Continuing with
Schulman's
Ties That Bind.
After the first couple of chapters, I find my argument (rather than my agreement) with Schulman developing. I've taken a number of days to figure out where our difference would be.
As I've written below, one difference is simply that I have not led a gay life, and never could lead a lesbian one. She's very much concerned about the experience of homophobia corrupting lesbian relationships. It's just something I don't/can't know about. Schulman is the only writer I know for whom this is a major topic - altho I trust her and see enough congruence with other people's writings and experience that I can't doubt it. Maybe this is why later in the book she identifies her writing work with Philip Roth's, which would not have been my first guess. Like Roth, a secret that her in-group would rather keep out of sight just makes for a more interesting area to explore.
I guess I have absolutely nothing to offer in comment on that topic... I didn't know it was so, I wish it weren't so, I don't know what to do about it, aside from the general.
Schulman's overall recommendation for what is to be done, I think, can be summarized as (continuing the work of) eliminating the onus placed on homosexuality and directing attention to an actual source of cruelty and victimization, homophobia. She and I would be as one on this. I think that just as it is impossible now, after much cultural work, to regard racism as a sin which can be diluted by other better qualities, or excused as part of the overall person's experience, we have to do the cultural and personal work that will make homophobia an unpopular, distasteful, disfiguring characteristic in the eyes of society, family and friends.
The work of stigmatizing racism is not yet done. The work of stigmatizing homophobia has barely begun. The sign of this is the ease and frequency with which homophobia is forgiven in personal and social situations; again, contrast to racism. As a marker, look at the heroes of TV and movies - you could not possibly have a hero among whose failings was racism. Sometimes the opposite for homophobia.
The book makes an excellent moral case for interfering with homophobia, but Sarah would go on to make legal and psychotherapeutic intervention a requirement. That sounds awfully official. To put it less so, therapist and family counselors as well as representatives of law should be required to take action against homophobia in the same way they would against, say, child abuse in a family, or harrassment in a workplace, or cruelty in a marriage.
When I put it that way to myself, this doesn't sound bad at all. But I think she errs in the degree of intrusion into what's commonly known as private life. She addresses this - that it is a social and moral error to allow a cloak of privacy to cover injustice and abuse - in reasonable terms. But I think for one she is suggesting a change in the culture that dwarfs even erasing homophobia - to let sunshine into possibly every corner of family life. I am not certain that such exposure would be tolerable or good - and it would mean an enormous degree of openness to examination, lest abuse be missed. And I am certain that allowing government or bureaucracies further into the regulation of family life is a terrible idea.
To alter the general understanding of homophobia as something resulting from homosexuals into something imposed by homophobes, great, and effective. To test for compliance, not so much.
I don't think it's laxness of thought that moves Schulman in this direction. I think it may be life experience - and this is absolutely not to say that admitting such weakens her argument. On the contrary, it may strengthen it, as real testimony of real human suffering. One of the things I've admired in Schulman's writing, open in her nonfiction and evident in her fiction, is that she works very well in the field where political and personal overlap. I've never been able to work creatively from that place, only the (seemingly) purely personal.
I think the prospect of dying before the extinction of homophobia and the making right of its injustices is something that upsets her greatly. And I would speculate more on that if I knew her better or this was even less of a public forum.
And I think here is the biggest difference between Sarah and myself. She is an optimist. It may sound funny to so describe someone so while considering their treatise against the infliction of human misery, but she is an optimist and knowingly so:
Why, after all, try to explain what exclusion and punishment feel like, and why they are wrong? Somewhere in the choice to communicate lies a profound optimism and pure belief that people don't want to do evil, and if they realize what they are doing, they will stop it.
I don't have much belief in the willingness of people to examine themselves, identify wrongs, and work to change. We are lazy and selfish - and I write this as a buddhist - it is our nature as conscious vulnerable creatures. I don't think we as a whole desire to do evil - I just think we are weakly motivated to see it in the first place and do something about it in the second, esp at any expense to ourselves.
Sarah, in the course of writing her book about human cruelty, and with possibly a more particular and general experience of it than my own, expects better of human beings than I do. She is an optimist. Which might well make her much more different from me than being a lesbian.
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