Why Are So-Called Liberals Using Homophobia to Mock Trump and Putin?

From ELLE

There are a myriad of ways to mock the sitting President of the United States, an oafish megalomaniac with a pitiful grasp of the English language, a Shakespearean obsession with small pyrrhic victories, massive insecurities, and the petulance and eating habits of a maladjusted teenager. Making fun Trump is almost too easy-with his whining tweets, his garbled double-talk, and his cartoonish history as a New York celebrity no one truly respected, he owns himself so frequently it makes it almost impossible to find new avenues for mockery. For better or worse, he is a figure who might as well have been crafted for this particular moment in a scientific lab, so well does his personality resist being felled by his many obvious weaknesses, hypocrisies, and personal failings. There are many, many reasons to make fun of President Trump but being gay or some variation thereof is not one of them. Would someone please inform the liberal elite?

In anticipation of today's peculiar Helsinki Summit in which the President met with Vladimir Putin at length before conducting a combative press conference, the New York Times Opinion page recirculated a cartoon by Oscar-nominated animator Bill Plympton in which Trump pines for a hunky Putin and imagines the two spending a romantic afternoon together and sloppily kissing.

This is vile. Plympton took his obvious talents for satire and animation and threw them directly in the trash, choosing instead to make a feeble joke out of calling the president a faggot.

Make no mistake, that's exactly what this is. No more and no less. It is a homophobic slur barely disguised as political comedy and it's shockingly prevalent amongst people who would probably describe themselves as liberal. It is pervasive on Twitter where journalists, celebrities, and comedians, as well your average Resister, continue to go back to a well that has always been dry.

The premise of the joke, such as it is, is that Trump and Putin's special, dangerous relationship is deepened by a same-sex attraction between the two. What's worse than potentially colluding with a hostile foreign power? Two men kissing. Hilarious.

Some people make these insinuations as acts of "Resistance," believing that if Trump sees himself mocked in this way it will make him mad. I have bad news for everyone: Trump isn't looking at your dumb tweets. But you know who is? Queer people. LGBTQ adults and children who are seeing their president cozy up to an autocratic, violently homophobic leader of a country with a host of anti-gay policies are seeing your poorly constructed jokes. Queer Americans whose lives have been and will continue to be negatively affected by the fact that a third of Trump judicial nominees in his first year had anti-LGBT track records, according to Lambda Legal, by his attempted ban on trans troops in the military and by the Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court verdict, to name but a few.

When someone tweets out an insinuation that Putin and Trump are having sexual intercourse as a way of emasculating them, they aren't owned. Same-sex attraction isn't emasculating, even between purportedly straight people. It isn't a sign of weakness and it isn't something to be ashamed of. But when one suggests that Trump and Putin are gay, that's what the statement says. It belies a deep discomfort with male affection, revealing a toxic relationship with masculinity and an undeveloped understanding of human sexuality.

Maybe that's what these people want. Maybe they're homophobes. Plenty of liberal people are. Ask any LGBTQ person how many well-intentioned allies have called something "gay" in front of them, have mimicked gay sex as a punchline, have joked a person is gay or lesbian because of they way they dress or talk or the things they enjoy. Every time a gay person hears a "joke" like this, it confirms that the world we live in is not safe, that the people who say that they have our backs are lying, that any interaction can suddenly reveal a hurled slur and after that, a thrown fist.

Because this is where the road ends for queer people: seemingly innocent mockery codifies homophobic beliefs and discomfort with same-sex attraction; that, in turn, results in open insults, complaints, or noises of disgust when said attraction is made visible through acts like holding hands, kissing, or simply standing in a certain way. And the noises of disgust then boil over into violence and often death. It can happen over the course of years or over a matter of minutes. That is the reality that queer people are reminded of when gayness is a punchline.

According to the FBI's latest available statistics, there were 1,076 anti-gay hate crimes reported in 2016, ranging from intimidation to murder. This is only a fragment of the full picture, as reporting to the FBI is not mandatory and thousands of law enforcement agencies do not submit data. In 47 states, when accused of a crime against a LGBTQ person, a defendant can legally use the "gay panic defense"-the assertion that the defendant finds homosexuality and homosexual acts so frightening that they were driven to temporary violent insanity. In March of 2018, in response to a gay panic defense, a Texas jury recommended 10 years probation for James Miller, who was convicted of stabbing his gay neighbor to death while they were drinking and listening to music. This isn't just theory; this is being used in practice to defend the murder of LGBTQ people in the present.

To attempt to mock Trump for having feelings of attraction for Putin is to attempt to incite a gay panic in the two men and in their followers and acolytes. It is willfully violent, not to mention careless, lazy, reductive, and, frankly, boring. It makes Putin and Trump's jobs easier by reinforcing a world that is hostile to LGBTQ people to the point of death. If that's the objective of these so-called jokes, fine. Just don't call it comedy; call it what it is: hate.

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