily, by the aggressive and dishonest propaganda
of the homosexualist lobbies, by their attempts to stifle my freedom
of speech, and by the efforts of their extremist elements to recruit
innocent kids to their practices. Millions of other people are ticked
off in the same way. If you're not a member of those lobbies —
most homosexuals aren't — and are not one of those extremists
— the overwhelming majority of homosexuals aren't — I
have no beef with you, and I can't see why you should have any with
me. You are just a person who does weird things at home, which I'd
be extremely grateful not to know about. I don't know what half
my friends do at home, and couldn't care less. And I wish you —
I really do, sincerely wish you, whether you accept my wishes or
not (mostly not, I imagine, if you've read this far) — a very
happy Christmas with the person you love. Amor vincit omnia.
|
