The Dictionary of Homophobia (55 page)

For the gay or lesbian child coming out to his or her own family, this standard can have dramatic consequences, including verbal and physical violence or psychological blackmail. Such tactics are used by parents in the name of love, yet negative words and acts can be devastating and irreparable. Furthermore, gays and lesbians, particularly youths, find it extremely difficult to talk openly about homophobic violence in the family more so than other types of family violence. We know it is one of the critical causes of the high rate of
suicide
among homosexual teenagers (eight times more than heterosexuals, according to an American study).

Even in the absence of physical violence or outright rejection, it often takes a great amount of time for families to accept that one of their members is homosexual. There is symbolic violence: first denial, the idea that “it’s going to go away”; then the refusal to talk about it, sometimes accompanied by the request to keep quiet: “Don’t tell your father,” etc. The list of typical family responses is long and well known to gays and lesbians. Changes in social attitudes toward gays and lesbians may have improved relations between many homosexuals and their families in ways that would have been unthinkable in the past, although heterosexism persists. To understand the complexity of the situation, one must consider the diversity of familial models and familial homophobias as inherent products of Western history.

The most ancient model of family still holds strong for many of us: the clan-family, or the traditional family, made up of multiple generations, is still typical in the majority of Western societies since before the nineteenth century. Take modern-day Latin America, for example. Here, the family typically controls its members from birth until death; deeply patriarchal, it mandates and controls the
marriages
of its children. The head of the family is granted full authority to maintain family order at any cost, thus justifying homophobic violence when members “betray” the family by becoming gay or lesbian. The
Catholic
Church
still largely refers to this family model, explicitly in developing countries and implicitly in Western ones. By advocating the control of its members all their lives, this family model strongly discourages any activity that undermines the family order. Thus, the only homosexuals who are slightly visible under this control are social outcasts, victims of violence, and young men who have not married. Homosexuals must live in secret and
shame
.

But this traditional model evolved as a result of the industrial revolution and the environment of the twentieth century. The new traditional family was smaller, centered on the married couple with fewer children, with the ideal of the stay-at-home wife. The parents’ control over their children remained absolute, based on a desire that the children learned to “conform” to a society and its standardized values. The pressure to get married was stronger than ever. Within the family, homophobia as a means to control behavior was ferocious, but outside, the state now played a much larger role.

This family model took its final shape in the 1950s, corresponding to the height of legal homophobia in the United States and France. This model remains in place today in Europe and more so in the US, and is the basis for a large number of homophobic practices and discourses, mostly in the purported name of “best interest of the child.” Despite this (or perhaps because of this), these same families produced the first lesbian and gay militants (the word was coined then) in the 1970s. The development of capitalist, industrial societies in the twentieth century caused a social revolution by breaking the power of the extended family; it also allowed for greater socialization outside the family, promoting the will of the individual that ultimately led, among other things, to the birth of gay and lesbian culture in the West.

In fact, the 1970s saw the end of the traditional family as it had been known, and multiple variations on the idea of family became common. There started a strong dissociation between couples and marriage, between marriage and children, and a de-legitimization of the separation of sexual roles; there was also a drastic decrease in parental authority, and an explosion in the divorce rate. All of this led to new forms of familial relations that would open the debate on what now must be acknowledged by law.

Thus we can understand how homophobia within families can also change and evolve. Parents and children are now witness to the new visibility of homosexuals within society, and homophobia finally has a name. Although it still has potentially damaging ramifications, it now becomes possible to identify oneself as homosexual or lesbian within the family; to identify oneself as a parent, brother, or sister of a homosexual; and to call oneself a gay parent. At the same time, expressions of homophobia within families are now challenged. This evolution in the family model has created an ideological battle on the very idea of family, a battle that is also played out in the media and the political arena.

Family as an Argument in the Homophobic Discourse
Traditionally, homophobic comments about family have been unapologetic. A recent example can be found in
Vivre ensemble en famille
(Living together as a family)
,
a book for six- to eight-year-olds, published in 1998 in France by Bayard
,
a Catholic publisher, where the existence of gays and lesbians in families is not mentioned, and where we find written that “families have always existed because men and women have always had children,” and that “[the family] is a set of people that are linked together by marriage, birth or
adoption.
” Nothing more is said on what constitutes a family. Thus, this book dismisses all alternative models, including gay parenting.

But times are changing. Homophobic people who speak in the public domain are, for the first time, put on the defensive. They are forced to address a wide range of controversial subjects including adoption by gay couples, the status of homosexual partners, and medically assisted procreation. This is the reason we have seen of late the emergence of a whole set of somewhat dispersed homophobic discourses that purport to protect and defend the family. To understand them, one has to see what they have in common and what differentiates them.

Almost all homophobic discourses on the family borrow heavily on the theme of moral
decadence
, a common feature of reactionary thinking. They are based on the same assumptions: the family is undergoing a serious crisis that threatens to bring down the whole social system with it, and it is urgent that we protect and strengthen it. That leads to the second common feature of such discourses, the call to political action, often in response to gay activism. Indeed, at stake is the refusal of social advances for gays and lesbians, such as the French Civil Solidarity Pact called
PaCS
(Pacte civil de solidarité), but also the will to reestablish the central place of marriage in society. “Marriage and family are at the heart of the State’s duty” because “family is the basic model that allows society to establish itself and last,” reactionary French politician Christine
Boutin
wrote in
Le “mariage” des homosexuels?
in 1997. Indeed, to quote a recent book expressing similar concerns,
La famille à venir
(The family to come): “[family is] an absolute necessity in the context of unprecedented crisis of society and economy.” In this view, homosexual demands threaten the family; the state must oppose it, and even react to it.

Recent Attempts to Establish a Homophobic Theory of Family
As we have seen, the old argument of nature and natural law to justify homophobia is, by itself, no longer convincing. Those in France arguing against PaCS thus used several different tactics, supposedly scientific, to justify the exclusion of spousal and family rights from homosexuals. To use the words of psychoanalyst Michel Tort, homophobia theory is today “a symbolic estuary where Levi-Strauss, Lacan and the traditional family right flow together.”

Let us first consider
psychoanalysis
as an argument to justify homophobia. Without going into too much detail, let us note the use of a Lacanian vulgate that makes gender
difference
the basis for all adult sexuality and a structural component from the parental point of view, of all future personality of the child. Its commonality with Christian thinking on the subject is apparent, and we are not surprised when priest-psychoanalyst Tony Anatrella writes: “There is only love between a man and a woman because love implies a fundamental otherness.” He also contends that “parental love exists only through the mediation of conjugal love,” which lets us better understand Christine Boutin’s assertions when she says that PaCS would “put the child and
human love
in danger” (which is the title of a chapter of her book, cited earlier). Boutin can thus negate even the remote possibility that a gay couple could be equal in dignity and nature to a married couple, homosexuality being an “ephemeral and
sterile
project”; in this way, she attempts to give legal credence to the idea that the homosexuality and the gay couple threatens society as we know it.

In a less hateful and apparently more acceptable manner, we can consider that gay couples, due to their unsettled sexuality, are, in a futile way, imitating heterosexuals. This is Sylviane Agacinski’s thesis in her book
Politique des sexes,
published in 1998. In this sense, the gay couple is “slightly fabricated,” and remains separate from society (their desire not being “universal”), and therefore they should not pretend that they are a family. We can see how Agacinski’s condemned gay couple and Boutin’s beloved heterosexual family flow together in a closed homophobic loop. But, stiff opposition from psychoanalytic communities on this use of Lacan, and particularly the heinous character of Tony Anatrella’s comments which very nearly justify homophobic violence, prove the academic and practical limits of the psychoanalytical approach to this subject.

Anthropology
offers another justification for homophobia. Granted, sociologist Irène Théry, family specialist, does not offer heinous comments like Anatrella. She clearly acknowledges gay couples, but at the same time aims to deny them the right of adoption. Théry claims that healthy child development is predicated on two parents of opposite sexes. Her stance against gay adoption is thus not based on political rhetoric, but on “scientific,” anthropological “evidence.” In so doing, she legitimizes homophobic comments about gay parents, including scandalous pedophilic connotations in which such parents pose a “danger to children.”

Past & Present Strategies for Non-Homophobic Families
At the end of this analysis, we can better understand the evolution of gay strategies toward the family institution and define its key moments. For gays and lesbians in traditional families, escape was often the only solution; in the twentieth-century family model, the struggle of gays and lesbians was still difficult, consisting of maintaining a space of
tolerance
beside the family institution. In
Corydon,
published in 1922, André
Gide
demonstrates that the notion of homosexuality which he defends could not hurt families, but on the contrary, make them stronger. In 1999, writer Dominique Fernandez subscribed to this same logic when he affirmed in his essay, “Le Loup et le chien” (The wolf and the dog), that “family concerns the majority of French citizens; PaCS, the minority that is situated outside the family. PaCS has nothing to do with family and consequently does not threaten it in any way.” During the 1970s and 1980s, attitudes relaxed somewhat although social hostility toward issues involving gays and the family remained strong. Today we see many gays and lesbians reinvest in the idea of the family by defining family for themselves, outside of the traditional model, to include friends and lovers. Armistead Maupin’s books (such as
Tales of the City
) are symbolic of this. The road traveled permits hope for new ideas of family, whether gay or heterosexual, where full equality can be guaranteed and defended for both children and adults.
—Philippe Masanet

Agacinski, Sylviane.
Politique des sexes
. Paris: Le Seuil, 1998. [Published in the US as
Parity of the Sexes
. Translated by Lisa Walsh. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2001.]

Anatrella, Tony. Preface to
L’Amour en morceaux
. By Gérard Leclerc. Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 2000.

Bernstein, Robert.
Straight Parent/Gay Children: Keeping Families Together
. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995.

Borrillo, Daniel, Eric Fassin, and Marcela Iacub, eds.
Au-delà du PaCS, l’expertise familiale à l’épreuve de l’homosexualité
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998.

Boutin, Christine.
Le “Mariage” des homosexuels? CUCS, PIC, PACS et autres projets législatifs
. Paris: Critérion, 1998.

Bozett, Frederick W. and Marvin B. Sussman, eds.
Homosexuality and Family Relationships
. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1996.

Carrington, Christopher. “No Place like Home: Relationships and Family Life Among Lesbians and Gay Men.”
Journal of Homosexuality
42 no. 2.

Clauzard, Philippe.
Conversations sur l’homophobie. L’Education comme rempart contre l’exclusion,
Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002.

Desfossé, Bertrand, Henri Dhelhemmes, Christèle Fraïssé, and Adeline Raymond.
Pour en finir avec Christine Boutin, aspects moraux, juridiques et psychologiques du rejet des homosexuals
. Paris: H & O Editions, 1999.

Fernandez, Dominique.
Le Loup et le chien, un nouveau contrat social
. Paris: Pygmalion, 1999.

Lensel, Denis and Jacques Lafond.
La Famille à venir, une réalité, menacée mais nécessaire
. Paris: Economica, 2000.

Leroy-Forgeot, Flora. “Nature et contre nature en matière d’homoparentalité.” In
Homoparentalité, Etats des lieux
. Association des Parents Gays et Lesbiens symposium. Paris: ESF, 2000.

Nadaud, Stéphane.
L’Homoparentalité, une chance pour la famille?
Paris: Fayard, 2002.