Gay Persecution Rising Around the World

From Reuters via Common Dreams, a report on a new book chronicling worldwide homophobia:

The book, "Sex, Love and Homophobia," offers an overview of the experiences of gay, lesbian and transgender people around the world and gives a snapshot of their status in various societies today.

One British gay man interviewed describes how he was subjected to "aversion therapy" as a teenager in the 1960s because his mother could not accept her son was gay.

"I was locked up alone in a mental institution for 72 hours with supposedly gay pornography and given drugs to make me vomit and become incontinent," he said. "They said the next part of the treatment was to apply electrodes to my genitals. After three days I begged to be let out."

In the United States, Baird notes an increasing polarization of attitudes. "While San Francisco boasts the largest openly gay community of any city in the world, anti-homosexual movements in Kansas, Ohio and Colorado advocate as a 'Christian duty' the rejection, and in some cases even killing, of gay people."

"And this is not all just a small group of nutters in the mid-West," she told Reuters. "This kind of evangelism is growing, and unfortunately a substantial part of it is homophobic and says homosexuality is a sin or a disease."

Baird's book also focuses on countries where homosexuality is punishable by death -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Mauritania, Sudan, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Yemen and northern provinces of Nigeria.

Click here for the rest.

As a young Republican Southern Baptist fresh out of high school back in the mid 80s, I was rather homophobic myself. Then I changed my major to theater; it was sink or swim, and I learned to swim. After a few years of working, socializing, and eventually living with homosexuals, every pseudo-intellectualized reason I had to support my anti-gay views drifted away like so much smoke. There are no good reasons to hate or even dislike people for being gay. Sure, there are homosexuals I dislike, Andrew Sullivan for one, but that has nothing to do with sexual orientation.

Ultimately, homophobia, among straight men anyway, has much more to do with gender socialization than anything else. That is, men are not generally sexually objectified in our culture in the way that women are; because we still live in a highly patriarchial society, the potential for being objectified becomes an attack on a straight man's sense of power and control, which is tantamount to an attack on masculinity itself: gay men turn straight men's sense of identity completely upside down. Not understanding all the social and psychological elements coming into play, some straight guys freak out and develop fear or even hatred of gay men. Arguments about "God's will" or "nature" are bullshit--after all, homosexuality is simply one sin among many for Christians, and there are numerous examples of homosexuality found in nature.

It's goddamn sad that people don't think things through more clearly.

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