Organized Ugliness and Gay Suicide

For those interested, I have a new article in today's Religion Dispatches, "Gay Suicide and the Ethic of Love."

Let me say that this is something I care about on a very deep level, sometimes (I suspect) to the detriment of my health. The other day when I read about yet another suicide by a young gay man, this time here in Oklahoma, I paced my kitchen in a rage, hissing recriminations under my breath against those whose hateful views drive too many sexual minorities to the brink of despair--and then over the edge. After a few minutes of this I felt as if veins in my head were about to burst, and I had no doubt that if someone were to take my blood pressure at that moment they'd want to whisk me off to the emergency room.

And so I did something more productive: I sat down and started to write. Since the most recent suicide had everything to do with the substance of my recent talk, "God and Gays," I connected the dots between this tragic death and the points I made in that talk about what love for our gay and lesbian neighbors requires.

As I wrote, I kept recalling the snippets of hateful comments, delivered in self-righteous tones, that I'd heard through news reports about the Norman City Council meeting where young Zach Harrington was driven to suicide. I visualized them, one after the other, lining up at the microphone to deliver the same message that Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church deliver at Gay Pride Parades and funerals with their garish signs.

Of course, at the city council meeting these messages were sanitized a bit. Phelps, at least, is more honest in his hate. His signs say "God Hates Fags" and "Fags Die, God Laughs." While this is an appalling message, it is somehow less appalling to me than the more sanitized one, which runs something along the following lines: "God despises the perversion of homosexuality, which is a blight on His creation. But He loves homosexuals, and so wants to save them from the fiery pit of eternal anguish He intends to fling them into if they don't change their sexual orientation. And I love them, too, even though they are sick and disgusting."

This kind of message, because it is wrapped in the occasional assurance of love, has greater power than Phelps' hate speech to creep into the psyche of gays and lesbians--like a poisoned pill with a candy coating. But it wouldn't have this power were it not for the broad influence it has, the status it possesses as a legitimate social view (and, in some parts, as the dominant social view). In the absence of that, it would be easy to see through the sugar-coating. But for those gays and lesbians who grow up steeped in a message of rejection, the idea that this rejection is only conditional, that it might be rescinded if only the person would stop being who they are--this message can become internalized. That is, gays and lesbians can hear it and try to meet the condition of acceptance--and when they fail (often after a period of pretense), they blame themselves rather than the purveyors of hate. And so the condemnation of who they are becomes self-imposed, turning into a self-loathing that is a short step from self-annihilation.

At other times, even if the self-hatred does not sink in all the way, the experience of alienation from the community, the sense of being alone in the world and despised by the community, can lead to suicidal despair.

This strident rejection of gays and lesbians (cloaked in self-rightousness and scriptural appeals) is what was on display at the Norman City Council meeting. But there were also representatives of a more progressive view. About half the crowd had come to speak in support of the proclamation of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender history month (which, by the way, was approved). But half the crowd had come to shout it down with all the organized vitreol they could muster. So why did Zach Harrington hear the latter and not the former?

As I was writing my article, the answer came from my friend and co-author John Kronen, who called to share with me (for reasons having nothing to do with what I was writing) the following quote from Rabindranath Tagore. I think it speak powerfully to the reality that was on display at that city council meeting, a reality that, somehow, those of good will must find ways to overcome. Here is what Tagore says (from his 1917 book Nationalism):

"But the danger lies in this, that organized ugliness storms the mind and carries the day by its mass, by its aggressive persistence, by its power of mockery directed against the deeper sentiments of the heart….Therefore its rivalry with things that are modest and profound and have the subtle delicacy of life is to be dreaded."