Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [20]
“It’s not perverted,” Orville said gently. “It’s thwarted.”
Of all that someone says, it’s curious how one thing makes it through the haze. I try to recall this when teaching—Try it a second way, and a third, you don’t know what they’re hearing. Why did those words—“perverted” and “thwarted”—reach me? Did I like how they sounded against each other—the “vert” and the “wart”? Did I like that I needed to think about how they differed? I do not know. But I heard in them what I needed to hear. I heard my desire was not twisted, but blocked. I heard that I was sick and that I was gay and that these were not the same thing.
Orville did not lift my depression. But he showed me I was still in the grip of a conversion fantasy, which I needed to talk through to dispel. Even then, I felt lucky. I knew that only a few decades before, psychiatry would have fueled my conversion fantasy rather than helped me resist it.
In later sessions we talked about whence that fantasy, in the year 1992, arose. I knew most people no longer considered homosexuality a mental disorder. I wondered aloud why I did not experience it as normal human variation—a preference, chromosomally speaking, for the letter Y over the letter X. I came to see the demand to convert had become more diffuse, but in some ways harder to contest for that reason. It was the ambient fluid in which I swam. I could no more imagine life outside heterosexuality than a fish could imagine lolloping onto land.
Only after I came out broadly did this pressure ease. Once I was irrevocably gay, the fight for my soul was over—angels and demons alike looked for other quarry. I came to realize conversion demands were made most aggressively on sexual waverers—individuals whose sexuality seemed ambiguous or unformed.
When I started to look for contemporary conversion demands, then, I looked to the classic sexual waverers, that is, to children. My instinct was vindicated: I discovered a willingness to say point-blank that wavering children should be converted to heterosexuality. At least eight states currently have “no-promo-homo” statutes, prohibiting public educators from “promoting” homosexuality in schools. These laws can bar any mention of homosexuality, prohibit progay teachings, or even require antigay teachings.
In some states, no-promo-homo laws for children coexist with gay rights laws protecting adults. This legal tension reflects a broader cultural one. As psychology professor E. L. Pattullo states: “Surely decency demands that those who find themselves homosexual be treated with dignity and respect. But surely, too, reason suggests that one guard against doing anything which might mislead wavering children into perceiving society as indifferent to the sexual orientation they develop.”
When I read this passage, I kept tripping over Pattullo’s dual certainty that one should “surely” protect adults who were gay but just as “surely” protect children from becoming gay. It suggested the continuing vitality of a disease paradigm of homosexuality. For this is how we talk about people who have a disease—as in the claim that HIV-positive individuals should “surely” be protected from discrimination but just as “surely” should not spread their condition. This position makes sense for a disease. But didn’t we retire the idea that homosexuality was a disease three decades ago?
Apparently not. Although the idea of homosexuality as a literal disease (a mental illness) has faded, the idea of homosexuality as a figurative disease (a disfavored contagious condition) has endured. Antigay psychologists have explicitly dubbed this the “contagion model of homosexuality,” under which “homosexuality is taught by