violence & responsibility

Last night we learned that a friend of ours got attacked by some gay men who had heard a rumor that he had transitioned. Our friend is healing well, which we're grateful for.

Obviously this made me feel disturbed and angry. I'm still mulling over my thoughts and responses - but I have a few things to say about it already.

What is it with men that we need to do violence against each other anyway? I struggle to understand how this rumor could lead someone to violence anyway. It reminds me how much violence is related to fear of the unknown and a need to prove oneself by dominating or denying someone else. We teach this as a culture, from our foreign policy down to our voting, and even sometimes our "sex" lives. I use sex in quotation marks because the intimate, vulnerable act of sex is the opposite of an act of violation. I'm reminded that men sometimes say women are "emotional" or "too carried away by emotion," but what do you call it when a man lets his emotions of anger or fear lead him to violence? And what possible gain is it, to commit violence like this, when it simply leads to more fear and anger? Where does this cycle stop?

What makes me even more livid is that it was gay men who did it. Gay men, who know that even in the Bay Area we are at risk for violence against us for not fitting the dominant mold of masculinity. Over and over, James Baldwin's analysis rings in my head: there are two categories of response to oppression. The first is to strive to get back into the norm, and the second is to find common cause with others who are oppressed. Too often, I think gay people, especially those of us who can "fit in" pretty well, take the first option. If we can just widen the circle a little bit, we think, we'll be okay - safe, happy, and smiled upon. The underbelly of this is that it continues to stand on the same principles of exclusion and violence. I learned early in my feminist education, and in my own life experience, that this simply doesn't work.

Gay men who seek to be included back into the fold of normative masculinity are cutting their nose off to spite their face. If we strive only to "be just like you [hetero men]" we lose. We sacrifice, if not a part of ourselves, then a part of who "we" are in a larger sense.

Even more, I have criticism for the gay men who buy into the norm of masculinity. These are the guys who idolize big muscles, big penises and overt, even violence, masculinity. I use idolize very consciously - meaning those who make a god or a savior of these things. It's not the attraction to these traits that I see as the problem, but the unconscious results. The implication is that a man who doesn't have a specific size and shape of anatomy is somehow not "really" a man. That kind of thinking is just a breath away from the implication that a man who has sex with a man is not "really" a man. That kind of violence is a violence against oneself as well as against other people. We have to create a culture where this isn't the kneejerk response to someone who doesn't fit our idea of what someone is "supposed" to be.

I don't know what happened in that attack - who these gay men were, or what their motivations were. But I do know that I am implicated here. When I reinforce the idea that some men are more "men" that others, based on arbitrary traits like that, I do violence against myself and others. When I try to be just like the norm, or try to stretch the norm just enough so I can fit in again, I commit violence against myself and other people. It has to stop somewhere. So let's make it stop here.