Yes, You Are Afraid of Queer People
Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash
There is a common refrain heard by bigots whenever the word transphobia or homophobia is brought up. I can’t possibly be that, they argue, because I am not afraid of them; I just disapprove of their lifestyle. These men, and a few women, but mostly men, will spend hours trying to logic their way out of this position, writing articles and op-eds devoted to the Sisyphean task of trying to convince everyone the opposite of what we all know to be true — that they are afraid.
They wouldn’t be spending years of their lives tying themselves into logical knots about the etymological root of a word if queer people did not absolutely terrify them. A person’s alleged distaste of queer people can indeed be centered around fear, and the fact that a queerphobic person does not understand this fact makes them very dangerous to all the queer people around them.
Those ignorant of their fear are the most dangerous of all.
The crux of the “I can’t be afraid” argument relies on a juvenile understanding of how fear works. These people are basically operating under the delusion that fear is all about shivering in a corner as though you’ve just seen a horror movie monster, but people have all different reactions to a perceived threat: some people freeze; others do indeed flee; a sizeable portion, though, they fight. They redirect all their rage and anger onto the source of their discomfort, which in the case of queerphobic people, can lead to very horrible outcomes for their targets.
Many members of the LGBTQIA+ community have experienced a lot of discrimination over the course of their lives. A 2020 Survey by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that LGBT people are almost four times more likely than non-LGBT people to be victims of violent crime. Anti-LGBT attacks have been increasing at alarming levels both in the US and abroad.
It would be impossible to know all the reasons for these attacks, but in my initial research, the theme of fear did come up a lot. It might seem strange to suggest that queer people — a group that is historically less financially secure and powerful than the general population — somehow make others afraid, but this fear is far more symbolic than it’s tangible. Bigots are not rationally afraid of queer people (because there is no reason to be), but they do have many irrational ones.
A trend that I have observed is that queer people often bring a perceived threat to a bigoted individual's masculinity. Gay men and women are the frequent targets of attacks by people who love them because the knowledge of that relationship is threatened to be exposed. In one example, a man in Brockton, Massachusetts, was believed to be involved in the shooting of someone he slept with because he was afraid that the victim would reveal his sexuality to both his family and his employer. The man in question was not public about his identity, and the relationship in question went against the rules of his work. He is believed to have tricked his lover and friend into meeting at a certain location in the dead of night so that they could have him killed.
Likewise, transgender people are often falsely accused of “trapping” straight men into relationships by concealing their transness. These accusations can get quite violent, with many men killing trans people for this alleged “deception.” Many of these encounters do not come from one-night stands but longstanding relationships. For example, the first person charged with a federal hate crime against a transgender person killed his former girlfriend after a friend discovered that she was transgender. The perpetrator was a member of a criminal gang and feared reprisals, so he lured his former girlfriend into a car under false pretenses and stabbed her, ending her life with the swing of a hammer.
It should be emphasized that these encounters are numerous. Every year comes with it multiple headlines of someone killing a person they love or loved because of the fear that others will learn the truth of their queer identity. These relationships were not an issue when they were secret. These men knew their partner's gender and sexual orientations. The person was afraid of the judgment of others, and they resorted to violent means to preserve their fragile masculinity.
This fear exists even when the relationship is nonexistent. In 2016, one man described punching a trans woman to death after she flirted with him as a way for him to preserve his sense of pride. He told police: “I don’t go around gay-bashing people. I don’t care about what they do, I just don’t wanna be fooled. My pride is at stake.” He initially pleaded not guilty, relying on a sort of “trans panic” defense or the idea that the woman’s advances were enough to justify his violent response.
It might seem strange to some that the sight of a queer person would spark this response, but such reactions have historically been quite common. Our recent past is filled with fragile men and women attacking queer individuals for much less. We saw this especially when queer people made sexual or romantic overtures to individuals, often referred to in the press as “indecent advances,” which were then seen as justification enough for the recipient to respond violently. Many people died (and continue to die) because the law would often not take these assaults as seriously as they would of ones committed against heterosexual individuals. As Caleb Crain wrote in The New Yorker:
“Even when an intimate attack ended in death, the law was sometimes lenient with a gay man’s killer. A judge might spare a victim’s family the “embarrassment” of a full-dress trial, for example. And, time and again, killers won lighter sentences by claiming to have been surprised by what newspapers euphemistically described as “indecent advances” or “improper proposals” from the deceased.”
Another way I see fear factoring into violence against queer people is when the person has imagined queerness to be a larger-than-life threat that must be dealt with immediately. For example, two Floridians attacked a gay couple visiting Wisteria Island back in 2018. The sight of the couple being unapologetically queer in speedos was enough to send these Floridians into a homicidal rage. “Hey, Mr. Speedo f@ggot, get the f@ck off our island,” one of the Floridians shouted. “You have five seconds to get off, or I will kill you.” The couple had to fend off knife stabs with an inflatable dingy, paddling to safety until the coast guard eventually rescued them.
This is also a type of gay panic, but rather than being “offended” by a romantic or sexual overture, it is the mere presence of overt queerness that has prompted such a response. They are reacting to the perceived threat of difference and trying to purge their space of it. This type of panic is constant. Many bigots are actively consumed by the “impending threat” of what they perceive to be a battle with a clear-cut enemy.
We see this fear in the very creation of our laws. When conservatives pass bigoted legislation, one type of justification commonly used is to protect society, particularly children, from the looming threat of queerness. Conservative lawmakers, for example, have framed recent anti-trans legislation (e.g.. laws that ban the use of gender-confirming healthcare like puberty blockers, ban trans people from participating in their preferred sports team, etc.) as protecting children, even if it is to protect those children from their own identities. “…every child deserves a natural childhood,” Montana Rep. John Fuller told the Montana Free Press in January of 2021 on why he supported such bigoted legislation. “…one that allows them to experience puberty and other normal changes that shape who they will become.”
More comprehensive analyses than this one have been made that debunk why this pearl-clutching over trans health care is wrong. Puberty blockers are not particularly harmful, and most of their symptoms are reversible, but the science is not really the point. It’s a justification to mask their fear of change. “the pushback,” Fuller said earlier that month, “…will come from people who have an agenda…and a vested interest to put forward the destruction of what I would call, traditional and classical and moral treatment of young people.” It’s about the fear of changing institutions men like Fuller care about that actually drives all of this legal bigotry. Things are changing, and they don’t like it.
We saw similar sentiments with the battle over same-sex marriage. People would talk about needing to preserve the “institution of marriage” when really many of them seemed to be projecting their own fear of change onto strangers. In fact, an interesting study came out nearly half a decade ago now in 2016 that proposed that fear of sexual promiscuity, which many people believed gay men and women to be at the time, correlated with opposition to same-sex marriage. The lead author of the study says: “Many people who oppose same-sex marriage are uncomfortable with casual sex and feel threatened by sexual promiscuity…Sexual promiscuity may be threatening to these people because it provides more temptations for spouses to cheat on one another.”
Those who push for regressive policy or actions against queer people may shroud their intentions in many different things — protecting children, preserving the natural order, temporary bouts of insanity — but at the end of the day, they are very obviously afraid.
People continue to have a deep misunderstanding of fear, and that includes even other queer people. This problem is highlighted in a small scene in the web series The Outs where one of the characters is opining on the meaning of the word homophobia. “You know what, homophobia gets a bad rap,” they say dramatically, “but what it means is people being afraid of homos. And I know I’d feel a lot safer walking home alone at night in Charlotte, North Carolina, if more people were afraid of me.”
As we have just covered, though, this understanding of fear is rudimentary at best. While we will never know all the reasons that push people to commit violence towards queer people, it would be foolish to dismiss fear entirely. Fear is a powerful motivator that pushes people to do horrible things. The fear of judgment can cause insecure people to hurt and kill those they love, and the fear of change can cause people to distort the laws of society to exclude the most vulnerable.
To those insisting they are not homophobic, transphobic, or queerphobic because they are not afraid: yes, you are, and your fear is deadly.