Has there been a recent uptick in homophobic violence, or is it just election season again?

Whatever the case, another recent outrage, this one in the Bronx, forces me to ask, again, who is really gayer, gay men or the men who gaybash them?  I've argued before that "gay" is a social identity — you "identify" as gay — whereas sexuality is something far less cut and dry, emanating from the dark core of the amygdala, the seat of the Id, home of primitive instincts and urges. 

It's futile, I think, to try to find the sense in something like what happened last week in the Bronx, where, according to the Times, a gang of nine attackers ranging in age from 16 to 23 (and calling themselves "The Latin Goonies"), kidnapped, tortured, and sodomized three men for, um, having sex with men.  Unlike, say... themselves?

True enough, the sodomy was by proxy — a plunger in the case of one man and a baseball bat in the case of another — and some of the violence was as well — one young man who had had sex with the "primary target" was forced to beat the latter and burn his genitals with a lit cigarette.  Much of the explicitly sexual violence was obviously "pornographic".

Their "primary target" was a man in his thirties who in all likelihood identified as gay. 

Before setting upon their 30-year-old victim, they had snatched up two teenage boys whom they beat, the police said — until the boys — one of whom was sodomized with a plunger — admitted to having had sex with the man.

The attackers forced the man to strip to his underwear and tied him to a chair, the police said. One of the teenage victims was still there, and the “Goonies” ordered him to attack the man. The teenager hit him in the face and burned him with a cigarette on his nipple and penis as the others jeered and shouted gay slurs, the police said. Then the attackers whipped the man with a chain and sodomized him with a small baseball bat.

The beatings and robberies went on for hours.

I was watching an excellent documentary the other night form National Geographic called Stress: Portrait of a Killer.  The really intriguing part for me was the work of Stanford University neurobiologist/primatologist Robert Sapolsky, who has spent years tracking wild baboons in Africa (here's a fascinating talk he gave at TED in 2009).  And one episode in particular (also alluded to in the TED talk and written about in an article in the Times here) where the bullies — er, alphas — in a baboon troop he'd been following died of, basically food poisoning (they picked up bovine tuberculosis from a dump they'd raided). 

Sapolsky had been tracking them for ten years at that point, I think, and was naturally upset that fully half the males in the troop died off in what seemed at first like a real catastrophe.  But as he continued to track the troop he discovered that with the bullies gone, the beta males didn't take on the bullying role.  Quite the contrary, they were communicative and cooperative.  They shared resources, groomed each other, treated the females with respect, even deference.  Not only this, but when males from other troops joined them they were acculturated within a couple months as well. 

Sex has a multitude of purposes among primates.  From the obvious procreative function to establishing hierarchies through dominance and submission, punishment and reward, sex has social functions well outside the realm of intimacy and affection we associate with it. 

In our society, what is offensive and threatening about male-on-male sexuality that is nonviolent and wholly consensual is its subversion of a social hierarchy based on bullying and violence.

And bullying and sexual violence are of a piece.  Children are acculturated to it before they know exactly what words like "gay" and "faggot" even mean.  At first they're merely labels for children who are different or weak or awkward or shy.  But as bully's mature, the labels become license, verbal abuse justifies physical and sexual abuse, sexual abuse being the most extreme form of male dominance, because it is the most literally intrusive and destructive of both an individual's sense of autonomy and physical integrity, and his or her ability to experience the affirmation of real intimacy with another.  It strikes, in other words, at the very heart of his or her humanity. Sexual violence destroys a perosn's ability to even be at home in his or her own skin.

What you see in situations like the one in the Bronx is a troop of bullies seeking out vulnerable males and using sex to punish them for having sex with each other.  That they associate the sexuality of their prey with weakness is a cultural idea, reinforced on all levels by the culture around them.  Homosexuality — dedicated or situational — can certainly be seen as part of an alternative social paradigm.  Whether that should be threatening or not depends on how invested you are in the current social paradigm, I guess.  There are plenty of voices throughout history that sang the praises of an heroic homosexuality. 

But heroism is not high up on the list of social values in our conniving times. And when our nation's leaders cannot summon the will to stand up for ordinary gay folks (much less the extraordinary ones who serve a nation that offers them only second-class status in return for their heroism) they communicate implicit approval for violence against gays. 

Wherever you have a class of people you deny rights to, you dehumanize them, and you give others license to abuse them.  They don't have to be treated like human beings, because, in effect, the state doesn't recognize them as full human beings. And while hate crimes legislation was passed to address this, it's only a band-aid for the second-class status that in large part justifies the violence against gays in the first place.

And if there is an increase in violence against gays right now (and an increase in self-inflicted violence) it is partly because when it comes time to stand and deliver on the issue of equality under the law (supported by a clear and ever-growing majority in polls), our leaders have declined.

This communicates, far and wide, that gays will not be treated equally under the law and that gay people are not people in the same sense as other people whom the law recognizes as equals.

You may not think a troop of baboons in the Bronx gets this, but obviously they do.