She's Back?!

Tila Tequila is back with a new show and more victims. She's gives bisexuals a bad name, I swear. Not everyone fits neatly into the 50/50 desire category, where one could flip-flop between men and women with ease. Plus like every other friggin' reality show, it has the most ridiculous stunts and challenges just to show how much you "love" Tila--you mean to tell me that by eating a pig's vagina (!) I will prove you my undying attraction? Wow. Didn't know it was as simple as that. (Guess that knocks out any stereotypical vegetarian lesbians.)

The ridiculousness doesn't end there. I came in half-way through the second episode, and apparently there were Black twins (guys) vying for a spot in Tila's heart. One got kicked off right off the bat, and so it was up to lone twin to carry out his mission--to convince Tila that her bisexuality was "just a phase" and that, pretty much, all she needed was a good dicking. The guy even went as far as to say that lesbianism, too, was just a phase. Which leads me to wonder, why is it that so many Black men continue to feel threatened by non-normative gender expression and sexualities?

"From cradle to grave, much of America has drilled into Black men the thought that they are less than men. This made many Black men believe and accept the gender propaganda that the only real men in American society were white men.

In a vain attempt to recapture their denied masculinity, many Black men mirrored America's traditional fear and hatred of homosexuality. They swallowed whole the phony and perverse John Wayne definition of manhood, believing that real men talked and acted tough, shed no tears, and never showed their emotions.

These were the prized strengths of manhood. When men broke the prescribed male code of conduct and showed their feelings they were harangued as weaklings, and their manhood questioned. Many Black men who bought this malarkey did not heap the same scum on women who were lesbians.

White and Black gay women did not pose the same threat as gay men. They were women in a patriarchal society and that meant that they were fair game to be demeaned and marginalized by many men.

Many Blacks in an attempt to distance themselves from gays and avoid confronting their own biases dismissed homosexuality as "Their thing." Translated: Homosexuality was a perverse contrivance of white males and females that reflected the decadence of white America.

Also many Blacks listened to countless numbers of Black ministers shout and condemn to fire and brimstone any man who dared think about, yearn for, or engage in the "godless and unnatural act" of having a sexual relationship with another man.

If they had any doubts about it, they fell back on the Good Book. They could, as generations of Bible-toting white preachers did, flip to the oft-cited line in Leviticus that sternly calls men being with men, "the abomination."

For many African Americans, Black gay men became their bogeymen and they waged open warfare against them. Black gay men became the pariahs among pariahs, and wherever possible every attempt was made to drum them out of Black life.

Some of these efforts have been especially pathetic. Civil Rights leader Bayard Rustin, a known gay, and the major mover and shaker being the 1963 March on Washington, was all but banned by March leaders from speaking or having any visible public role at the March. A popular Black nationalist magazine of that day frequently referred to him as "the little fairy." No Black leader publicly challenged this homophobia.

In Soul on Ice, published in 1969, then Black radical Eldridge Cleaver viciously mugged James Baldwin for his homosexuality and delared homosexuality the ultimate "racial death wish." No Black leader publicly challenged Cleaver on this point, and his outrageous theories on sexuality were praised by an entire generation of radical "wannabes."

A decade later Black gay film-maker, Marlon Riggs, hoped that the hostile public attitudes of many Blacks toward gays had lessened enough to at least permit a civil discussion about masculinity and homophobia.

In a purposely ambiguous and veiled concession to the anti-gay mood, Riggs stole a bit of the rhetoric of Black militants and proclaimed that "Black men

loving Black men is the revolutionary act of our times." It didn't work. Riggs found that anti-gay bigotry was just as entrenched as ever among many Blacks."

--MY GAY PROBLEM, YOUR BLACK PROBLEM
African American men's fear and misconceptions
contribute to their homophobia
by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Ph.D.

I really have nothing much to say. I find homophobia (and it's cousin, biphobia) repealing and a nuisance.