Gayness and misandry

Andrew Comiskey, a psychologist-preacher of the Protestant Christian group Desert Stream Ministries*, has written that homosexuality, among other things, is a complex of narcissism combined with hatred of both sexes, technically termed misandry (hatred of men) and misogyny (hatred of women). This is the most dumbfounding hidden dynamic one can ever hear explained by the very same people who call themselves “ex-gays,” those who have left the gay lifestyle out of disillusionment in favor of heterosexuality. But after the recovery from the shock of hearing it comes the lightbulb of insight –- an entire lantern of lightbulbs, in fact, switching on and off in a beguiling light show.

Comiskey’s observation complements psychologist Joseph Nicolosi’s more streamlined explanation of the puzzle of homosexuality. He distills the problem down to shame and anger, particularly “unexpressed shame” or layers of “unexpressed anger” growing out of unexpressed shame. Why shame? Because shame, specifically John Bradshaw's conception of it ("toxic shame," an unnecessary and extreme form of shame), is a symptom of the fear of death of self, due to the trauma of perceived rejection.

Which brings us to the reminder that, before we laugh or get angry at LGBT antics, which most of us find inexpressively weird and wild, they are first a people of shame, and resultantly people of anger, due to perceived or actual abuse during childhood. We’re not talking here of one-time humiliation or sex molestation (though one-time sex molestation is reportedly already traumatic for a child), but years and years of (imagined/real) abuse, which forms a cluster of issues that work together inside the afflicted person to produce a complex, a syndrome, or a palimpsest of suppressed (buried in the unconscious) and repressed (buried in the subconscious) feelings of shame and anger, exacerbated by guilt and envy and depression, and culminating in the death of healthy self-worth (and the breathless compulsion to source it from outside).

The nature of abuse, shockingly enough, is often sexual, and often perpetrated by someone living near the victim, the “prehomosexual child” in the phrase of Nicolosi. One thus understands the afflicted person better when analysed along these terms –- shame and anger. Add to that the resulting “desire for vindication,” said another psychologist Melvin Wong, or the anger targeted at both males (misandry) and females (misogyny) and even fellow sufferers of homosexuality (which is but a projection of self-hatred). Anecdotal evidence comes aplenty in support of these views, particularly the one on misandry.

If one is surrounded by gays and lesbians, one can easily cite a treasure trove of quotable quotes. Someone put it this way up front: “Gays are the worst misandrists and lesbians the worst misogynists,” although both share differing levels of man-hate and woman-hate. (The statement was not uttered in the spirit of hatred or belittling, it must be emphasized.)

Sexual objectification and debasement

a. Casual sex

On the surface, i.e. sexual level, the hatred is expressed in gays’ treatment of men as nothing but playthings, sex objects, whose organs are sucked like a lollipop and sometimes whose anuses are attacked to the point of bleeding, even though, to quote a naughty friend, they know that the anus was “designed to release, not to receive.” They engage in all manner of irregular sex, even if they are aware of the risks of HIV infection or because of the risks (or even when they know the risks). On and off the gay lifestyle, Arthur (not his real name) admits that he is aware why he is fond of fondling young men when severely stressed: “I feel relieved whenever I treat the boys like pigs because that was how I felt all men were when I discovered my father having an affair. From that time on, I wanted to debase all of them through sex.” More often than not, the abused soon becomes the abuser.

b. Reverse sex molestation and sex abuse

That is certainly an ironic twist, but we must understand that broken personal boundaries are the abused child's notion of normal, having wrongly modeled the 'real world' from abusive mentors. Many are the stories of men and women accusing gays of abuse, in an odd kind of reverse sex discrimination: sex with (or sex molestation of) minor boys, sexual propositions in beauty parlors, railing at women for not allowing gays inside the female comfort room, ogling at another's privates in restrooms/urinals, exposing someone naked in public, exposing oneself to children, nonconsensual caressing or fondling of lone strangers in moviehouses, overaggressive pursuit, and so on.

c. Pornography

Pornography, in relation, is but an extension of this objectification of men. It is an unconscious desire for an intimate lover or to be loved intimately, resulting in an imaginary love affair but without the consequences and commitments in the real world.

Envy

While it is true that gays put the male idyll on a pedestal (as in Michaelangelo’s masterpiece in marble, "David"), it is more out of envy than love, more out of the desire to repair the damaged self (a natural desire Nicolosi calls “reparative drive,” the instinctive drive to make up for what is perceived to be lacking in one’s manhood). And is not envy a form of anger? Envy, they say, is sadness over one’s lack coupled with anger at one’s not having gotten what is desirable. In this way, homosexuality is indeed misandry.

Sadism, masochism

The anger is not restricted to envy. Other forms of compounded reaction may occur, ranging from sadism, to rebellion from authority, especially male authority, to atheism, cross-dressing and sex change, and pederasty.

I have learned of a case in Granta of an Arab man who was a gay sadist who subjected his lover to a most violent bondage torture at his own home because the perpetrator had been traumatized as a child in some sort of a family incident he interpreted to be a kind of rejection.

The twin of sadism, masochism, is punishment for oneself for not living up to self- and social expectations, a self-directed form of misandry.

Not surprisingly, some of the loudest demonstrators against legitimate governments and religious authorities are also active in LGBT concerns. Where could all that pent-up anger be coming from if not from unexpressed hatred for a wayward father or an abusive militaristic monster at home, if not bullies in school embodied in the jock or varsity types. The vehemence seems to boil down to this: the (ego) defense mechanism called displacement, in which the hurting person diverts his anger to another similar but less threatening target because he cannot express his anger at the actual target.

Atheism

The most tragic consequence of this defense mechanism is the confusion of one’s father issues with one’s God issues, resulting in the denial of God, apostasy, agnosticism, and atheism. The fatal mistake? Rage against the father becomes rage against God the Father.

Cross-dressing and sex change

Cross-dressing (often confused with transvestitism, which is limited to heterosexuals) and sex change, we can easily extrapolate, are but other derivations of shame-based anger, resulting in hatred of man. These are the ultimate flouting of social conventions by reversing nature or rebelling from reality. It is homosexual anger expressed by way of fashion and surgery. The psychological effect of sex change on anyone realizing his hidden issues and desiring to revert to the original is literally castrating and catastrophic, needless to say, that a few are driven to commit suicide. Melvin Wong has cited one celebrated case of someone who took his own life because of this. A ‘luckier’ convert named Sy Rogers is now travelling around the world busily preaching the lessons he learned the bitter way. In the Philippines, one can take an inspiration from the life story of Vins Santiago, an ex-trans-gay, who eventually found it impossible to turn his back against his XY chromosome.

Defensive detachment and effeminacy

The above form of hate-filled rejection of masculinity has a less intense cousin in the more subtle form that another psychologist, Elizabeth Moberly, calls “defensive detachment.” In defensive detachment, the young boy is driven to rejecting his own father for some reason and ends up in “attachment failure” (Nicolosi), the failure to model after the father’s masculinity. Boys grow up effeminate because of this, preferring girl things over typical male interests.

Pederasty and ephebophilia

Pederasty, the man-to-boy version of pedophilia, and ephebophilia, the sexual attraction of middle-aged man to teenage boys, I strongly suspect, are an expression of profound anger at the traumatic loss of innocence caused by early-life sex abuse. Pederasty is sometimes (or often?) characterized by sodomizing, sexually torturing, and paddling of boys till their behinds bleed. Here, the pederast or ephebophile commits the grave mistake of thinking that loss of innocence equals loss of self. It is a cocktail of shame and shame-based anger all over again. The desire to recoup that innocence must have been sexualized because sex provides the high needed to cover up the shocking and painful fact that innocence has been lost and that it is impossible to regain it (at least physically speaking). Someone likened this ‘brokenness’ to what I would call the Humpty Dumpty dilemma (a takeoff from John Powell), the breaking of an egg and the ensuing (and pitifully impossible) attempt to reconstitute it. Part of this dynamic is observable in Gregg Araki’s 2004 movie on pederasty, Mysterious Skin, where the boy prostitute have nothing but mutual contempt for his 'DOM 'patrons/clients despite communing in an act that is supposed to bond two personas psychologically into one.

Pederasts and ephebophiles could learn from the story of 1500s England’s Queen Elizabeth I, who had the spunk to claim “I am virgin again” after losing it, upon merely deciding she wanted the broken hymen stitched back in her mind. In the movie account of that scene, one can not help but admire the queen for not confusing two things: the loss of innocence versus the loss of self or identity.

In another unforgettable indie film by a Filipino director Jerrold Tarog, titled Mangatyanan, the issue of sex abuse is used as a metaphor of the abuse of the Philippines as a colony, a nation-level psychoanalysis that certainly borrows from the thoughts of Franz Fanon, or maybe a little bit of Toni Morrison in Jazz or Beloved, stories of the black people's struggle against white supremacy. Laya, the daughter abused by his own father, is a budding photojournalist with an obsession for untouched civilizations, as though to recover the virginity she had lost in the most unexpected manner. She is, needless to say, a ticking time bomb. (Notably, the film was co-produced by John Silva, a vociferous LGBT figure.)

Sex fetishes

The obsession with innocence must be quite similar in gay men who often exhibit secret fetishes that symbolize, signify, or give a clue to what gets their unconscious goat or pet peeves and consequent obsessions.

Using anger as prism, sex attraction to nonsexual symbols of masculinity such as sports outfits may therefore indicate traumatic shaming in the boy’s attempt to play ball; military gear, in the attempt to act tough like the rest of the boys or in the desire to be disciplined by an absentee father; fraternities, in the wish to be ‘initiated’ into the brotherhood of men; and so on. The anger, of course, bears fruit in unconscious envy of male attributes and body parts. Other psychologists deduce that everything is a sexual symbol that has nothing to do with sex: sexual attraction to breasts and arms symbolizes the hidden desire for fatherly love or nurturance; the sucking of erect phallus symbolizes the intense desire to absorb masculinity one mistakenly feels one does not have; and so on.

Gay lingo

Gay misogyny is also particularly revelatory in gay lingo. Ben, my overly gay officemate, once called women who frequently flitted around the attractive men he desired “poison.” Another gay guy jokingly called them "putakti," literally meaning wasp (mean insects that sting so bad) but actually a pun around "puta" or whore. They view women as bitter and bitchy rivals they would rather drink arsenic than imagine in the slightest to have romantic feelings with them, not the least sex. But this virulent misogyny is, in fact, fuelled by misandry, in that they snatch the men from their natural mates and hinder true reproductive health. Today’s gay lingo for attractive ‘straight’ (heterosexual) men are “papa” (signifying a hidden desire for a father figure, an unfair imposition) and “boylet” (signifying a hidden desire to turn a boy into a toy poodle, meat, or plain commodity). By the way, Ben also jokingly calls his stubble of beard "sumpa," meaning curse, which is equally telling. And he always jokingly insists, with theatrical flourish, that "Babae ako!" ("I'm a woe-man!").

Emotional dependency

The former resident counselor of Courage Philippines Joe Garcia, who once publicly lectured on these views all over the Philippines, was reported to have said that “homosexual ‘love’ is not love.” It is an imperfect form of love -- in fact, a manipulative, emotionally dependent (clingy) form of relationship that is based on neediness. In this deceptive relationship (not a monopoly of homosexuals, surely, as 'straights' can be guilty of misandry and misogyny too), the gay lovers constantly keep tabs of what they have contributed in the relationship, making the affair caustic, incendiary, volatile. It is, I would say, the most subtle form of misandry because the hatred is not apparent: it is hidden in the subtle ways of user-friendliness disguised as passionate love.

The above are just some of the possible ways that homosexuals, in fact, secretly and unknowingly reject manhood and hate men even as they are inordinately attracted to them (Wong used the better verb, magnetized) because they are still men, after all, biologically speaking; they still retain that desire to seek the approval and acceptance of fellow men. Reversing homosexuality, therefore, involves:

- gently bringing unconscious material to self-awareness,
- grieving all those layers of anger,
- forgiving one's abusers and oneself (because people do what they do for a reason that they think is good),
- exposing the unwarranted shame for the lie that it is (a huge part of it is self-inflicted because the shaming was undeserved yet internalized as truth),
- not confusing one's identity with one's falls and struggles, and
- affirming the wholeness and completeness of the individual as he is at the core.

Let's all embrace 'gays' (and 'lesbians' too) in love and acceptance as the worthy men (and women) that they already are. They are, after all, mere beggars of love, begging for true (unconditional) love, which unfortunately they don't know they already have just by being who they truly are and not earned by resorting to all that lantern, or constellation, of defense mechanisms.

Lastly, gays should learn to love men right: as equals, brothers, mentors, fathers, friends, and fellow men and children of God.

---------------
*Comiskey has recently converted to Catholicism