gay bashing and class

[William S. Lear]

On Tue, October 20, 1998 at 13:39:58 (-0400) Doug Henwood writes:
>Meredith_Glueck at edf.org wrote:
>
>>when talking about the 2 guys who killed Matt Shepard, i really wonder if
>>there is all that much that differentiates them from alot of other people
>>who are prejudiced, there are plenty of people capable of doing this-i
>>don't know if a class based argument would really be valid-
>
>There's something there, I think, at least for men, as a psychological
>defense against marginalization. "I may be a lowlife but at least I'm not a
>queer." I read somewhere recently that some anticolonial discourse played
>with a colonization = ravishment trope, that the colonized man was somehow
>feminized (and no, that is not a, um, backdoor apology for imperialism). I
>don't know what to make of this, does anyone else?

If I weren't so pooped, I'd scan through Raphael Ezekiel's *The
Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen* (Viking,
1995) to see if he has anything interesting on this.  I remember
hearing him interviewed, I think on NPR, several years ago.  One thing
that struck me was that he said most of these people had pretty thin
beliefs, and were just held together in hatred with others (this is
something Noam Chomsky has noted as well, not only referring to these
sorts of people).

Perhaps along with escaping marginalization, it's about belonging to
something with others, satisfying that great urge that List wrote
about in a gruesome way.

Bill