Looking, with an outsider’s eye, at the American political debates -- rife with anti-homosexual fear-mongering -- and at the enshrined annual tradition of the Superbowl -- for all its primal enthusiasm directed toward tights-wearing men rollicking about an open field, piling upon one another in sporting competition, exchanging impassioned caresses upon each other’s buttocks at the sidelines -- one can’t help but conclude that repressed homosexuality is a driving force (perhaps thee driving force) behind modern American Culture.
It has long been recognized that anti-homosexual outrage -- homophobia -- is often itself a symptom of repressed homosexual desire. In fact, in 1996, researchers put this idea to the test and found that of men divided into categories of “homophobic” and “non-homophobic”, “Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli”. Based on the profiles of their subjects, the researchers concluded, “Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.”*
Consider Rick Santorum and his frenzied anti-gay rhetoric. Clearly ‘light in the loafers’ himself, it hardly takes a PhD in Psychology to discern the repressed longings that torment Santorum’s shame-filled sleepless nights. According to Rick:
“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. ... That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing." (AP interview, April 7, 2003)
These are the words of a man desperately confused in his sexuality admitting of the fact that the only things restraining him from wild, “abnormal” sexual abandon are the Christian Bible and the archaic laws this contradictory book has inspired. “Society”, Rick suggests, would be obligated to act upon these rights if equal rights were to be granted to homosexuals. In keeping with the bizarre conspiracy theory of the “homosexual agenda” which insists homosexuality is a “life-style choice” propagandized by a satanic cult of sodomizing evangelists, Santorum imagines an apocalyptic collapse of the Traditional Family as each and every male is given to satiating his homosexual lust in orgiastic fervor.
I personally dislike meatloaf. When I go to a restaurant where meatloaf is on the menu, I don’t order it. I don’t live in mortal fear that I will arrive at a restaurant, find meatloaf on the menu and be forced to partake of it. I don’t urge federal mandates for removal of meatloaf from all menus. In fact, the only people I’ve met who have ever expressed anything approximating fear of a particular menu are those who find the food enticing, but are trying to adhere to a diet that restricts them from such indulgences. I trust that readers -- at least those who agree that the world wasn’t “created” in six days time no more than 10,000 years ago -- get my meaning...
As laughably obvious as Santorum’s desire for the meat menu is, it is deeply disturbing to find his personal struggle played out on a public stage where his repressed homosexuality has metastasized into a presidential platform actually taken seriously by a significant segment of the American population. But then, repressed homosexuality has been a defining characteristic of the Republic Party -- as evidenced by the fairly regular surfacing of (by now unshocking) Republican gay sex scandals.
Of course, loafer-and-cardigan Republican homosexual repression can’t be separated from Evangelical Christian homosexual repression, and the alarming popularity of both grotesque institutions in contemporary American culture could only indicate a large population for whom expressions of homosexual repression have struck a resonant chord.
Now consider the irrational hysteria which surrounds the Superbowl. As mentioned above, American football involves men in tights piling upon each other on the field while paying an unusual amount of “friendly” attention to each other’s buttocks -- with very ostentatious pats, caresses, and grabs -- at the sidelines. An odd and unnatural insistence at the pure heterosexual manliness of the sport suggests an element of denial, but has also served to create an insulated environment wherein flagrantly homosexual elements pass unnoticed or ignored. For example, in their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (Dutton, 2011), authors/researchers Gaddam & Ogas cite a perplexed sportswriter’s observations from the playing field where, he notes, “You’ll hear scouts and coaches throwing out compliments like, ‘That guy’s ass is pretty, now.’ You’ll see write-ups lauding a prospect’s ‘big, bubble ass’ or ‘great explosion in his hips.’” Perhaps this helps to explain why, when the NFL teams employ some of the most physically attractive females in the world as cheerleaders, the cameras pay almost no attention to them at all, focusing instead on sweating, drooling players toweling off and massaging one another’s rears even while the cheerleaders practice their precision routines but yards away. Perhaps it also helps to partially explain the exaggerated outrage that followed the mere suggestion of an exposed female breast -- revealed during a “wardrobe malfunction” -- during the now infamous 2004 half-time show performed by Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake.
Of course, one need not necessarily be a repressed homosexual to enjoy football, any more than a man need not necessarily be gay to perform on Broadway, but I would argue that repressed homosexuality has played an important role in the outsized popularity of this revered American game.
On the other hand, a man casting his ballot for Santorum is absolutely gay. No use denying it, though he doubtless will. In fact, a man wouldn’t vote for Santorum (or watch Sean Hannity) if he could admit he is gay. When America can come to grips with its gay-ness... only then will we be rid of these delirious and deformed by-products of caged yearning...
*Adams, Henry E. et al, “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Desire?” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 1996, vol. 105, no. 3, 440 - 445
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