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--From John C. Wright’s screed, complete text here
Why do I bring that up again? Because a New Unpleasantness has arisen that I am not at liberty to discuss in detail right now, another ugliness that will hide behind the scenes of genre fiction publishing for now. If and when it comes to full public light, I’ll report on it here. But for now, I will confine my comments to one particular aspect, the one also stated so crudely in Wright’s asinine remarks. I speak of the persistent, disgusting and wholly evil tactic of homophobes to associate gay male sexuality with pedophilia. Again and again these people make statements that either state directly or imply that m/m love is tantamount to raping kids. It’s a psychotic obsession with them. Sometimes, as in the case of the New Unpleasantness, they couch it in phony-baloney Christian piety and condescension. In other cases, as with Wright, they are just plain foul and vomitous in their hate.
Just in case any fundies, teabaggers, birthers, Death Panelists, Palin-lickers or other dain-bramaged nitwits are reading this, here’s a sweet and irrefutable fact for you to suck on, fuckers: Child molesters are, as a species, overwhelmingly straight dudes, regardless of the sex of their victims. Regardless. Of. The. Sex. The compulsion to abuse kids doesn’t have its basis in “normal” sexual orientation and it sure as hell has nothing in particular to do with being gay. If it did, then mobs of gay child molesters would be a reality rather than just a homophobic delusion. So suck it on it, jerks. Isn’t it sweet? Its statistical irrefutability should make it go down so smoothly. You want to believe that straight men are “normal” because they outnumber the fags? Fine. But you also need to wholly own the fact that straight child molesters are the “normal” breed of child molesters, too. Statistics.
(Though I know, of course, the I-Got-Faith crowd Don’t-Need-Facts, so I don’t know why I bother.)
Science fiction and the other speculative genres are, in my view of them, places for expansive imagination, artistic honesty and intellectual integrity. This does not mean you have to be a “liberal,” but associating a whole class of people with child rapists based on a wholly delusional understanding of their sexuality is the kind of ugliness that just plain doesn’t fit into the genre fiction-publishing world anymore, and should be repelled whenever it is encountered. It is a hate tactic through and through.
Talking about molesting kids and about homosexuals in the same sentence is obviously designed from the ground up to both insult and horrify. Few things, if anything at all, sound more appalling to most people than raping a kid. Add to this the fact that everyone is indoctrinated to believe that gay sex is just plain gross, and there you have the perfect formula to attack gays. This is just the worst example of a whole host of ways that homophobic fuckwits try to gin up the “yuck” factor to turn on more primordial reptile-brain hate against the fags. When they’re not suggesting we rape kids, then they are making wild, psychotic assertions about how we generally have sex. You’ve heard it all. In their fantasy-land, 1) we fuck each others asses literally every day; 2) As a group, we have many, many sex partners, also on a daily basis; 3) We also—and this is Sean Hannity’s fave—we routinely engage in the practice of “fisting.” (Look it up if you don’t know—I don’t have time to describe it here); and 4) Indeed, our sexual proclivities are so predatory in nature that all straight men need to fear that we may look at or touch them in an icky manner. This may be entirely more information than any reader of this post wants, but I can tell you that around my house…1) No, almost never; 2) I wish! but no; 3) Never!; and 4) Most str8 dudes just aren’t hot enough for us. Sorry y’all.
When I was in high school, I worked on the student newspaper, and we covered the horrifying case of a teacher at another school was run out of his job and hounded out of town for being gay. I won’t rehash the whole story, and I won’t mention names, because I hope this guy has a decent life now and would probably not want people from those days bringing all this up again. Long story short, the persecution went like this: 1) Rumor spread somehow that he was gay; 2) Someone “confirmed” the rumor by claiming to have seen him at a park that was supposedly a notorious gay cruising area (it wasn’t); 3) Oh my God! The children! Boo hoo hoo! Will someone think of the children!; 4) Allegation from the shadows that he was also a pot-smoker; 5) Police raid on his home where they discovered gay porn, confirming the gay rumor; 6) Teacher tarred as a pedophile. Wait! What the fuck? Where did that come from? Well, yeah, being gay and working in a school…well, duh! But there’s more: a physician, who was supposedly some kind of “expert” in human physiology, examined some of the porn that was raided from this guy’s home and gave his opinion that one of the performers in one of the videos was “probably” only seventeen years of age. Child molester, ipso facto. Even back in the late 1980s when all this happened, it wasn’t possible to fire the guy just for being gay (like it would be where I live now). This was in Wisconsin, which has generally been fairly progressive on these matters, and even back then there was protection under employment discrimination law for sexual orientation. So the fact that he was a proven fag wasn’t enough: they had to suggest that he was also a pedophile. That’s how they do it.
