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Perverts Roamed the Earth |
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By Perry Brass
When I was a kid, back in the early sixties, I was sure that homosexuals could not exist. They had to be mythical creatures, like the one-eyed, human-flesh-eating Cyclops in The Odyssey, since no real people could be as reviled, loathed, and feared as I was made to believe "queers" were. As Phi Beta Kappa scholar Joseph Epstein wrote in his early seventies Harper's magazine story on homosexuality, he would sooner murder one of his beloved sons than see a kid of his condemned to this "permanent niggerhood."
The animosity towards gay men (and lesbians, too, for that matter: girls did not escape this hatred) was so intense that it actually escaped rational reality. It spread into a mythical atmosphere of contempt for any and everything that was not "normal" and did not promote home, hearth, patriotism, boyhood, and all that the public was taught kept the earth revolving, "normally," on its axis. This confection of goodness, normalcy, and acceptable, decent business practices is still the true American religion that we revere. However, those who believe in it in its purest form have to work a little harder to recreate its rituals. In short, the Old True Religion is no longer knee-jerk and automatic. There has been so much dirty water under the bridge, that the bridge itself is now in danger. So, the question is, what will replace our national quest for all that is Good and publicly Normal? This brings me back to another memory: hearing, when I was a kid, my mother and some of her friends whisper about that "Creature from the Black Lagoon" bogeyman believed lurking in every sewer, i.e., the "child molester." This conversation was definitely not for children. But I got little whiffs of it. It was enough to terrify any child. And I heard the kind of punishment that these men deserved. It was at least castration and death. I still remember the violence of their loathing of these monsters, and I did wonder what these molesters did. Did they beat kids to death? Tie them up and kick them? Constantly brutalize and humiliate them? I had never known anything that resembled a child molester or known anyone molested, but I had known the kind of violence at home that I later associated with a state of war, from a secretly schizophrenic mother who was prone to extended periods of terrifying hallucinations. So if you can imagine waking up into a nightmare worse than sleeping, that was my childhood- I was, of course, too scared to ask any questions: a state that kids are supposed to stay in. But I knew that somewhere, out there, were these big Monster-molesters and you were never supposed to get into a car with them. (This made me fear getting into a car with anyone, other than my parents.) At twelve, due to the generosity of wealthier relatives, I was packed off to a Southern-Jewish summer camp, Camp Barney Mednick near Charleston, which combined the two lovely attitudes of Southern racism and Jewish smugness. In our six-bunk cabin, I made the mistake of admitting to my camp counselor, a lean, hunky, twenty-year-old six-footer, that I was really not interested in what girls looked like physically. Being a quiet, bookish lad, I said something to the tune of: "I want to get to know them first." He smiled very knowingly at me, and said, "What are you, some kind of pervert?"
I did not understand that only perverts harbored attitudes like that. In fact, I thought the word "pervert," like the word "divert," wasn't even that bad.
Back at home again, I told Mother that Uncle Phil had called me a "pervert." I smiled as if it were kind of a funny thing to be called. She jumped at me, grabbed me by the hair, and started shaking me. "He called you WHAT? Are you sure? Do you know what that word means?" I was speechless. She slapped me several times, saying, "Never use that word again! Never use any word you don't understand, unless you're sure you know what it means." She calmed down a bit, then asked, "Did anyone else hear him say it?" I was scared she would try to call the camp long distance from Savannah and look up Uncle Phil and tell him off. She was menaced by the specter of the word itself, and frightened that "pervert" might be attached to her son at age twelve, the way that "mental patient" might be attached to her. These things could spread like wildfire. I was a small kid, and she started stalking me around my room. I was too frightened even to cry out. I sobbed quietly, out of pure fear. "Perverts," she finally said, "will do anything. They smoke marijuana cigarettes and prey on kids. You're never to go anywhere near perverts. And never let anyone call you that! If anyone ever calls you that, let me know." I did not return to Camp Barney, and learned never to talk about girls except in a manner that I figured out normal boys used. This kind of talk became normalized to me and--I learned--the rest of the civilized world. It is the lingua franca that sells everything on TV, and proves you are a regular citizen. It was also part of the regular world of boys, that hard, alien island that has no bridge to anything else except football, beer, fast cars, and the rest of what I secretly believed was all brain dead. Religion was, too, was supposed to play a strange part in this isle of normal boys. It was both an arbiter of "normal" and something "super-normal," in that it "opened up your heart" to something other than baseball, football, and girls. (Or, as we used to call that last experience in the South, "pussy-hunting.")
I knew it physically and emotionally, rather than verbally. The "queer" word scared the shit out of me (and it's always interesting that the word "scared" and "sacred" use the same letters) but there was already something physically inside me that knew that I was headed for what Mother would surely call "Pervertdom." It was that little bit of reality and truth that kids keep inside them, no matter how violently the world tries to beat it out. I could feel that hard kernel inside me. I can still feel it and know it in my mind's eye; I can remember it. Even touch it. It was extremely powerful. It was like having a time bomb inside me, connected to my heart and genitals. Through this period, religion (in my case being Southern and Jewish) became a makeshift refuge from the playgrounds of boys and bloody hunts of adult men. My father was a Southern-style hunter, which meant that I grew up in a woodland landscape of shotguns, packs of hunting dogs, and bloodied animals. Early and instinctively, I knew that Daddy and his buddies could easily hurt me, too. I could not masquerade with them as a regular boy. I needed someplace of my own, and the "Jewish thing" became it, this little place where I could exist with that most unquestionable Big Daddy figure Himself: God. For me, as for many other queer boys of every stripe and belief, religion became that clearing in a violent woods. I'm sure that a thousand years of monks, gurus, and shamans have proceeded me there. There, too, my father and I could meet, since we could not in that place of guns and dead animals. I began to see religion, then, as this powerful thing that belonged to me. I could share it with others like myself and we could use it to exclude boys who could not enter God's territory, because they were stuck in "real boyhood," where baseball, cars, and girls--the "secular religion" of America--was worshipped. I entered, then, this religious "hobby," as so many other boys did, with an instinctual belief that if, on the deepest level, I didn't really question God--and all the vast business around Him--He would not question me. In short, if I admitted nothing, God would not pull it from me. My father, who died when I was eleven, was greatly pleased. Judaism is basically a male job, and he'd had enough religious education to share this feeling of belonging and otherworldliness with me. He was also extremely imaginative, and did not denigrate many of my own fantasies. In fact, he could co-exist with them. My mother, though, hated it. Unlike in Catholic families where the mother pushes the son to become a priest and the father feels (if he can allow himself that much honesty) that his son has now been pushed into that castrated little clique of men in dresses where he can not follow, Mother did not want to share me with God, or anyone. She was having too good of a time destroying me herself. However, as a small Jewish kid in the deep South (who was a "queer" by any other name too), I began to realize things that I wasn't even supposed to think, much rather feel. One was this sense of feeling deeply alone, and the other was that almost everything around me was a lie. If I questioned it, I'd be slapped; but it was still a lie. The "verities" of race were lies: that is, that Negro people were unevolved animals whom, at the very most, white people were supposed to "take care of," as they might watch over farm animals. At the worst, they would harm them, but no one was supposed to talk about that. The "verities" of class were also lies: that some people were just better, because they were "nicer," "whiter," and, of course, drove more expensive cars. And there were the "verities" of how you were supposed to react to girls--nice, but with a hardon; and "verities" about boys, and baseball and everything else. They were all lies, too. All of this was supposed to make you normal, happy, and a regular guy. That lie is still told to all boys, but it is part of a game that's even bigger than baseball. Now, there were things I did not know and would not find out for a long time-like how cruel human beings can be; that my own queerness could be marvelous, if I just accepted it without trying to make any bargains (for instance, trying to be a little saint, so God might love me); and that all the lies that people tell themselves and others in order to survive, survive, too. What made me think about all of this was the situation now with "child molesters" and the Catholic Church, a situation which I'm sure the Silent Minority of the right will spread way beyond the Church. Bill Clinton's being branded a "sexual predator" in the Monica Lewinsky set up was simply the prelude to this.
I keep wondering: when the truth about life finally hits, how many "normal" people who've bought into all the lies will be left standing? And the answer is: None. 
Perry Brass's newest novel is WARLOCK, A Novel of Possession,
that does deal with the interesting intersection of business and evil.
His "domestic partnership" is not underwritten by any of the Fortune 500.
He can be reached through his website www.perrybrass.com. For more information
on WARLOCK, go to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ASIN/1892149036/107-8161877-7587701
Telephone: 1 (800) 365-2401.
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Although "pervert" was a word I did not hit before twelve, I knew by eight or nine that I was--certainly on retrospect--a "queer."
© 1997-2002 BEI