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By Perry Brass
"Rex Wockner: No. Never." ---From Rex Wockner's recent interview "An Argument with Barney Frank" http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/viewpoint/111901vi.htm Never, Rex? What a sweet little target you've made yourself into. Of course you've compacted your life a little bit. Got it down to the bare essentials, so that, obviously, there's nothing in it to "discriminate" against. Hate loves little targets like you: the ones that have become really focused onto their self-satisfied lives and have dismissed so many options that the hate guns don't have to work too hard to get at them. So . . . let's say: You've never tried to buy property together with another man, or faced a coop board, who could be perfectly agreeable and "liberal" to your "difference," and who would then make sure that once they did nobly let you in (and then got to spend a lot of your money), you'd never be elected to the co-op's board. You'd never be allowed to make decisions about where you live. And they could pretend for the next ten years not to be able to tell you apart-since we all look alike and it's so difficult to tell one queer man from another.
Like Siberia. And you never had to fill out a corporate insurance form for one of the umpteen garden-variety, too rich, homophobic corporations that do not make the OUT 400 list, and therefore "out" yourself, knowing that your chances then of real advancement in the corporation were literally halved. And you never tried to buy a car anyplace outside of a "gay ghetto" and had car salesmen ignore you, blatantly lie to you, or dismiss you because they automatically assumed that you were a dumb queer and were either not to be taken seriously, or be given the favor of any attention at all. You never realized that the "boys" were winking and laughing behind your back, as you got smaller and smaller, until you decided that either you had better grab the damn car and get out, or just drop the car idea. Period. And I'm sure that you never had to re-apply for health insurance after your third carrier had dropped you, and found that your new insurance agent had no idea that two men could be in a "partnership" relationship; but he'd make sure that you got the most raw deal possible, because he was now nice enough to work with you. And I'm sure that, like some of my readers in the hinterlands have told me, you never felt the least discomfort reporting to the U.S. Post Office that an obviously "gay book" you had ordered had been stolen out of your post office box, and you were now afraid of what postal workers might do to your mail. You never had to feel "discriminated against" because people felt that your reading material was "disgusting," and they had a right to intercept it. And I bet you've never had a problem involving the police, where you've had to psyche out a cop's prejudices in order to see what kind of reception you'd get either as the victim of a crime, or even as a suspect? You never had to report a robbery in which the cop's first assertion, which he did not hide at all, was that queers got robbed because they invited in strangers. Therefore, you'd be put on trial before the perpetrators were. Likewise, as a detained suspect, I'm sure you never had to delete anything that even resembled a "gay connection" from yourself that would show that because, as the cops said about Abner Louima (in enlightened New York), they had placed you in a gay bar, where you just happened to have had a toilet plunger rammed up your rectum. So I'm sure you'd feel perfectly comfy talking to a group of strangers in blue uniforms, who were three times your size, about your private life. And I'm sure you never even thought about having kids, or anything to do with having a "bio" family, either your own or your lover's. And I'm sure that now that you've narrowed your "options" down a bit-those "options" that most "normal" people consider "customs"-the idea of walking down the street holding another man's hand is totally foreign to you. Or even the idea of what the kids call PDOA , Public Displays of Affection, which absolutely traumatize many people as far as coming out is concerned. In other words, they'd rather be seen eating cat crap out of a litter box, than kissing another man outside the GAP at a suburban shopping mall. I'm sure you have narrowed this outside of any options which might be considered discriminatory. In other words, if you don't think about it-and can't try it-how can such behavior be discriminated against? Of course we have here the strange place where hate and discrimination dance around one another. Discrimination is always the simple outcome of hate, no matter how it's packaged. We cannot keep people from hating one another, as any libertarian will tell you. But legally we can try to isolate discrimination to control how it works and operates. Jews were discriminated against in Germany in the thirties and forties, only because the Nazis were able to get away with spreading their hatred of them. But most people forget that even before the Jews were universally discriminated against in that country, homosexuals were. The famous "Paragraph Seventy-Two," which made homosexuality itself a crime, was passed before Hitler came in. And even though Jews were no longer being jailed and gassed after the end of World War II, homosexuals continued to be harassed, tried, and jailed in Germany. Even after homosexuality was "legalized" in Germany, most German gays and lesbians limited their options as much as possible, so as to become invisible and not be "discriminated" against. (For instance, there were no longer laws preventing landlords from renting to openly gay men; they just were not rented to.) Having grown up in the totally segregated deep South, as a Jew, I have seen discrimination "naturalized." It was simply a natural part of the culture. Anything non-discriminatory was considered "liberal" at best, and "unnatural" at worst. People's attributes were "naturally" described. It has taken several generations, for instance, for Southern whites actually to believe that blacks don't smell differently than whites. Growing up, I was told that there was such a thing as a "Negro" smell. Faulkner wrote about it often in his novels. As a kid, I was told very little about homosexuality, except that it was unnatural, illegal, depraved, unwholesome, and disgusting. Most people of my parents' generation, gay as well as straight, would tell you that there was very little discrimination against homosexuals in the South because they were simply not recognized at all. If you are invisible, how can you be discriminated against? Maybe you're just invisible, Rex? Perry Brass's latest book is WARLOCK, a Novel of Possession (available for $12.95 at bookstores, Amazon, or through Belhue Press). It deals with that fascinating intersection between evil and business-which looks for any sucker it finds and does not discriminate all. He can be reached through his website www.perrybrass.com. |
Rex Wockner 
Barney Frank
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