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| Homophobia is back – it’s no accident that nationalism is too | Homophobia is back – it’s no accident that nationalism is too |
| (1 day later) | |
| From China to the US, prejudice is a symptom of a politics that seeks to eliminate all human difference | |
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| Sun 2 Jul 2017 15.41 BST | |
| Last modified on Mon 27 Nov 2017 20.52 GMT | |
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| As Pride season started to captivate the world’s capitals, the Chinese government was putting the final touches to its new online broadcast legislation. Although homosexuality has long been subject to restrictions on television, the approach to online content was, for a time, relatively liberal. The censors came eventually for Addicted (also known as Heroin), a teenage gay love story – but not before the internet drama had gathered a Twin Peaks-scale fanbase. | As Pride season started to captivate the world’s capitals, the Chinese government was putting the final touches to its new online broadcast legislation. Although homosexuality has long been subject to restrictions on television, the approach to online content was, for a time, relatively liberal. The censors came eventually for Addicted (also known as Heroin), a teenage gay love story – but not before the internet drama had gathered a Twin Peaks-scale fanbase. |
| The brief phase of light-touch turns out to have been an oversight rather than modernity. New prohibitions run from depicting “abnormal sexual lifestyles” to “abnormal views of the family, relationships and money”. Luxuriousness, mocking revolutionary heroes, any portrait of national disunity or deviation from “Chinese values”: all are banned from the internet in language so prim and unselfconscious that it’s hard to take seriously. It reads more like a 60s sketch about an authoritarian state than a real, 21st-century edict. Yet this is not a Chinese curiosity, it is a global story. | The brief phase of light-touch turns out to have been an oversight rather than modernity. New prohibitions run from depicting “abnormal sexual lifestyles” to “abnormal views of the family, relationships and money”. Luxuriousness, mocking revolutionary heroes, any portrait of national disunity or deviation from “Chinese values”: all are banned from the internet in language so prim and unselfconscious that it’s hard to take seriously. It reads more like a 60s sketch about an authoritarian state than a real, 21st-century edict. Yet this is not a Chinese curiosity, it is a global story. |
| Homophobia is such a bizarre rabbit warren for politics to disappear down, generating nothing but acrimony and alienation, that the temptation is always to explain it as a quirk of a particular person or context. Vladimir Putin has a hyper-masculinist sensibility; he likes to walk bare-chested among pines, hold big guns, swim with sharks. He really is quite a specific character. The splenetic excesses of his homophobia seem both entirely in keeping, from a psychoanalytic point of view, with his hysterical machismo, and unreplicable. | Homophobia is such a bizarre rabbit warren for politics to disappear down, generating nothing but acrimony and alienation, that the temptation is always to explain it as a quirk of a particular person or context. Vladimir Putin has a hyper-masculinist sensibility; he likes to walk bare-chested among pines, hold big guns, swim with sharks. He really is quite a specific character. The splenetic excesses of his homophobia seem both entirely in keeping, from a psychoanalytic point of view, with his hysterical machismo, and unreplicable. |
| The US vice-president, meanwhile, persecutes gay people with language and legislation so specific as to sound unique to the American religious right – conversion therapy, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, biblical proclamations pushed into the shape of modern life. The fact that secular Republicans have, historically, been just as impassioned about stamping out sodomy, just as ready to put hatred at the centre of their political agenda, is obliterated by the sheer spectacle of Mike Pence, the scale of his zealotry, his Old Testament wrath. | The US vice-president, meanwhile, persecutes gay people with language and legislation so specific as to sound unique to the American religious right – conversion therapy, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, biblical proclamations pushed into the shape of modern life. The fact that secular Republicans have, historically, been just as impassioned about stamping out sodomy, just as ready to put hatred at the centre of their political agenda, is obliterated by the sheer spectacle of Mike Pence, the scale of his zealotry, his Old Testament wrath. |
| The problem with many Christians in politics is that they seem to be interested only in sex: gay sex, adulterous sex, sex that results in unwanted pregnancy. If they could spend even a proportion of their time thinking about anything else in the Bible – crops, markets, usury, justice, fish – they’d be so much easier to live with. | The problem with many Christians in politics is that they seem to be interested only in sex: gay sex, adulterous sex, sex that results in unwanted pregnancy. If they could spend even a proportion of their time thinking about anything else in the Bible – crops, markets, usury, justice, fish – they’d be so much easier to live with. |
| In our own parliament, however much we might abhor the self-satisfied bigotry of the DUP, we’re far more exercised about the billion pounds heading in their direction. There’s a deep sense of injustice at the power they now wield for reasons of constitutional anachronism unmasked by Conservative incompetence. The threat they pose to pluralism and human rights, the sheer outrage of having people in parliament who think it’s any of their business what happens in someone else’s bedroom: all that can be neutralised with familiarity (they haven’t only just arrived in Westminster), whataboutery (Gordon Brown discussed a deal with them in 2010), complexity (there are myriad reasons Irish politics is so polarised) and jokes (when the deal was first mooted, someone read their manifesto and said it was basically the Bible with fortnightly bin collection; that pretty well dispatched them as a threat, for me. It is hard to violently oppose a party and find them comical at the same time.) | In our own parliament, however much we might abhor the self-satisfied bigotry of the DUP, we’re far more exercised about the billion pounds heading in their direction. There’s a deep sense of injustice at the power they now wield for reasons of constitutional anachronism unmasked by Conservative incompetence. The threat they pose to pluralism and human rights, the sheer outrage of having people in parliament who think it’s any of their business what happens in someone else’s bedroom: all that can be neutralised with familiarity (they haven’t only just arrived in Westminster), whataboutery (Gordon Brown discussed a deal with them in 2010), complexity (there are myriad reasons Irish politics is so polarised) and jokes (when the deal was first mooted, someone read their manifesto and said it was basically the Bible with fortnightly bin collection; that pretty well dispatched them as a threat, for me. It is hard to violently oppose a party and find them comical at the same time.) |
| Homophobia is on the rise on too many continents for this to be the coincidental ascendance of a few idiosyncratic characters. It comes, as it always does, with racism and sexism, the persecution of refugees and a dim-witted nationalism in which every state looks back to its glorious, exceptional, entirely misremembered past, and seeks to build a future on returning to it. It is no accident that Theresa May, a prime minister who sees dissent as un-British, and Andrea Leadsom, who sees challenge as unpatriotic, should be in government with a party that wants to erode LGBT rights. | Homophobia is on the rise on too many continents for this to be the coincidental ascendance of a few idiosyncratic characters. It comes, as it always does, with racism and sexism, the persecution of refugees and a dim-witted nationalism in which every state looks back to its glorious, exceptional, entirely misremembered past, and seeks to build a future on returning to it. It is no accident that Theresa May, a prime minister who sees dissent as un-British, and Andrea Leadsom, who sees challenge as unpatriotic, should be in government with a party that wants to erode LGBT rights. |
| Homophobia is nothing but a desire to stamp out otherness; it ends nowhere but in nationalism and control | Homophobia is nothing but a desire to stamp out otherness; it ends nowhere but in nationalism and control |
| It is no coincidence that this parliament arrives after many months of hypernationalistic political language. There is no rational reason why disapproving of the sexual behaviour of others should go in lockstep with believing your nation to be superior to all others, yet it does. These are the politics of simple answers to complex questions: your life is bad because your nation is floundering; your passion for your flag will make your nation great again; differences cannot be tolerated because difference is disunity. Authoritarians are always with us, but in stable and prosperous times most have the sense to ignore them. It is only in times of hardship that their certainty holds any appeal. | It is no coincidence that this parliament arrives after many months of hypernationalistic political language. There is no rational reason why disapproving of the sexual behaviour of others should go in lockstep with believing your nation to be superior to all others, yet it does. These are the politics of simple answers to complex questions: your life is bad because your nation is floundering; your passion for your flag will make your nation great again; differences cannot be tolerated because difference is disunity. Authoritarians are always with us, but in stable and prosperous times most have the sense to ignore them. It is only in times of hardship that their certainty holds any appeal. |
| At the end of this month, it will be 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act received royal assent, and male homosexuality was decriminalised. Half a century has passed, and history is looking less like an arc tending towards justice and more like a series of cycles: from enlightenment and progress, through a crash, war or disaster, back to superstition and authoritarianism. It is a grave mistake to miss the signs, to parry anxieties with confident assumptions that once progress has been made it cannot be unmade. It is myopic to think that Britain is alone in its debased new politics, galvanising to see the patterns in authoritarian politics everywhere. | At the end of this month, it will be 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act received royal assent, and male homosexuality was decriminalised. Half a century has passed, and history is looking less like an arc tending towards justice and more like a series of cycles: from enlightenment and progress, through a crash, war or disaster, back to superstition and authoritarianism. It is a grave mistake to miss the signs, to parry anxieties with confident assumptions that once progress has been made it cannot be unmade. It is myopic to think that Britain is alone in its debased new politics, galvanising to see the patterns in authoritarian politics everywhere. |
| Homophobia is nothing but a desire to stamp out otherness; it ends nowhere but in nationalism and control. It is far more significant, and infinitely more costly, than a billion pounds. It is never a quirk, and always a project. | Homophobia is nothing but a desire to stamp out otherness; it ends nowhere but in nationalism and control. It is far more significant, and infinitely more costly, than a billion pounds. It is never a quirk, and always a project. |
| LGBT rights | |
| Opinion | |
| Democratic Unionist party (DUP) | |
| Vladimir Putin | |
| China | |
| Mike Pence | |
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