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Opinion Republicans’ Fresh Fixation on Vintage Homophobia

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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By Frank Bruni
Contributing Opinion Writer

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For much of my life, I was extra careful around young children, especially young boys.
I made certain not to congratulate one of them with a pat on the back, lest run-of-the-mill tenderness be misinterpreted as something else. There was no playful tousling of hair, so there would be no wrongful stirring of suspicion.
Born in 1964, I grew up when stereotypes about gay people like me were largely negative and deeply ingrained. And perhaps the cruelest of the lies about us, reflected in recurring debates about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to teach in schools, was that many gay men were child molesters. It was a facet of our perversion, a function of our deviance. To leave us alone with children was to give us an opportunity to groom them into sexual activity, so we had to be watched. We had to be stopped.
I remember that verb: groom. Its meaning was both specific and sinister.
As the decades passed, its currency seemed to fade as the prejudice it gave expression to ebbed. I stopped seeing, hearing or at least noticing it. And I pretty much forgot about it, choosing to relish progress rather than rehash the indignities of the past.
But everything old is new again, including slurs.
“Grooming,” as Monica Hesse wrote recently in The Washington Post, “has lately become a buzzword in anti-gay politics.” She went on to note that it “preys on every parent’s worst fear — someone harming their children — by insinuating that all gay or gender nonconforming people see their children as prey.”
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Are we really back here?
Oh, yes.
The debate over a recently enacted Florida law that prohibits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity among young schoolchildren was both an emblem and an engine of the demonization of L.G.B.T.Q. people as malevolent opportunists with children in our sights. And while its backers often referred to the legislation in terms of “parental rights,” some of them also spoke of it as an “anti-grooming” measure.
On her Fox News show, Laura Ingraham asked: “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender-identity radicals? As a mom, I think it’s appalling, it’s frightening, it’s disgusting, it’s despicable.” Somebody, please take away her thesaurus. She’s in adjectival meltdown.
Another television host, Sara Gonzales, who has a show on the conservative streaming service Blaze TV, responded to a video of Chasten Buttigieg speaking to children at an L.G.B.T.Q. summer camp by tweeting, “Pete Buttigieg’s husband is a groomer.”
The conservative superstar Ben Shapiro expressed his support for the Florida law by saying that he was passionate in his commitment to “protecting small children from the predations of adults who wish to talk about controversial social issues” with them. “Predations” is no accidental noun. It doesn’t just roll off the tongue. It is, more likely, “the skeleton key to this entire debate,” as Mark Joseph Stern wrote in Slate. “It reflects an angst that gay people who do not conceal their sexuality are attempting to brainwash and molest children.”

This outlandish and bigoted notion has deep roots. You see this assumption in the infamous 1961 short film “Boys Beware,” which warned schoolchildren against predatory homosexuals and was produced in part by (of course) a school district. You see it in the failed 1978 campaign to ban gay teachers from California schools. You see it in Board of Education v. National Gay Task Force, a 1985 case in which the Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law barring teachers from “encouraging or promoting” homosexuality. (The state cited a need to protect “student morality” and “traditional cultural values,” worrying about student “imitation” of gay teachers.) You see it in many ads supporting Proposition 8, which asserted that legal same-sex marriage would force educators to indoctrinate kids. (Tagline: “It has everything to do with schools.”) Now we see it in Florida, Tennessee, Kansas, Oklahoma.


Those last three states are considering laws like Florida’s, and Stern’s sweep of history is a condensed one. As my Times colleague Michelle Goldberg observed in a recent column, the anti-gay campaign that the former beauty queen Anita Bryant started in 1977 had the unambiguous title Save Our Children, and Bryant once explained its necessity by saying: “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America.”
The world has indeed advanced since then, at least on the L.G.B.T.Q. front. Ingraham’s and Shapiro’s fearmongering can’t erase the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that created marriage equality throughout the United States. Gonzales’s dig at one Buttigieg doesn’t undermine the significance of the other’s political ascent.
But I’m sobered by how much hate nonetheless remains and by how readily and unabashedly many partisans vilify gay people when they sense a tactical advantage in it. I’m scared by our resurgent popularity as scapegoats, not just here but in Poland, in Hungary, in Russia, where Vladimir Putin casts himself as a righteous warrior against Western permissiveness.
And I’m saddened, because the self-consciousness that I mentioned earlier was an awful and degrading feeling, in one sense ludicrous and in another utterly sane: I understood the world in which I was operating and was taking care to protect myself. That’s what you do when you’re the target of bigotry. It’s why such bigotry must die for good.

 
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