May 2021
Interview with Dr. Anthony Petro
Omar Safadi: Anthony, thanks so much for joining us for this interview. I wanted to begin a little broadly and invite you to speak about moral panics as a category of analysis in your writing. What does it allow us to see about power, society, and religion that would otherwise not be in view?
Anthony Petro: I think it’s a great question. So, you know, there’s a lot of really good work on moral panics and sex panics. I’m thinking of the work of Roger Lancaster in particular, but there’s a lot of other good work as well. I’m particularly interested in the question of the moral and the work that word does. One of the things that I think about in in my first book, After the Wrath of God –and here I’m drawing from the work of anthropologists and sociologists of religion like Lynne Gerber, who wrote a really wonderful book comparing evangelical exgay and weight loss ministry programs, where she’s also thought about this question of the moral in relationship to health–is how the moral is this interesting category, because it operates like a switch point between how we conventionally think of things that are ostensibly religious and things that are ostensibly secular. It’s not quite owned by one or the other, so morality can become a sort of container, a kind of linguistic or conceptual form, through which a lot of that translation or messiness can happen.
So I’m very interested in thinking about the word in that way–how religious ideas, and in my work often I’m thinking about conservative Catholic and evangelical ideas, can be translated through the category of the moral into ideas about public health, or ideas about risk. Or, broadening out how queer politics and its concern with different kinds of sexual and reproductive justice could also be articulated through the language of morality, although it is less commonly is articulated in that way by a lot of queer activists. But it is at least one place where such work can happen, where the moral might take on a more ostensibly secular and progressive queer cast. So that’s how we became very interested in the question of the moral.
And then, if we are thinking about moral panics, I’m especially interested in the notion of the public, so here I usually am thinking about rhetoric in public culture, through news media, popular media, art, and so on. I’m interested in panics around a number of issues regarding gender and sexuality, even in just the last 40 or 50 years, including the AIDS crisis and the kind of moral and sex panic that that sets off.
Currently, I’m working on a book called Provoking Religion that looks at arguments that erupt over feminist and queer art and artists in the 1980s and 90s. Of course, there’ve been public fights over art and obscenity and over censorship in the past, but I wonder if there is something different about this particular moment in the modern U.S. culture wars. I’m writing about this acute interest in art dealing with gender and sexuality that is thought of as being blasphemous or sacrilegious or offensive and the way that it is picked up by, or even galvanized, leaders of the political and religious right in the late 80s and early 90s. In some ways, the specific attention given to gender and sexuality in these in these fights has depended upon the visibility of queer people and queer bodies that come about through the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
For a lot of Americans, including a lot of religious conservatives, the AIDS crisis brings homosexuality to the forefront of their attention in a way that just wasn’t so in the 1960s or 70s. It set the stage for a number of these battles, which are ultimately battles over different imaginings of the nation state. So the moral panic, right at its core, is a panic over what kind of future people want, which is imagined within the terms set by what it means to live in a particular kind of nation state.
I’ll add just one more little thing to sort of personalize this. I think one of the reasons why I became really interested in this set of topics is, well, firstly because I grew up during the AIDS crisis itself, as it came to public visibility in 1981, which is the year that I was born. So I’ve lived and grown up with the crisis. And you know, people who grew up in this time of AIDS, the way you learned about sex if you grew up in the U.S. is that sex is medically dangerous. Sex is scary. And I was fascinated to learn that this particular fear has a history, right? That people who grew up in the 60s and 70s didn’t didn’t necessarily think of sex in these kinds of ways, right? Where if you have sex, you would probably get AIDS and die? I mean, that’s sort of just what you were taught in school or what was in the air growing up.
I also grew up in a Catholic family–not theologically or politically conservative, but very culturally Catholic. And I have this really vivid memory of when I was young, I don’t know how old, but I was riding a school bus, so I must have been like six or seven. And people were shooting birds. That was like the thing cool kids were doing at this age. And I remember fearing that, if I formed this shape with my hand, I will go to hell, because I’m supposed to be Catholic. And I did it. And I was really scared. And then I didn’t go to hell, at least at that point I wasn’t struck down and sent to hell, but I guess it could be coming! But I remember forming the shape with my hand, with the body, and this sort of visceral feeling, a sort of fear and guilt and sort of sinfulness. That was also probably the turning point where I figured I don’t think I’m Catholic anymore. But I just remember that moment. And it was tied to sinfulness and guilt, from literally making a shape with the body. It wasn’t tied to having some kind of belief about something or another that is first and foremost but more so: what are you doing with your body? So I’ve often thought there was something about that which deeply shaped how I approach the study of religion.
Omar: But you’re really speaking about this kind of moment when the religious subject chafes up against the boundaries of the profane. Having grown up religious myself, I know precisely how intense and how affectively painful it is to feel the edge of this boundary, because there’s such high stakes. It’s no ordinary boundary, and you feel it in the body. But how do we talk about that affective and bodily pain without giving ammunition to the kinds of oppressive politics that come out around the protection of religious group boundaries?
Anthony: Yes, yes. I think of Michael Warner, who has this beautiful essay that he published, in the early or mid 90s called “Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood” He describes his conversion from being a devout Pentecostal boy to being the queer, radical atheist he is at the moment that he’s writing it. He describes so well the stakes of what it meant to live in this Pentecostal culture, a reading culture (reading the Bible, I mean), in which everything was elevated–the stakes, the affect–of getting interpretations right.
Omar: Right, but it matters. It’s not just exegesis or interpretation, you know, because there’s a lot of consequences attached to getting it wrong. You don’t want to get it wrong. The stakes are even higher than life and death. It’s eternal damnation.
Anthony: Exactly. So he’s thinking about this moment in his life and what it means to be coming of age sexually, right? So he asks what does it mean when he’s masturbating, and he thinks that Jesus is watching? What is it like to feel this guilt and shame. But then also, he wonders, why is Jesus watching you masturbate? There’s something like going on there with religion and the erotic. Mark Jordan also has also thought a lot about this kind of eroticism that comes up within Catholic culture itself–the erotics of obedience, the erotics of the homosocial space (also often a homophobic space, as Sedgwick and Jordan both remind us) of the Church itself. We can also think about this historically, going back to the work of art historians, like Leo Steinberg, thinking about all of the ways in which depictions of Christ have been interested in Christ’s embodiment and sexuality. And so there’s something also within Catholic culture itself that sort of puts the erotic out there and tells you that you can’t have it at the same time it creates it. There’s a generative ambivalence there.
Kyle Byron: It sounds like we all have, in certain ways, similar childhoods, and this relates to another argument in Warner’s “Tongues Untied,” which is that when you grow up, or even convert, there are these vestigial selves from your past identities that hang around. So, even if you say to yourself, “I’m no longer Catholic,” there’s still that little rush of energy the first time you stick your middle finger up in the air on the bus, and that little rush of energy is a vestigial self feeling the thrill of doing something wrong, even if you no longer believe it’s wrong.
Anthony: Yes! I’m also reminded of this essay by Marcel Mauss on notions of personhood we read in an undergrad seminar I taught this past spring. We were talking about the idea of the self and whether we think of the self as continuous, or whether we think of the self as having these various kinds of ruptures. So Kyle’s point gets to this. One of the arguments that Warner makes in that very short piece–by the way, I teach it every chance I get, it’s a really good essay!–is that the idea of having a break with the self and being able to remake the self, which is so much a part of U.S. American culture, is also a very evangelical notion of the self, that is, this idea that you can just be born again. So I love how he plays with the idea of becoming a queer atheist that was, in form, another kind of evangelical self. His thinking about form this way is generative. And some of my recent work has been trying to think about form: what work does form do? How do we think about form in relation to politics or to the social? I’m often thinking about different kinds of religious forms that appear in feminist and queer art and the work that they’re doing right. And why is it that, you know, some people see that and say that that’s blasphemy, that’s sacrilege, and then I’m trying to think about what those artists are doing with those forms. What does it mean to employ Catholic forms in the way that Andres Serrano, or Robert Mapplethorpe, or Renee Cox, or David Wojnarowicz, or Karen Finley do? My essay “Bob Flanagan’s Crip Catholicism, Transgression, and Form in Lived Religion” talks specifically about this.
Omar: And would you say your interest in morality is part of your interest in form? Can you say more about how you understand the moral, or what operations, rhetorical moves, and/or claims morality facilitates, on both sides of the religious divide?
Anthony: Yes, it certainly is. I think of the moral as one of these forms, as an example of a particular kind of form that is so pliable in our everyday work. And I don’t mean simply our scholarly work, but in the politics and media that we consume, right? Because morality, it’s not quite formal politics, right? It’s not quite power. It’s not quite religion, right? It’s not quite dogma. There’s something about it that allows it to serve as this switch point. Morality is this form, it’s this vessel that can be used by so many different actors, to so many different ends.
I mean, one of the claims that Saba Mahmood makes has been helpful for me in thinking through morality and its relationship to gender and sexuality. Within secular discourse, religion and sexuality both become privatized or, at least, come normatively to occupy this space of the private sphere. And then, of course, there’s lots of contentious public debate about what proper sexuality or gender is, what proper religion is, and so forth. But there’s something about their movements, the movement of religion and of gender/sexuality normatively at least, into the private sphere that brings morality into the picture. Because morality is also the place where public politics meets personal behavior. And it becomes a site through which you can then articulate all of the rules publicly that you want to put in place. And at the same time, of course, morality is also more than a set of rules, right? It is habitus, it is the feeling that if you form your finger into shooting a bird, that you might go to hell, or that if you’re masturbating, you’re doing something wrong, or that if you’re having sex with another man, you might get AIDS. Right? Then you’re breaking a norm, a taboo.
Omar: That’s cool, because another way I like to think of morality is as a genre. Which then allows us to think about atmospheres, sensibilities, and attitudes that are imbricated in the social or political claims being made.
Kyle: As you were talking about morality as a genre of politics and the moral panic as a particular form of morality, I was thinking, “Oh, that’s the connection between your previous work on religion and AIDS, Anthony, and your current work on the idea of ‘provoking religion.’” In After the Wrath of God, you talk about how, for conservative Catholics and Protestants, but also in the supposedly secular medical discourse, the AIDS crisis shifts from a crisis of homosexuality to a crisis of promiscuity, and also shifts from a U.S. crisis to an African crisis that requires international moral intervention. And while AIDS doesn’t have the same kind of moral weight among Christians today as it did, say, in the 1980s or 90s, we do have new moral panics (I’m thinking of anti-trans legislation or vaguely worded bans on teaching so-called Critical Race Theory). So, now I’m seeing the malleable form of the moral panic as the continuous thread in your work and I’m wondering if that’s right, and if there’s some kind of instructive difference between the idea of the moral panic and the way you’re thinking about the act of provoking? I should also say that I don’t know how far along you are in writing Provoking Religion, so that might not be a fair question.
Anthony: That’s a really great question–and the kind I will probably have to keep thinking about at least until I’m finally writing the conclusion to this book! In After the Wrath of God, I was interested in debates about the culture wars. There are all these debates among sociologists and historians about whether there’s really this polarization or whether it’s “just rhetorical” as if that’s a distinction that means something is real, and something is fake. James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars really launched this conversation. There’s a lot that I disagree with him about, but I think it’s a very fascinating book nonetheless. And he’s very indebted to a particular reading of Durkheim on moral community. In After the Wrath of God, I wanted to think through how Durkheim understands the moral and its relationship to the social. Durkheim, of course, understands the moral differently than Hunter does. For Durkheim, the moral is very much about a certain kind of affect, the sort of feeling of authority that somebody has or that a community imbues in certain kinds of persons, or leaders, or representation. A lot of sociologists of religion like Hunter have missed that, so they reduce morality or the moral community, maybe, to something that’s communicative, but not necessarily affective.
I wanted to take something from Durkheim’s idea of a moral community and to think about it alongside Foucault’s work on biopolitics–the work of public health, in the 1980s with AIDS, but also the work of different religious approaches to thinking about AIDS and how they were either working with logics of public health or with disciplinary models of sinfulness and how one ought to comport themselves. Thinking with Durkheim and Hunter about moral community and the culture wars, then, leads us to consider the category of citizenship and the way that citizenship–the practice of citizenship–changes across the 1970s into the 80s.
Lauren Berlant and others have articulated very nicely this shift, when citizenship becomes very much about feelings of belonging, national belonging–it becomes less about exerting one’s rights as an actor who lives in a state and a lot more about the desire for recognition from the nation state. There’s been important scholarship on racial citizenship, political citizenship, reproductive citizenship, sexual citizenship, and so on. And I wondered what it might mean to be a moral citizen? The rhetoric of “morality” and family values has pervaded culture wars speech. So how has the AIDS crisis shaped how people have understood what it means to be an American along the lines of health and sexual status, as these become prominently “moral” concerns?
So we had all these debates about the culture wars and polarization. And I think the polarization is real. I’m not one of the scholars, and there are some, who think it’s not real; I think it really is real. It might exist most prominently at the level of public rhetoric, and it might be messier on the ground than among media or political elites, but there clearly is polarization.
And yet, what I found when I looked into different kinds of responses to the AIDS crisis was a lot more agreement than polarization. Sure, people on the far religious right certainly did articulate this idea that AIDS was God’s wrath for sinful behavior. But even most prominent evangelical leaders didn’t go quite that far. They would say something more, like, “homosexuality is really a problem, and might be one of the things that’s driving the epidemic. But we still need to find ways to include people in the broader gospel, and we need to have research poured into fighting this epidemic.” But nonetheless, in speaking this way, they started using the language of sexual morality. And there you see a lot more commonality across progressive, liberal, conservative approaches, whether secular or liberal, which often use the same kind of moral rhetoric. They would say something, like, it’s not God’s wrath, there’s something about homosexuality, or there’s something about promiscuity, right? It’s not “just” a biomedical crisis, in this view; it’s also that people with AIDS are having sex with people they shouldn’t have sex with, or they’re having too much sex.
So one of the ways that I like to talk about this with my students–who are often very curious about the history of the AIDS crisis–is that I try to show them how something like promiscuity comes to be seen as a problem that collapses the medical and the moral. And, again, not just for someone like Jerry Falwell, but also for many public health leaders who see themselves or their work as secular.
The line that I like to use, which comes from Cindy Patton’s amazing work on AIDS, is that what matters is the kind of acts you’re engaged in, not the number of acts that you did. So you can have heterosexual sex one time and spread or contract HIV, but you could give 1000 hand jobs to 1000 different people, and maybe you’ll get a sore wrist, but you’re not going to contract HIV; it’s just not going to happen. Right? The point is that it’s the kind of act that matters, not the volume. Does the act carry the potential to share bodily fluids that transmit HIV or not? End of story. But that’s such a hard lesson. And even when we discuss this point, say in the class, some of my students are still suspicious, right? Because there’s still this sense that if you do something you’re not supposed to do–something ostensibly immoral–then you will get punished.
Omar: It seems so ingrained in us, right, that kind of logic, and the fear of being punished for doing something wrong, committing a violation. There’s also the notion of punishment as deserved. Like the way in which you were saying, AIDS was considered a just punishment for the transgressions of homosexuality. So we seem to be in the vicinity of questions of justice and injustice here. In a way, homosexual sex was committing a public injustice against hetero-patriarchal society, which is where the danger comes in. Sex is not personal. But I wanted to zero in on the relation between promiscuity and homosexuality, because homosexuality is indexing a particular kind of promiscuity between men. And so what problem in masculinity is the sex panic attempting to respond to? What is the sex panic trying to secure in terms of male-male relations in society and the polity?
Anthony: Those are great questions. I would start by consider the history of public sex–there’s sex public parks, but also, a culture of gay clubs and bathhouses, and a lot of the early debates during the AIDS crisis were about shutting down gay clubs and bathhouses. There’s a lesson here about the power of the logic of public health that I think resonates even today. Across these kinds of histories–of AIDS or COVID–we see the authority of public health as a legitimizing rationale that remains so strong, right? Where if you hear someone say, “oh, x or y is important for health reasons” then it’s quite difficult to offer any pushback. Health logic trumps other ways of thinking because it appears to be outside of the political or the social.
During the early years of the AIDS crisis, though, there are a lot of bad public health arguments, about closing bathhouses, as if you couldn’t imagine other things you could do to make the spread of HIV less likely, such as by handing out condoms or teaching people about other kinds of sexual practices that they could engage in that wouldn’t be likely to spread the disease. But there’s this sense that we couldn’t possibly educate people about what kinds of things one could and couldn’t do. We just have to shut it down. There’s also a long history of thinking of queer people–in this case, queer men–as being like children, as not having rationality right, as literally not being able to control their urges. So that’s one place where we can already think about this phenomenon of sex panics. If you just look at the history of sex since the 1970s, even among queer people, attitudes about public sex have become much more conservative. Consider even the recent Twitter discourse about kink at Pride. I remember my first Pride was in the late 90s, in Atlanta, Georgia, and I was floored. We went with a bunch of friends, and remember seeing a game that was a dildo toss. I’d never seen a dildo! I never heard of one! I just didn’t know what it was. I didn’t really even know what you did with a dildo. I didn’t know how to have gay sex. Right? I just know you don’t know these things and yet you can still be gay at the same time. I was like, wow, there’s like a dildo toss! What does that teach you? What is the pedagogy of kink at Pride?
So now we have this history in which Pride has shifted from being a political march, a sort of celebration of sexual diversity, to now becoming, a parade of corporations saying that they’re okay with sort of having queer folks as part of their group, as long as you’re not the wrong kind of queer. I don’t think we think about that enough, how pervasive this moralization has become, even within queer communities.
So one key point in my first book was that the story of AIDS shows us a lot more mainstream agreement about a particular kind of moralizing argument around sexuality, it galvanizes this moralistic argument about sexuality, whether it’s coming from secular public health leaders or from evangelical Protestants or from Catholic bishops.
Kyle: This discussion about shutting down bathhouses and the annual “no kink at Pride” Twitter discourse makes me want to come back to the idea of provocation as a particular kind of act, because I think of provoking as something like an incitement to discourse, to provoke is to try to incite a response. So, non-normative sexualities provoke a response, maybe from the state, or conservative Christians, or the organizers of Pride. But the effectiveness of provocation, I think, also depends on a broader context in which the constant remediation of controversy has become a form of politics. And I know you’re writing about the idea of provocation in terms of feminist and queer artists’ engagement with religion, but it’s interesting to me that provocation is also a strategy commonly employed by the Christian right, as well as other right-wing individuals and organizations. The pleasure of provoking is something that runs under lines of political difference. So, I want to ask, what does provocation, as an act or as a category, do? Are there ways to distinguish between different kinds of provocation?
Anthony: Thank you for the question! I borrow the term from Sandra Day O’Connor, who talks about “provocative” art in this Supreme Court case from the early 90s. So I took it from her and ran with it, precisely because I like the different kinds of meetings that Kyle mentioned.
Oftentimes, when we think about something that is provocative, it can be in many ways a critique, or a way of saying that something is, you know, “just provocative.” It’s accusing something of not being sincere, right? Like a statement that’s just trying to get a rise out of you, with little more substance to it. A lot of feminist and queer art has been accused of being provocative in this limited way, as though such artists couldn’t possibly be using images of Jesus sincerely or using the crucifix sincerely. They’re just using it to get a rise out of somebody or make someone add, to be offensive (note how these are already actually multiple uses, various ends). So in this way to be called provocative is to be connected to a history or an accusation of inauthenticity or even theft. Of course, members of the right and the religious right, in particular, are doing provocative things in these ways all the time. One of the things that we’ve learned about evangelical rhetoric, I think, in the last decade or so, is the extent to which evangelicals are often not concerned with “truth” in a way that secular people might be concerned with truth, that they’re often willing to engage in a lot of behaviors that might seem to an untrained eye shocking, or immoral even. Yet, within evangelical traditions, they can make a lot of sense, right? Because it’s moving them towards something that they think of as a higher truth. Who gets to use provocation toward this end?
So thinking about provocative–I can give one example of this. One of my chapters looks at a fight between Donald Wildmon, who is the founder of the American Family Association, the AFA, and David Wojnarowicz, who’s a queer artist in the East Village in the 70s and 80s. He produced a lot of art, and used a lot of different media, but he would often use various kinds of pornographic images in larger artistic pieces. He would cut things out, or he had this series called the Sex Series, where he found these pornographic cards, mostly gay pornography. And he double exposed them, so they kind of look like x-rays. And he put them in these larger collages against all kinds of other backgrounds, right? One is a forest, so then you have these circular in-sets of different kinds of things, but sometimes they would include these images of sex.
Wojnarowicz came to the attention of Donald Wildman and a number of folks in Congress in the early 90s, when some of his work was included in an exhibit in New York about AIDS. He penned this very provocative rant, where he imagined Jesse Helms and Cardinal O’Connor and all these people like being killed. And he says, look, I’m a writer, I’m imagining things, I can imagine whatever the fuck I want to imagine; it’s not against the law to imagine things. I’m not actually killing them, right? So he says something to that effect to defend himself. But there’s a lot of pushback, and it comes to the attention of the Right. A bit later, there’s a retrospective on his work at Illinois State. And the in the catalog for that comes to the attention of Wildmon, who starts off as a minister and then moves into thinking about different kinds of entertainment and news media that are anti-Christian. Right. His organization, the AFA, monitors the culture industry world for sex and anti-Christian content–anything that goes against what he would understand as traditional values. He had a campaign against Madonna, against Scorsese when he did The Last Temptation of Christ.
So anyway, Wojnarowicz comes to his attention, and Wildmon gets a copy of the catalog. He goes through and finds every pornographic image and cuts them out. And he puts them together on a template in this grid for formation. Next, he writes this screed about how the NEA is funding pornography, and one of the images is also of Christ with a tourniquet and syringe. So he notes the pornography and the representation of Christ as an IV drug user. And he puts it all together on this pamphlet and mails it to members of Congress, Christian radio stations, Christian news sites, and so on. And it creates this huge backlash. And so what does Wojnarowicz do? He takes him to court, he basically sues him in New York! He winds up losing on most accounts, but wins on one point having to do with a particular rule in New York about using artistic work out of context. And that the judge orders Wildmon to pay him a total of $1 in damages. So it’s mostly a symbolic win. But I’m fascinated by this because I’m interested in what Wojnarowicz is doing in his artwork, and his own archive has a lot of Christian stuff happening. If you go through his archive in New York, they’re all these cards of Jesus and saints and Jesus holograms, and Jesus appears in a lot of his images. St. Sebastian appears. So there’s all this religious stuff already, as he’s creating this mythological work.
And with Wildmon, I’m interested in this tactic of combing through all this work to pull out what he takes as pornography and then assembling it together for this pamphlet. I call it an “aesthetics of literalism” that Wildman is working with, where he reduces mythological artwork to literal pornography. Wojnarowicz pushes back on this. He says, look, I’m not producing pornography, I’m producing art and I sometimes manipulate these images and put them in larger collages. How could you think of this as pornographic? And Wildman sees an image of a gay sex and asks how is this not porn? I’m interested in that line and the kind of work that Wildmon does to reproduce this pamphlet to make the argument that it’s pornography. I’m interested in what work literalism as a reading and writing practice does here, literalism as a particular aesthetics or style of reading images. So often we think of it in a textual sense. So I’m thinking about it in terms of the real epistemological disagreements, right, between someone like Wildmon and Wojnarowicz or between the religious right and a lot of these feminists and queer artists who are using and manipulating these forms to ends.
Wildmon works with a habit of interpretation that says that all symbols are merely representations. And symbols are simple, decipherable. Right? So his aesthetics assumes things are representational and that they’re sincere, even as he’s producing this hyper provocative pamphlet that literally puts Jesus in the context of pornography. So that’s a long way of saying that I’m very interested in this sort of messiness of provocations across the political and religious spectrum here.
Omar: I’d like to ask a final question in an attempt to link up this conversation with the problem-space of global populism. In your work and in the conversation, you theorize moral panics as doing particular kinds of political and social work. And that work is historically situated – it has its material, affective, and discursive conditions. Okay. But there’s a kind of pervasive liberal understanding that morality, or let’s say, morality against sexuality, is epiphenomenal of a kind of ignorance – a not knowing something. It’s like when people talk about homophobia as a problem of ignorance, that we just need to educate people, raise awareness, and we’ll solve the problem. But sexuality doesn’t work that way, like there’s not a fantasy telos where everyone would have understood the thing necessary to live in peace and happiness. It seems that sexuality and gender will always be used as sites for contesting power and making claims for and against power. And we see the activation of gender and sexuality in populist movements around the world: in Euro-America, in Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, etc. So I guess the question is, what is it about sexuality – and homophobia, in particular – that provides such a fertile and charged site for the building and channeling of popular authority?
Anthony: One of the questions I have about homophobia would be to think about the role of gender–what role does gender play, wrong gender, normative gender expectation, and so on? This is something that comes up in a lot of conservative Christian discourse about homosexuality, that is, that being homosexual is fundamentally a gender problem. You were improperly socialized as a man or as a woman. We see resonances of that now when, today, we see the fear or the moral panics around trans folks. This fear that, if someone is able to switch their God-given sex (according to the conservative reading here), then, what does that mean? Are all things changeable? Is anything possible? And suddenly, truth, single truth, “biblical” truth, is no longer secure. This is the fear of relativism.
Of course, homophobia can also be mapped onto questions about the family and how something like a certain version of the family comes to be normalized and universalized. And homosexuality becomes a threat to that version of the family, especially when it comes to thinking about reproduction. It’s still the case that people say, well, how can two people in a same sex relationship possibly have children? Right? And so often, there’s such a fundamental lack of thinking and imagination, right? I mean, I see this in my classes, like, all the time, my students are very smart, they often come to conclusions like this, like, how could they possibly, like have weight? or How could you possibly have sex? How can they possibly do it? How could it happen?
But returning to homophobia, I would also want to think back to some of our canonical queer theory, considering Sedgwick’s work on homosocial cultural spaces and the intensity of erotic connections in those kinds of spaces, which then necessitate creating some kind of outside or marginalized figure–the homosexual–onto which erotic anxieties can be focused. What is more “straight” than being in a locker room and commenting on the guy next to you? Right?
Omar: That kind of demonstrates how homosociality is so valued and so common, but it needs the homosexual figure to project all this anxious desire onto, even though the homosexual in this sense is usually more fantasy than reality, the ghost that haunts intimacy between men.
Anthony: Again, take the locker room. I remember when I was in school being horrified of the locker room–the last place I wanted to be was in a locker room checking out or even interacting with other guys, even though that’s the homophobic assumption, that fantasy of the voyeur or sexual predator in the locker room. This is not unrelated to the fantasy of the bathroom predator that so many anti-trans people bring up, though we’d need to think through that comparison more and more carefully. Gill Frank has also discussed the racial and racist history of these kinds of bathroom fears.
Omar: There’s a lot of regulation of relations and practices between men, but at the same time, it’s like an open secret that’s not really talked about, like you were saying… these kinds of practices between straight men that happen all over. I mean, the kind of comparing dick sizes and jerking each other off. This has to happen. Not explicitly disavowing it, they’re not naming it either. As desire. Because naming it is when it becomes dangerous.
Anthony: Exactly. So, to return specifically to homophobia–and I don’t have a full answer to this–but I do want to think about what work identity-making does. This is in many ways a Foucauldian question. For Foucault, the creation of homosexuality as a kind of identity is not a liberating moment in the history of sexuality. I am curious whether homophobia needs sexual identity, or homosexual identity as such, or whether it desires sexual identity, right? If we didn’t have sexual identity, could homophobia exist? Or what would homophobia look like? If we just took as the basis, all the various kinds of things that people do with their bodies without attaching them to a hetero or homosexual identity, would you still have to have homophobia? I get that it’s a counterfactual.
Omar: I mean, that’s precisely the question I’m kind of interested in. Thinking about homophobia more than the policing and regulation of gender and sexual minorities, but as operations of power that do a lot of work in the polity.