Born in 1964, I grew up when stereotypes about gay people like me were largely negative and deeply ingrained. And perhaps the cruelest of the lies about us, reflected in recurring debates about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to teach in schools, was that many gay men were child molesters. It was a facet of our perversion, a function of our deviance. To leave us alone with children was to give us an opportunity to groom them into sexual activity, so we had to be watched. We had to be stopped.
I remember that verb: groom. Its meaning was both specific and sinister.
As the decades passed, its currency seemed to fade as the prejudice it gave expression to ebbed. I stopped seeing, hearing or at least noticing it. And I pretty much forgot about it, choosing to relish progress rather than rehash the indignities of the past.
But everything old is new again, including slurs. “Grooming,” as Monica Hesse wrote recently in The Washington Post, “has lately become a buzzword in anti-gay politics.” She went on to note that it “preys on every parent’s worst fear — someone harming their children — by insinuating that all gay or gender nonconforming people see their children as prey.”
Are we really back here? Oh, yes.
The debate over a recently enacted Florida law that prohibits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity among young schoolchildren was both an emblem and an engine of the demonization of L.G.B.T.Q. people as malevolent opportunists with children in our sights. And while its backers often referred to the legislation in terms of “parental rights,” some of them also spoke of it as an “anti-grooming” measure.
On her Fox News show, Laura Ingraham asked: “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender-identity radicals? . . . Another television host, Sara Gonzales, who has a show on the conservative streaming service Blaze TV, responded to a video of Chasten Buttigieg speaking to children at an L.G.B.T.Q. summer camp by tweeting, “Pete Buttigieg’s husband is a groomer.”
The conservative superstar Ben Shapiro expressed his support for the Florida law by saying that he was passionate in his commitment to “protecting small children from the predations of adults who wish to talk about controversial social issues” with them. “Predations” is no accidental noun. It doesn’t just roll off the tongue. . . . “It reflects an angst that gay people who do not conceal their sexuality are attempting to brainwash and molest children.”
Stern went on to provide crucial historical context:
This outlandish and bigoted notion has deep roots. You see this assumption in the infamous 1961 short film “Boys Beware,” which warned schoolchildren against predatory homosexuals and was produced in part by (of course) a school district. You see it in the failed 1978 campaign to ban gay teachers from California schools. . . . . Now we see it in Florida, Tennessee, Kansas, Oklahoma.
Ingraham’s and Shapiro’s fearmongering can’t erase the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that created marriage equality throughout the United States. Gonzales’s dig at one Buttigieg doesn’t undermine the significance of the other’s political ascent.
But I’m sobered by how much hate nonetheless remains and by how readily and unabashedly many partisans vilify gay people when they sense a tactical advantage in it. I’m scared by our resurgent popularity as scapegoats, not just here but in Poland, in Hungary, in Russia, where Vladimir Putin casts himself as a righteous warrior against Western permissiveness.
And I’m saddened, because the self-consciousness that I mentioned earlier was an awful and degrading feeling, in one sense ludicrous and in another utterly sane: I understood the world in which I was operating and was taking care to protect myself. That’s what you do when you’re the target of bigotry. It’s why such bigotry must die for good.
All of this saddens me greatly and makes me very concerned about gay youth in this resurgent atmosphere of hatred and vicious lies.
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