No-Nonsense Guide to Sexual Diversity, 2nd edition by Vanessa Baird

Author:Vanessa Baird [Baird, Vanessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781897071342
Goodreads: 17221807
Publisher: Between the Lines(CA)
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

But whether traditionalists like it or not, actual, real families are changing.

‘Thank God my family accept me as I am and love me just the same,’ says a gay 19 year old from Malta.

While a young lesbian in the Netherlands reports: ‘In my family it is accepted very well. My aunt on my mother’s side is a lesbian and the brother of my father is bisexual. This helps a lot.’7

In countries where they have been won, gay legal and political rights have also validated the creation of these new, alternative families and given them some protection from being torn apart by heterosexism.

One of the main advantages of anti-discrimination legislation in Ecuador, says activist Irene Leon, is that now if someone tries to take children away from a woman because she is lesbian she can refer to her constitutional rights.8

Gender control

Although the threat to ‘the family’ is one of the most common ideological expressions of homophobia, the real objection is probably more deep-seated: it has to do with gender.

Deviation from heterosexual norms is threatening because it seems to challenge the conventional rules governing a person’s sex, their sexual preferences and the general female and male roles in society.

The assertion of homosexual identity clearly challenges the apparent naturalness of gender roles. That women might find full emotional and sexual fulfillment with each other is clearly a threat to many heterosexual men.

The position, held by some lesbian feminists, that lesbianism is the logical response to male oppression, appears to confirm the conservative fear that homosexuality undermines the traditional roles of the sexes. And if men establish primary relationships with each other this too suggests that there are ways of organizing emotional and sexual lives other than those approved of by religion and state.

Extremist religious leaders and their followers target sexual minorities and women first, observes Anissa Helie of the Women Living Under Muslim Laws Network. ‘The very same rhetoric,’ she says, ‘is used to justify repression against homosexuals, feminists or ‘different’ women – who all are systematically denounced as non-Muslim, non-indigenous. It is always through manipulation of religious, national or cultural identities that violence is legitimized.’8

One reason sexuality and gender conformity are the focus of so much attention by fundamentalist forces, is that autonomy – especially for women – is a threat to authoritarian and patriarchal control.

Absolutism versus pluralism

Homosexuality in itself may not pose a real threat to any established social order or regime. After all, various ultra-conservative regimes have tolerated a sort of closeted homosexuality. And the increasing prominence of gay conservatives – especially in the US and Britain – shows that liberalism around sex can be made to dovetail with economic liberalism.

The real threat comes when sexual-minority activities become part of an alternative way of life in societies where alternatives are not generally tolerated.

‘When people endorse the idea of sexual pluralism,’ argues social historian Jeffrey Weeks, ‘they are also implicitly endorsing social and political pluralism. When they affirm their lesbian or gay identities, when they assert their sense of belonging to

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