Note: This article is also available in Portuguese.
If you have spent any real amount of time reading the articles, and in particular the comments in men’s movement forums, then you are aware of an often anti-homosexual attitude that has been prevalent for quite some time.
On a political level, some of the resentment is understandable. Gay activists have aligned themselves with feminists, and, while marching in misandric lockstep, have draped themselves in victim couture and made their grab for special government considerations. The resultant draconian intrusions and bullying on behalf of gays and other special interest groups is a core issue in the men’s movement, and for good reason.
Heterosexual males are the societal default for the role of perpetrator and are subsequently the identified enemy for whatever victims du jour have the stage at the moment. Just more misandry in a culture that seems to run on it these days.
But while the politics of this may have helped structure a façade of improvement for gay men, it has actually revealed something about their political agenda that becomes more apparent with each public campaign.
They have no idea who their real enemies are. No, not a freaking clue. And that ignorance sets up them up to lose more rights than they could ever hope to gain.
Allow me to digress for a moment to make a statement about gay men in general.
Gay men have invented new technology, built cities, researched cures for disease, made profound contributions to the arts, literature and philosophy, excelled at athletics and participated wholly in every aspect of the development of civilization as we know it.
But of course, they did not do these things because they were gay. They did these things because they were men. Solving problems and making advances is what men do, and there is no evidence to suggest that gay men are any less proficient at it than straight men.
And therein, in my opinion, lies the problem. We live in a culture that doesn‘t regard gay men as men. So, it would stand to reason that a movement of social awareness and enlightenment, proffering that men who are gay are no less men than men who are straight, would have been in order. And it would have served a purpose not dissimilar from what we see in the men’s movement today- to wit, that holding men to standards and expectations based on sex, while relieving women of their corresponding expectations, has led directly to their systematic, conscripted misuse as human beings.
By embracing feminist ideology and misandry, gay men only buy into the myth that they are not, and shouldn’t be, men. And by allowing themselves to be co opted by a group of ideologues that hate men to the core, they have only further undermined solutions to their very real problems.
And this leaves us with what we see in the “gay rights” movement today- a dissonant ideology that is designed to attack the very nature of who they are. For in the end, whether you are an avowed deconstructionist of traditional masculinity, or an equally fervent traditionalist that thinks real men sit tall in the saddle and lay their coats in the mud for women to walk on, gay men will remain what they are- men. And to whatever extent they seek to include themselves in the “rights“ of men in the modern Zeitgeist, they will invariably suffer the consequences for that pursuit.
The two current hot spot examples of this are gay marriage and military service. Roughly speaking, the activism that seeks to include gay men in these realms is, in reality, placing them directly in the crosshairs of corrupt family courts, and on the battlefield, where they can join straight men in being used as the cannon fodder of choice for hegemonic corporatism.
Let’s dig a little deeper into both of these gay “causes” and try to understand what they really mean.
To be sure, gays have been targeted for exclusion from legally sanctioned matrimony. And with that has come exclusions from some of the legal advantages we place on marriage. There are will and property considerations, hospital visitation, tax breaks and a number of other things largely bestowed on legally married couples. By refusing gays the right to get married, we are also refusing them many other rights taken for granted by the rest of the population.
Were things that simple, this would be a no brainer. But, as we often see when it comes to the law, things are not near that simple. And the more we examine the realities on the ground we find that a legal marriage is not a pathway to expanded rights, but a direct route to allowing state functionaries to eviscerate personal freedoms.
Also, and I don’t think this can be understated, pushing for legal recognition of gay marriage is a de facto endorsement of statist culture; a capitulation to recognizing the state, not the individual, as the ultimate authority over human relationships.
Depending on the government to legitimize your commitments is the same thing, literally, as giving the government control over them. And when the honeymoon is over -and over it will be- no one will be saved from family court by their politics, or their sexual orientation.
When newspaper stories cover gay weddings, they always run them with accompanying pictures of the happy couple(s), and some not so thinly disguised commentary about people finally realizing dreams, of being included in “normal” society. What those newspapers won’t do is run follow up stories, complete with pictures of dueling attorneys, confiscated property, false allegations, ex parte restraining orders, garnished wages and jail cells for those that don’t comply.
These are the results of the state sanctioned marriages in which gays are fighting so hard to be included.
I don’t fault anyone for demanding their fair share of misery, but as long as we are talking rights, we should also include those that are lost to this “sacred” institution.
It would seem sensible that since marriage, at least in western culture, is a religious institution, that men -all men- push for taking it out of the hands of government completely. Religious institutions would be able to marry whomever they please, which would ensure the rights of almost anyone to marry- and to suffer for it down the road.
But much better that suffering be a simple artifact of broken dreams than the for-profit destruction of lives routinely inflicted by family courts.
Family courts are a war zone, but they are nothing compared to the real thing.
In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the total count for American dead and wounded is 43,459. This number does not include the 16+ war veterans who kill themselves each and every day. 98%+ of these dead and wounded are men, by design.
Selective service is a boys club. Straight or gay, you are required to register or face time in jail. It is only women who are exempt. And if there were ever a draft again, it would be men and only men conscripted, with or without their consent.
We do have a draft of sorts, by the way. It is conveniently called “stop loss,” and forcibly extends the time on active duty when fresh meat is needed on the battlefield. In fairness, female soldiers too are subject to stop loss measures, but they still enjoy the military’s strenuous efforts to keep them out of harms way at the expense of the men. By the sex distribution of combat deaths, they are incredibly successful at it.
And for what? Oil profits? Imperialism? If we have ever had a war in defense of this country, rather than just a defense of our corporate interests, it has not been in a long, long time. Likely not in the average man’s lifetime.
All these wars are waged by an extreme minority of wealthy men, and paid for with the en masse suffering and death of much poorer ones.
Should gay men be allowed to serve in the military? Sure, and of course many do, if not openly. But again, as a political objective that purports to move a class of human beings toward more equal treatment under the law, the whole idea is a total fail.
In war, the discrimination is against men, from the induction center to Flanders Field. Seeking inclusion in it may well be a human right, but it will ultimately be at the expense of the same. Such is often revealed when taking more than a cursory glance at complicated matters.
This reminds me of a story I read some years ago that ran in The Houston Press, a local political and entertainment rag for the Houston Area. The story was about a gay man who was being repeatedly beaten by his boyfriend. He tried at several local agencies to get help, but was more or less laughed out of all of them. The Press wrote the story with the angle that he was discriminated against because he was gay. Having worked in a field that often referred victims of domestic abuse to support organizations, I knew better. I wrote The Press and informed them that the man was discriminated against because he was male, not because he was gay. There were simply no services for men, but plenty for women, including lesbians, who received help regularly.
They never published the letter.
It’s abundantly clear that they didn’t want to acknowledge the truth, even if the truth meant that men like the one in their story would eventually find some help when needing it.
Once again, gender politics took precedence over all, and the real reasons for this persons, this man’s struggle, were hidden from public view.
And this is where the men’s movement, if it heads in the right direction (my opinion of course), will make a decided difference. And when I look at the emerging mentality of the movement, I feel like we will get there.
The men’s movement, or at least a growing part of it, is about casting off all sense of expectation and obligation based solely on our sex. It is a fitting and appropriate response in a world where women are taught they are bound by nothing and can rightly choose whatever path they want in life. And it seems perfectly consistent that the unshackling of those expectations would include sexual orientation as much as it would anything else.
Coincidentally, I see growth in two areas familiar to this particular article. Men are learning to say no to marriage and to being designated bullet catchers for a small group of avaricious bastards. We are learning to tell the world around us that no one will be allowed to shame us as men, nor will they be allowed to instruct us on what a man is.
And when we learn this lesson well enough, it will provide fertile ground to allow us to see the real resentments that fester against gay men- which boil down to one inescapable fact:
Gay men are and always have been resented because they provide no utility to women. They are literally born free of the constraining and egregiously burdensome expectations that heterosexual men are still raised to fulfill.
They are, in fact, the natural recipients of what many men in the men’s movement clamor for every day- freedom from the control of women and from the control of the state on women’s behalf.
It is my hope that this movement comes to invite and include gay men within the ranks, not as gays, but as men. But I fear that this will take some real time; time for the very few within our ranks that actually hate gays for being gay to either wise up or leave, and time for many gays to wake up and understand that ideologies, like feminism, based on hating men, will only produce self hatred, and worse.
Right now the agenda for feminists includes sending men to the alter, and ultimately family courts, and to the combat zone.
Men should work together to avoid both.
