Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters

I've almost finished reading Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters, by Alvin McEwen. The subtitle is Exposing the Lies of the Anti-Gay Industry. This book is an eye-opener.

Here in our little county a couple of years ago we had a flare-up of ugliness that called itself the Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum. I'm afraid I went into this a little innocent, I didn't realize how organized and crazy these people are, I thought it was just some ignorant people, and didn't realize the extent of the machinery that's in place to keep them ignorant and make them think they're right. But man, these people really seriously believe that everybody else's private life is their business. And as McEwen shows, it is, literally, a "business" -- an industry.

Can somebody tell me, why is there an "anti-gay industry" in the first place? What is it about gay people, of all the things in the world, that ties these people up in knots? I've heard the Family Blah Blah stuff, the destruction-of-the-institution-of-marriage, breakdown-of-morals, criminalizing-Christianity -- I mean, really. They can't believe that. What in the world drives these people?

I think a hint toward answering this question comes from a quote in Holy Bullies from anti-gay fake-researcher Paul Cameron, a guy who is really at the center of the anti-gay industry. Cameron told Rolling Stone magazine:

If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one's own personal amusement, and all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get -- and that is what homosexuality seems to be -- then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist. The evidence is that men do a better job on men, and women on women if all you are looking for is an orgasm.

I have the feeling that you won't find a lot of actually-straight guys who think that orgasms with other men are "too powerful to resist." Some people though have to fight against the irresistible appeal of this must-be-better-than-anything sex, because ... well, I don't know why. If you're going to like it that much, why don't you ... I just don't get it. I mean, you don't have to think of sex as something for your "own personal amusement" to appreciate a mind-blowing orgasm, do you? It looks like there are some really twisted psychodynamic forces at work there.

In Holy Bullies, McEwen patiently lays out the characters, the fake-research they cite, the kinds of lies and rhetorical devices they use to convince people that there is a real conspiracy they call the "homosexual agenda," which is a plot to destroy civilization as we know it. I think this agenda is supposed to start with gay people recruiting children, and somehow results in everybody abandoning their families, maybe because of the irresistible pleasure of same-sex orgasms, I don't know, they're never very clear about how that works, but the next thing you know, Western civilization has collapsed. McEwen has done a ton of reading, and I'm glad he has spent the energy to put together a resource like this, so we don't have to dig through it all ourselves, barf-bag in hand.

In the past three years of working with the school district and the county, we've seen a lot of this anti-gay talk, from "love the sinner, hate the sin," to fake statistics and quotes taken out of context from the forgotten past, to petitions based on false pretenses, to messages twisted and distorted beyond the point of recognition ... We've seen real tears over supposed lost souls, lectures on the danger of ingesting feces, and an impassioned crusade to prevent unisex bathrooms in the public schools. We have been told that tolerance leads inevitably to AIDS, and have been warned about a lurid "lifestyle" that has actual gay people scratching their heads and wondering why they were left out of it.

And that's just Montgomery County.

Holy Bullies recounts the origins of the hateful movement that lies behind groups like the Citizens for a Responsible <insert_target_here>, going back to the original sources of some of the statements that get morphed and exaggerated over time. Sometimes it'll go like this: one twisted guy publishes some amateurishly-assembled numbers in a pay-to-publish journal; someone else cites the numbers as "research" and draws some wild conclusion from them; and then the others cite the conclusion as fact based on scientific evidence. Spurious allegations propagate through the rightwing media, retractions never do.

I was especially enjoying a section in Chapter Seven called "job discrimination and the anti-gay industry." If you've been following the local plot, you know that the Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum are now starting to call themselves the Citizens for a Responsible Government, since it turned out their interest was not actually a curriculum, but just anything against sexual minorities at all. The latest outrage for them is a new county law that prevents discrimination in jobs, among other things, against transgender people. So I'm reading this book and I am seeing the same names and the exact same arguments here that the CR-whatever is making. They want a referendum -- it turns out these groups always want a referendum. They can't live with the American system of government, where we elect representatives and let them and the judiciary work out what the laws will be and how they will be interpreted and enforced. No, a referendum is the best thing for these guys, because you can whip the populace up with falsehoods in a way that would never work with professional lawmakers. You can tell the public that a law is about, say, perverted men exposing themselves in women's locker rooms, and of course people will be upset when they hear that, and they'll sign a petition or vote to repeal the bill. A real elected policy-maker will have read the actual bill, will probably talk to some lawyers about what it means, and has skills and abilities that make them especially qualified for those kinds of decisions. So when you wave a red herring at them, they see it for what it is. The system works, which is why these groups have to try to go outside it.

I bought the book from Amazon.com, but you can get it from a lot of places linked from McEwen's website, called not surprisingly, HolyBullies.com.

I should mention proudly that Alvin has been a member of our Yahoo group for two years, and has been a frequent and articulate commenter on this blog. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the dark world of gay-haters, and is often able to tie together things in a way that makes sense out of apparent random statements by raving lunatics.