The American Homosexual Regression

On a sunny day in San Francisco, California, a group of friends gathered in a small kitchen as two men, an interracial couple, exchanged vows and wedding rings, pledging their lives to each other. Despite the fact the ceremony was broadcast on television, there was no outrage from the religious public. There were no public protests. In fact, it seemed as though very few people cared beyond the fact they thought it was nice to see two people in love.

The year was 1994.



A year earlier, in 1993, one very famous sitcom aired an episode where two of the main characters, upon being perceived as homosexual in a public forum, vehemently deny the accusation, but want it so badly to be known that they aren’t homophobic that the phrase, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” becomes part of the American lexicon. Again, there was no outrage or protest. Nor were there any accusations of pandering to the homosexual community. Like so many things, it was funny because of the truth the American public saw in it. As a public, we didn’t want to be perceived as gay, but we were equally unwilling to be perceived as homophobic.

These instances were over fifteen years ago.

Last night, at the American Music Awards, an openly homosexual pop star performed. His performance was a parody of the wildly sexual performances that have taken place at pop shows over the past decades, from Madonna’s stage-humping and same-sex explorations to Janet Jackson’s experiments with on-stage S & M.

Adam Lambert’s AMA performance has generated over 1,500 viewer complaints, and 78% of fans polled by MTV news didn’t enjoy the performance. Lambert himself lambasted the backlash of his performance, accurately claiming that it was a double standard from a society that was far more accepting of those performances by female artists.

Earlier this year a girl who created at least one, and allegedly several, masturbatory tapes to send to her boyfriend used the public forum of a nationally televised pageant to openly state her views against marriage between two consensual adults simply because of their matching genders.

In the past fifteen years, how have we gone from “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” to, “That’s how I think [marriage] should be, between a man and a woman”?

It seems like a very knee-jerk leftist reaction to blame George W. Bush, but the fact is that it wasn’t until his administration that anyone seemed to even care about two dudes standing at a wedding altar. The two scenes described at the beginning of this blog post occurred during Clinton’s era. During Bush’s stint as President gay marriage band cropped up in state’s all over the country, and he actually attempted to introduce national anti-gay marriage legislation.

The word “progress” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “gradual betterment.” If you look at the American perception of homosexuality over the past fifteen or sixteen years, the term has to be “regress,” or “movement backward to a previous and especially worse or more primitive state or condition.”

The best way to judge people is not on how they treat their equals, but on how they treat those they believe to be of a lower station. In the same way, the best way to judge a society is not on how that society treats the best among it, but on how it treats its lowest. In a country like India, where the lowest are ignored, exploited, threatened and hurt, we know that there are problems in their society. Somehow, we fail to carry that translation through to how we currently treat the homosexual community.

It is my firm belief that the prejudice currently facing homosexuals is the worst example since the Civil Rights movement. Just as then, our society will most assuredly begin to progress as soon as we begin to let go of that prejudice. By accepting that, even if you personally disagree with that lifestyle, it shows both a maturity of character and the wisdom of knowing that society improves most when those it unintelligibly sees as inferior equal to those it views as its best.