Gay Men and Homophobia
Gay Men and Homophobia
INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA:
Having grown up in a society which condemns and even abhors homosexuality (“faggot” is still an acceptable put-down in school), we all carry with us a degree of self-hatred for our attraction to other men. And, in some of us, this self-hatred can be immense (particularly if raised in a fire-and-brimstone Fundamentalist environment, be that Seventh Day Adventist, Southern Baptist, Roman Catholic or Orthodox Jewish). Becoming infected with HIV can re-trigger this self-hatred, magnifying all of those feelings of self-loathing, since it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that “if I hadn’t acted on my sexual impulses I wouldn’t have become infected.”
LOSS OF CONTROL: Most of us labor under the delusion that we’re in control of our life circumstances, a delusion that can be maintained as long as nothing catastrophic occurs. HIV is, to many, that very catastrophe. Suddenly it seems like an alien agent (the HIV virus) is in charge of their lives. The totally powerless feeling that results has been described to me as “like being a passenger in a car on the 405 whose driver just had a heart attack”.
MEDICAL ADVANCES: Ironically, while someone who’s positive is medically much better off today than in the 1980s, it may have actually been easier for some people infected then to deal with the psychological impact of living with HIV. At that time, HIV was almost assuredly a death sentence, and those who were positive were viewed, at least by many in our community, as martyrs or heroes, “diseased” though they might be. That was a context in which fear and suffering could be endured. Today, people who are HIV positive are no longer martyrs or heroes, but they remain “diseased”. And medical advances have enabled many of those infected to look healthy, or even better than before (thanks to testosterone therapy) – even when they’re not feeling that way. So sympathy is harder to come by.
