Straighten ‘em out!
published 20 April 2007
When one is in a foreign city during a long holiday weekend, when it is too nippy to go out and explore the neighborhood, when every mall or museum is closed and when all but one cable channel is in German, one really does not have much choice.
That’s how I got looped into watching a CNN documentary on Good Friday, my second weekend here in Berlin.
The documentary showed some attempts to “address the problem” of homosexuality in the United States. The US is generally perceived to be liberal, even permissive, when it comes to these things.
Apparently, the liberality is not the same everywhere.
Some people have made a career as “conversion therapists.” They offer professional counseling to gay people and, beat this, Straighten Them Out.
Picture this: The therapist tells the client to draw images of people he resents. Fathers and school bullies usually top the list. Then the therapist cheers the client on as the latter, with a tennis racket, hits these drawings (now mounted on a pillow), shouting anything that comes to mind.
The usual phrases are “I hate you” and “I won’t let you do that to me.”
The premise is that homosexuality is a behavioral aberration brought about by deep-seated pains that go all the way back to the client’s childhood.
In the smacking exercise, he is expected to release this pent-up resentment and, voila, he can consider himself “cured.”
Another church group purports to do the same thing. This group offers seminars (that don’t come cheap, really) and sells books and videos all aimed to “correct” flaws in certain areas of the patient’s brain.
The videos take the form of subliminal exercises. There are scenes depicting serenity, some soothing music, and a cajoling voice that says, slowly and over and over, “I am not gay. I like girls. I love girls. Girls are beautiful. I get turned on at the sight of girls’ bodies……” Something to that effect.
The products and services are marketed to parents who, the group says, have the absolute moral duty to make sure their children turn out normal. The catch phrase is that one can choose NOT to be gay.
What is queer (queer!) is that these therapists used to be homosexuals themselves. They are ex-gays who, after spending many years leading a gay lifestyle, saw the light, converted, and happily settled. Now they have wives, kids, dogs, white picket fences and a flower garden—all the elements of a storybook life.
Gay activists are none too happy about this drive. They say this is discrimination disguised as compassion. It is not conversion but coercion. According to them, the ultimate message of these “do-gooders” is: Shape up, or else.
***
Now let me touch on something closer to home. Just as everybody had expected, the application for party-list accreditation of Ang Ladlad, an organization of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders, was denied by the Commission on Elections.
The group’s members were dismissed as phantom candidates and accused of not being organized enough.
Flesh-and-blood individuals as phantoms? What stronger proof of marginalization could there be?
Sadly, people cannot seem to get past the audacity of Danton Remoto’s hot pink barongs.
If they only take the trouble of visiting the group’s Web site, they will find a solid, focused, well-thought out agenda that is perhaps better than what any so-called party-list group, especially the dubious ones, can ever produce. This platform is derived from actual life experiences of LGBTs. These are proposed safeguards that seek to protect them against very real instances of discrimination.
Now that’s representation.
***
Convention is fine, and so are norms. They guide us. They foster a sense of security that things have always been done or perceived a certain way, and that these tried and tested manners have never failed.
How now to face deviations?
One extreme is persecution of the deviants. This is the tack of those conversion specialists, after they shed all their pretensions, featured on CNN.
The other extreme is denial. It is always easier to pretend we don’t see anything uncomfortable. So we shrug our shoulders and go about our merry ways.
This approach seems harmless but is actually not.
The fact is that we are who we are. We are, in varying scales and degrees, all different. We are all wonderful and weak and bizarre and boring and shameless and sensitive at various points in our lives.
There is hence no room for any kind of phobia. The best way to celebrate diversity is to dignify it. Recognize it. Give it a name.
Then deal with it.
