Rodney

I lived in San Francisco in the '80s, in a more or less gay neighborhood (Polk Gulch). At that time, band of teenage boys would come up from working class communities 20 or 30 miles south to spend an evening in San Francisco riding around in somebody's car, drinking, and yelling abuse at "faggots." Sometimes they'd actually beat somebody up seriously, even killed a man once that I remember.

And I saw some of these kids close up. I have pretty fine features and dressed well at the time, and since I lived in a gay neighborhood, that was enough for this little numbheads. I was walking down the street once and a bunch of kids yelled at me from a parked car. I scoped it out -- battered old car, decals from a San Bruno High School, young kid in the front seat with a bottle poking out of a paper bag. And I just stuck my head in the window and gave them what for. They just cowered. But if I'd been all alone in an alley, and acted timid, and they were out of their car and more liquored up -- they might have worked up enough animal-pack courage to go for me.

What makes it happen? Every social group needs somebody to look down on, somebody you can legally show contempt for. It's a common but harmful safety valve for dealing with the crap in your own life that you don't know how to cope with or feel powerless over. And when you're near the bottom of the barrel, as these kids were, gays are a safe target -- certainly their parents have given them cultural permission by telling them that gays are unnatural and against God.

The hate comes from confusion and unfairness and hate in their own lives. We all have to deal, and some of us deal with it badly through fear and hate and prejudice; but most of us hide such things, or apply them indirectly. Young men -- who frankly, don't have all their judgment or experience in place yet, and aren't fully socialized -- tend to react with direct violence. Against gays, against other racial or ethnic groups, and so on.

When you look at a revolutionary or subversive group that takes power against an old regime -- the Nazis, the Taliban, the Iranian Ayatollahs, the Aryan nation groups in this country -- the wise old heads at the top seek out an army of angry, disaffected young men to be their foot soldiers. They tell them that all their problems are _not_ caused by their environment, or their parents, or their lack of education, but _this_ evil group over there. Which they can attack and kill for the good of themselves and all other right-thinking individuals. And then the young men go out and burn Jewish businesses, lynch black people, torture women who don't cover their faces, and more. While the old men take political advantage, and smile.