The Dark Heart of Homophobia
I’m riding the bus when we come to a stop near a local high school. Five teenaged males get on. They’re all jocks—football, probably. Their jackets are emblazoned with varsity letters and they appear to be fresh from practice. Each carries an oversized duffle.
They are boisterous and full of menacing bravado. The bus is immediately overwhelmed with testosterone. As they move toward the back, they purposely jostle everyone in their path. They’re rude and crude and every other word is fuck.
The bus lurches forward, and my fellow passengers instinctively know not to make eye contact. The older women clutch their belongings tight to their bosom. Everyone is tense.
The pack mentality emboldens the young men, who are flush with their newly discovered sense of male privilege. Hormones rage in their adolescent bodies, yet there is an awkward childishness about them. They are alphas, but only in as much as they are part of the pack.
They have off-color comments for everyone around them. Girls are singled out for the most abuse. They make insinuations about sexual prowess, while pawing at their groins. The women blush with embarrassment.
Despite being loud, obnoxious and brutish, they lack conviction. They giggle too much, indicating self-consciousness. It’s apparent that, at their core, they are still very uneasy about themselves, and have yet to grow into and own the alpha maleness they mimic.
The bus approaches the next stop, and several of us get up to exit. A nerdy boy with glasses and a violin case accidentally trips over one of the teen’s duffle bags. This is the spark. The jocks erupt, lunging at the offending kid. Easy prey. He’s petrified, but his survival instincts kick in, and he quickly maneuvers further up the aisle. I grab his shoulder and push him toward the door ahead of me. He makes his escape.
Now I’m in the line of fire. The rear door is only a couple steps away, but I stand my ground. The jocks size me up. I’m not an easy mark; I’m older and more dominant than any of them as individuals, but they trump me as a group. I may even be dangerous. In a split-second, the teens reevaluate the situation and instead of coming at me, they try to take me down with their best verbal shot: “You motherfucking fag!”
I move to the door. This could end very badly for me, but I will not show weakness. Adrenaline courses through my bloodstream. I alight from the bus, holding the door open so I can briefly yell back. “Hey, thanks for the recognition. Oh, and for your information, its father-fucking, brother-fucking and/or son-fucking fag, never mother-fucking. Get it?”
By the time the jocks realize what’s happened, the bus is in motion, and I am safe.
As the teens thought better of physically attacking me, they did the next best thing. It’s what most other threatened males would do: they attempted to diminish the threat by calling my masculinity into question, in that time-honored way—by inferring I was queer, a sissy and a defective male. Trouble is, I am queer, and I owned it—right in their faces. On top of that, I stood up to them and even had the temerity to publicly shame them. So that had to be unsettling to them on several levels.
They are boisterous and full of menacing bravado. The bus is immediately overwhelmed with testosterone. As they move toward the back, they purposely jostle everyone in their path. They’re rude and crude and every other word is fuck.
The bus lurches forward, and my fellow passengers instinctively know not to make eye contact. The older women clutch their belongings tight to their bosom. Everyone is tense.
The pack mentality emboldens the young men, who are flush with their newly discovered sense of male privilege. Hormones rage in their adolescent bodies, yet there is an awkward childishness about them. They are alphas, but only in as much as they are part of the pack.
They have off-color comments for everyone around them. Girls are singled out for the most abuse. They make insinuations about sexual prowess, while pawing at their groins. The women blush with embarrassment.
Despite being loud, obnoxious and brutish, they lack conviction. They giggle too much, indicating self-consciousness. It’s apparent that, at their core, they are still very uneasy about themselves, and have yet to grow into and own the alpha maleness they mimic.
The bus approaches the next stop, and several of us get up to exit. A nerdy boy with glasses and a violin case accidentally trips over one of the teen’s duffle bags. This is the spark. The jocks erupt, lunging at the offending kid. Easy prey. He’s petrified, but his survival instincts kick in, and he quickly maneuvers further up the aisle. I grab his shoulder and push him toward the door ahead of me. He makes his escape.
Now I’m in the line of fire. The rear door is only a couple steps away, but I stand my ground. The jocks size me up. I’m not an easy mark; I’m older and more dominant than any of them as individuals, but they trump me as a group. I may even be dangerous. In a split-second, the teens reevaluate the situation and instead of coming at me, they try to take me down with their best verbal shot: “You motherfucking fag!”
I move to the door. This could end very badly for me, but I will not show weakness. Adrenaline courses through my bloodstream. I alight from the bus, holding the door open so I can briefly yell back. “Hey, thanks for the recognition. Oh, and for your information, its father-fucking, brother-fucking and/or son-fucking fag, never mother-fucking. Get it?”
By the time the jocks realize what’s happened, the bus is in motion, and I am safe.
As the teens thought better of physically attacking me, they did the next best thing. It’s what most other threatened males would do: they attempted to diminish the threat by calling my masculinity into question, in that time-honored way—by inferring I was queer, a sissy and a defective male. Trouble is, I am queer, and I owned it—right in their faces. On top of that, I stood up to them and even had the temerity to publicly shame them. So that had to be unsettling to them on several levels.
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