> "Our true strength doesn't come from our
>military or our gross national product; it comes from our families.
>What's the point of keeping the terrorists at bay in the Middle East
>if we can't keep decline and decadence at bay here at home?"
huh. I can't find where I read it, but this theme came up in an analysis of heterosexism among blacks who see gays and lesbians as decadent expressions of whiteness. To be opposed to gays and lesbians was to reject the ills of white society:
"Many Blacks in an attempt to distance themselves from gays and avoid confronting their own biases dismissed homosexuality as "Their thing." Translated: Homosexuality was a perverse contrivance of white males and females that reflected the decadence of white America. "
Earl Orfani Hutchinson, My Gay Problem, Your Black Problem: http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/culture/black/articles/ofari1.html
who, like Keith Boykin, relates it all to the precarious state of black masculinity in the u.s. because of the history.
And this is what I read the other day, from Charles Mudede, "Homophobic Blacks Dance to the Sound of Gay Sex":
Black America also makes similar connections between white decadence/gay lifestyle and corruption. In a class I taught many years ago at Seattle Central Community College, a black student had no problem linking J. Edgar Hoover's purported homosexuality with the fact that he was, one, white, and two, morally bankrupt. To find the most hysterical expression of this attitude (white culture = decadence = homosexuality) in black America, you only have to read the once popular book Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver, which argues that "Negro homosexuals" were "touching their toes" for white men because their sense of masculinity had been corrupted by white culture.
Whether in Africa or America, for blacks, homosexuality takes the form of the foreign, the rupture on the border of black culture that initiates the fall from grace. This perception not only locates black gay men as dysfunctional or sick (which is what black homophobia shares with white homophobia), but also as race traitors, sexual Uncle Toms who have surrendered their black identity to European decadence. http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=7792