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When I was thinking about what I wanted to write this evening, my mind kept going back to Michael Scott from The Office.
Although not a perfect comparison by any means, some straight liberals have come across an awful lot like Michael in recent days and weeks. Michael never really meant any harm. He probably thought of himself as an “ally,” and he certainly didn’t think he had any problems with homosexuality. Nor did he ever realize just how offensive his comments and jokes were to other people in the office—and he wasn’t so great about listening when people tried to explain it to him, either.
For obvious reasons, there has been a great deal of discussion about Trump’s relationship with Putin lately. Some of that discussion has drifted away from treason and kompromat and toward another storyline: Trump’s sexual infatuation with the beefcakey Putin. It’s funny because they’re gay together. You may have seen the video tweeted by the New York Times, which generated quite a lot of debate this week:
Here on Daily Kos, there was a diary posted recently (I’m not going to link to it, but you could probably find it easily) that openly speculated about the possibility of Trump’s homoerotic attraction to Putin. That diary, to the credit of Daily Kos, was pretty roundly condemned. One comment by surfbird007, in particular, stood out as a well articulated explanation for why many LGBT people (myself included) are uncomfortable with this kind of soft homophobia (since, hey, this is Top Comments):
I read the whole thing, and it’s homophobic for reasons you seem incapable of understanding. It’s not one single passage, it’s the content taken as a whole. The reason is that you’re generally using homosexuality as a rhetorical cudgel against Trump and his supporters, and no matter how humorous you seem to find it or how much you try to obfuscate that point with how you “address” them in the text, that simply isn’t funny or welcome to most queer people and their allies.
To be clear, I don’t think we’re talking about a homophobia problem among a majority of liberals. Yet this kind of Trump-Putin homoeroticism talk persists, whether it is framed as “serious” analysis or as “humor.”
But the main reason I’m writing this diary—other than the fact that it really, really gets under my skin—is to shine a spotlight on an excellent piece on the subject written by James Michael Nichols, editor of HuffPost Queer Voices. The article is largely responding to the abhorrent New York Times tweet, but it’s really aimed more broadly at this kind of Trump-Putin homosexuality “humor.” When I hear people who are supposed to be LGBT allies laughing about Trump and Putin being gay for each other, a part of me is transported back to my school years, when lack of masculine conformity and homosexuality were weapons to be wielded against those perceived as weak. It sort of makes me wonder just how welcome queer people really are in this big tent of ours. James Michael Nichols, however, explains it much more eloquently:
What is so remarkable about this short animation is that it relies entirely upon the premise of homophobia in order to make an impact. There is no larger message, no big-picture takeaway. Just the supposed humor embedded within the idea that tenderness between two men is in some way mockable.
[...]
But these reductive depictions of Trump and Putin are all built upon an underlying and insidious foundation of homophobia ― an idea that men who love or have sex with other men are in some way weak, more effeminate and inherently contemptible than those identifying as straight.
He continues, getting to the heart of what I am trying to describe above:
LGBTQ people, and queer men in particular, have had to contend with and fight against how masculinity has shaped and affected their lives throughout the course of human history.
[...]
And effeminate men, myself included, have to think every single day about the way that their “failure” of masculinity could potentially impact their safety as they navigate the world. As a result, it’s pretty difficult to not read joking same-sex affection between Trump and Putin as a “fuck you” to queer people.
He calls it “weaponizing sex and romance between men,” and I think that hits the nail on the head. There’s more—I’d quote the entire article if I could, to be honest. All I can do is recommend that you read it in full.
I don’t believe that most people who engage in this kind of talk are trying to be anti-gay or bigoted. But I think it’s worthwhile for everybody to consider the larger implications of their words, especially when those words can have an impact on our progressive allies.
Top Comments (July 20, 2018):
From Chrislove:
There were no Top Comments submissions tonight. Rather than nominate a specific comment, I’d just like to nominate all of the comments from Bill in Waco Texas’s rescued diary Gay College Life — Then And Now. I found the entire thread and its multiple perspectives well worth reading.
Top Mojo (July 19, 2018):
Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
Top Pictures (July 19, 2018):
Tonight’s photo quilt is courtesy of jotter!