The Era of PoHoMoPho

Earlier this year, my blockmates and I each received a plastic baggie of condoms, dental dams, and other socially progressive articles. Included in these baggies were “BGLT Safe Space” stickers, intended for students to affix to their doors in demarcation of an area into which, in apparent contrast with most Harvard spaces, a queer student could enter without risk of being attacked. One of my blockmates (all of them are heterosexual) quickly found an appropriate spot for the sticker: on the door of our oven.

Another time, during a jocular skirmish, my roommate graffitied on the wall (in pencil, of course), “Ben is a faggot.” We look back on this and laugh: The day a hate crime was visited on Currier House.

There are folks who would wonder why I, a gay boy, would find these episodes funny. They might be appalled at my blockmates’ homophobia, and they might speculate that I pathetically accept their sensibilities, including their sick, hateful sense of humor as the price to pay for their friendship. Some of my friends and I—we all rigorously adhere to an ethic of cultural relativism—call these people, “The Bad People.” They are on par with people who make conversation during television shows, hold opinions about Undergraduate Council candidates, or sing “Happy Birthday” in restaurants.

What the Bad People misunderstand is that the gay-related humor I share with some of my close male heterosexual friends has far more to do with the enjoyment of a good joke than with homophobia. It goes without saying, of course, that we are “post-homophobic” (or—and here I must give credit to blockmate Jeremy Hartman—“PoHoMoPho”). Simply put, for me it is a given that the value my straight-boy friends place on me has fundamentally nothing to do with my being gay. And while my closest friends can find humor in nearly any idiot’s prejudice, they are also with it enough to separate what is hateful (and therefore unfunny) from what is…well, funny. It’s sort of the same principle that’s at play when Jon Stewart says the word “fag”: he can use slurs because we know that at the end of the day, Stewart is on the side of the smart people—who are on the side of the homos.

And that’s the thread in post-hate humor, whether it’s post-homophobia, post-racism, post-anything-not-very-nice. So within post-homophobia, for instance, is the implicit assumption that the teller of the joke (and the audience, too) is not homophobic, which means the joke teller is free to trot out every formerly “offensive” stereotype or sentiment in the service of a good joke.

You may be thinking that as someone who has never really experienced anything more than minor homophobia in my life, I’ve got a lot of nerve slandering others’ sensitivity to homophobia. Let me reassure you: homophobia makes me about as angry as I can get (that, and having to wait in line for food). And sure, some of my friends and I may be post-homophobic, but the United States at large sure isn’t; and if the fear instilled in the closet cases on boredatlamont.com is any indication, Harvard as a whole may not be either (but that’s another topic altogether). My blockmates’ “homophobia” wouldn’t be funny if there weren’t actually nutcases out there—or in here—who do want to commit violent acts against gay people; more importantly, though, it wouldn’t be funny if there weren’t people who for some reason feel these “Safe Space” stickers do anything to further tolerance. Because we’ve already established that homophobia is idiotic, we can move on to the next target—vacuous gay activism—without worrying about looking homophobic.

But before you all declare your post-homophobia status and start calling all of your gay and lesbian friends faggots and dykes, consider this. Last year I knew an extremely irritating girl who had a habit of praising my comic delivery by deliriously cackling, “I love you; you’re so gay!” It was clear that this person saw me primarily as a clownish little faggot, instead of as Ben, and that she stupidly fancied herself a forward-thinking person because she could like me not just despite, but for my lovable gayness. Similarly, I have some straight friends who, having several gay friends and being politically liberal, feel they’ve cleared their names enough to indulge in “ironically” anti-gay humor, which often consists of simply referencing a person’s homosexuality, but without actually forming a witticism.

Post-homophobic and post-racist humor, like any humor, only really sizzles when you have something funny to say; if you don’t, you’ll probably just end up showing off an ugly side of yourself that is a little too interested in parsing people into gay and straight, white and not-white. That’s the tendency that the Bad People find so repulsive—what they implicitly assume is contained in all humor that hints at homophobia, racism, sexism, genderism, etc. When they find it where it really exists, though, far be it for a clownish little faggot like me to defend the jokester.

Ben Kawaller ’07 is a sociology concentrator in Currier House.