Jew , lesbian, feminist: I knew the hatred was real, but I had not
imagined these apparently docile women hating so much that with
tiny steps they would become a gang: so full of unexamined hate
that they would have pushed me over that railing “accidentally” in
defense of Christianity, the family, and the happily heterosexual,
churchgoing child molester down the block. In my own body, bent
back over that railing, I knew the cold terror of being a homosexual
Jew in a Christian country.
*
“Anti-Sem itism , ” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, “does not fall within the
category of ideas protected by the right of free opinion. Indeed, it
is something quite other than an idea. It is first of all a p a s sio n ”6
The great hatreds that suffuse history, pushing it forward to inevitable and repeated horror, are all first passions, not ideas. Hatred of blacks, hatred of Jew s, and long-standing, intense, blood-drenched nationalist hatreds* are forms of race hatred. Hatred of
women and hatred of homosexuals are forms of sex hatred. Race
hatred and sex hatred are the erotic obsessions of human history:
passions, not ideas. “If the Jew did not exist, ” Sartre wrote, “the
anti-Semite would invent him . ” 7 The carrier of the passion needs
the victim and so creates the victim; the victim is an occasion for
indulging the passion. One passion touches on another, overlays it,
burrows into it, enfolds it, is grafted onto it; the configurations of
oppression emerge.
In patriarchal history, one passion is necessarily fundamental
and unchanging: the hatred of women. The other passions molt.
Racism is a continuous passion, but the race or races abused
change over the face of the earth and over time. The United States
is built on a hatred of blacks. In Western Europe, the Jew is the
primary target. This does not stop the black from being hated by
those who hate Jew s first, or the Jew from being hated by those
who hate blacks first. It means instead that one, and not the other,
signifies for the dominant culture its bottom, its despised, its
expendables. Homosexuality is elevated and honored in some societies, abhorred in others. In societies where hatred of homo
* Noting the high opinion Amerikan slaveholders had of Irish laborers,
English actress Fanny Kemble wrote in 1839: “How is it that it never
occurs to these emphatical denouncers o f the whole Negro race that the
Irish at home are esteemed much as they esteem their slaves. . . ” See
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 18 3 8 -18 3 9 (New York: New
American Library, 1975), p. 129.
sexuality has taken hold, fear of homosexuality is a terrifically
powerful tool in the social manipulation and control of men: pitting
groups of men—all of whom agree that they must be m en, higher
and better than women—against each other in the futile quest for
unimpeachable masculinity. Hatred of homosexuality makes possible astonishing varieties of social blackmail and male-male conflict.
In racism, the racially degraded male is sexually stereotyped in one
of two ways. Either he is the rapist, the sexual animal with intense
virility and a huge and potent member; or he is desexualized in the
sense of being demasculinized—he is considered castrated (unmanned) or he is associated with demeaning (feminizing) and demeaned (not martial) homosexuality. It is the relationship of the dominant class to masculinity that determines whether males of the
racially despised group are linked with rape or with castration/
homosexuality. If the dominant group insists that the racially
despised male is a rapist, it means that the dominant males are
effeminate by contrast; it is they who are tinged with homosexuality in that they are less manly. They will climb the masculinity ladder by killing or maiming those whom they see as racially inferior but sexually superior. The Nazis transparently craved
masculinity. It was the Jew who had stolen it from them by stealing the women they should have had. According to Hitler in Mein Kampf:
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth
lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his
blood, thus stealing her from her people. 8
German men unmanned by their own recent history (World War I)
and a host of social and psychological inadequacies, as exemplified
in their leader, found a savage redemption: the annihilation of a
racial group of men perceived as being more male *—which, in this
*The racist perception of the Jewish woman “as a harlot, wild, promiscuous, the sensuous antithesis of the Aryan female, who was blond and
setting, means more animal, less human, not the human husband
but the animal rapist. This annihilation was an act of mass cannibalism by which one group of men, lacking m asculinity, got it from a mountain of corpses and from the actual killing as well.
In the United States, the black man was characterized as a rapist
after the end of slavery. During slavery, his condition as chattel
was seen to unman him entirely. His degradation was as a sym bolically castrated man; a mule, a beast of burden. (His use as a stud to impregnate black women slaves to increase the slave wealth
of the white master does not contradict this. ) Vis-a-vis the white
man, he was unmanned; and vis-^-vis the white woman he was
unmanned. * Early in Reconstruction, M ay 1866, a fairly optimistic
Frederick Douglass wrote that, though sometimes he feared a genocidal slaughter of blacks by whites, the movement of the former slaves “to industrial pursuits and the acquisition of wealth and education”9 would lead finally to acceptance by whites. He recognized that even in success there was danger,
for the white people do not easily tolerate the presence among
them of a race more prosperous than themselves. The Negro as
a poor ignorant creature does not contradict the race pride of
the white race. He is more a source of amusement to that race
than an object of resentment. Malignant resistance is augmented as he approaches the plane occupied by the white race, pure” (see Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women [New*
York: Perigee Books, 1981], p. 147) also exacerbated the conviction that
the racially superior men were not man enough: she provoked them endlessly with her savage eroticism, but they could not tame or satisfy her—