I am constantly fascinated by the issue of homosexuality and challenged books. I grew up in a small town in Wyoming and obviously knew of the stigma attached to being gay, I was also in high school in 1986 when I and my peers first became aware of AIDS, which made male homosexuality at least that much "worse." It wasn't until the appearance of AIDS that I realized homosexuality was problematic due to it being scary. I learned this in my discussions with my male friends when I found myself explaining why gay men were more prone to getting HIV than straight men and how that same exchange process made women much more vulnerable than straight men. It was there that I began the slow process of learning that not understanding something made it threatening.
Over the course of my life I've studied History and Folklore and this has only strengthened this conclusion. That anything that is not exactly like us (for some value of us) is Other and the other is scary. When I teach, I try to bring this up. Not necessarily on the subject of homosexuality (although if I can bring up the Golden Band of Thebes I do) but on the subject of the Other in general and how that has coloured our history and most of the wars and conquest. James Tiptree Jr. had a wonderful line in one of her stories which stated that the whole history of humanity has been to "find the other, f--k it, or die trying." Which I have followed up in my own thoughts with the idea that once we've had sex with the other, they often give birth to "us" making them us. Ultimately making everyone like everybody else.
It's getting harder and harder to object to people due to Other skin colour, race and religion, at least to do so out in the open. For whatever reason, in the realm of who one loves and who one sleeps with is still grounds for fear and therefore rejection.
This is why we feel it's ok to say that allowing people who love each other and are in committed relationships to get married with threaten the institution (this arguement always makes me want to declare that no celebrity should ever be allowed to get married because thier divorce rates are high and thier divorces are public and glamorized, but that would be a violation of thier civil rights). And, to keep this on the topic of intellectual freedom, it allows parents and religious activists to protest a book called Tango Makes Three about two male penguins raising an egg. This is a true story. I haven't investigated it sufficiently to find out if the penguins are having sex or not, but the people protesting it obviously assume they are or that children will assume they are. They don't take into consideration that male penguins are the ones who take care of the eggs in nature (or maybe they do and don't want their kids to know about that either because it might threaten "traditional" family roles, but that's just me being snarky). This is not a book about homosexuality. But it is fear of homosexuality, fear of what we percieve of as the other which makes it a threat.
It is also my personal suspicion that, given the general age group of its readers, that not a one of them is going to consider sex unless their parents bring it up. But then, I'm sheltered, I could be wrong.
My question about "Tango" is what intended audience reader can actually make the leap to human homosexuality from that book? Obviously their parents can, but that kind of extrapolation is a higher level skill developmentally. And even if they can make the leap against the odds, so what?
ReplyDeleteThe penguins aren't having sex. The do some neck wrapping, but that is as risque as it gets.
I agree. Every time I hear the Tango story, I remember an article I read back when I was still subscribing to 17 (I gave it up at about 14 when I discovered Omni). A girl wrote about how when her parents died, her two uncles who were roommates, gave up their place and moved in with her to raise her so that her life had as little disruption as possible. It never even crossed my mind until I remembered it hearing the Tango story that they might not both have been "uncles". Granted, I freely admit to having been even slower on the uptake then than I am now, but I sincerely doubt 17 would have printed that in 1983ish had that been something they thought about. I would dearly love to find that article now and run it somewhere and see what kind of reaction it got. I would be that two men disrupting their lives to make sure a girl who'd lost her parents could have as normal a life as possible wouldn't be at the top of the list.
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