Torrey Orton
August 27, 2013
The
challenge of recovering from inherited prejudices
How did I get over my adolescent
homophobia? I think it just wore out from exposure to other realities. While I
don’t think I knew anyone homosexual until I was in university in the early Sixties,
I certainly knew “they” were somehow bad (mincing was bad, male or female, as
was coyness or excess delicacy). Unmanly in any guise I guess. But by the time
I was out of university, approximately, homophobia was a clear non-event for
me. Along the path I was hit on by a gay guy (Jewish) in final year of university
and another (Anglo) in second year of secondary teaching and in third year of
teaching wound up rooming for a year with a black guy who came out a year later
in NYC. I shared his flat for 6 weeks of a summer teaching program there (late
‘60’s) during which I met my wife. He did not hit on me and the prior hits had never
elicited a striking response.
The above paragraph was a rough
flow of consciousness prompted by the question “How did I get over…?”. This
question, in turn, had been preceded by some loose wondering about how others
might be unstuck from their frozen thinking / attitudes - namely the
anti-abortionists of the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants at the Fertility
Control Clinic.
In exploring this question I
discovered I was taken back to generic parts of my upbringing to do with
cultural identities, approval and disapproval of options and endorsements of
our own family identities. I realise that one stereotyping sits in a sea (?) of
stereotypes that composed working knowledge of the world. And they are
interconnected, both as content (the whats of our worlds) and construct or
system (the learning and engagement of our worlds). And it’s not a straight
line of sequences or consequences.
So, what first came to mind was that
there was one notionally Jewish guy in my boarding school class in an
institution which was resolutely non-denominational. There were a few Jews in
the small town of my origin. While my mother and father (?) were low energy anti-Semites,
it is clear to me there was nothing in their views which was more than a
narrowly Anglo aesthetic affronted by different cultural practices and beliefs.
Somewhere early in my university days I met quite a few Jews who happened to be
my intellectual peers or more, and gay to boot. Apart from being quick, they
were also combative, a trait or style I’ve always enjoyed in matters of the
mind, and some others like ice hockey and street politics.
My parents held consistently
dismissive views of the French Canadians, Italians and Irish who were around in
reasonable numbers even in our small town (pop. 5000 approx. in 1955), all
being at least second or third generation immigrants (hence native English
speaking) and all being Catholic. The underlying rationale of my parents’
disregard was never published in our times, nor am I clear that they held the different
groups in the same degrees of disregard. Blacks were unseen and Hispanics had
never been heard of or seen in the small town Massachusetts we inhabited in
those days. The Finnish population, which was large enough to be noticeable,
was assailed occasionally for an imagined propensity for alcohol, though who
didn’t have that? A couple of German families were treated as cultured
Europeans…why, who knows? This relief from the surrounding condemnation was
heightened by their use of a German nanny to support my mother after the
arrival of number two brother.
And I still carry the externalities
of this culture in a number of matters of taste which I have resumed in the last
ten years…e.g. an essentially North-Eastern US “preppie” style of dress which which
happens to be making a return for two generations below me I think…khakis,
moccasins (now flashed up in boat shoe forms), button-down dress shirts,
preferably tailored (which my China consulting life put me in the way of with
great ease and little expense…). I have books in my house as my parents did in
theirs, to an appropriately greater degree given my work(s). In the midst of
the right schools and universities I acquired an abiding, to this day, sense of
social justice from the very parents who carried racist, sexist and classist
stereotypes so freely. I’m aware, I think, that I cannot give up my class any
more than my race or sex or gender…though class, religion and ethnicity may be
changed over a generation or two.
Both parents, in different ways,
also rejected their class, having traversed the right school/right
college/right occupation territory in the 1920’s and 30’s. I imagine that for
them the idea of “right” didn’t apply, any more than preppie dress seems to me “right”
then or now; they were just what one did, as I did…a fact announced to me when
I was in year 6 primary school – that I would be going to boarding school in 2
years, so I started to work on my ice skating and stopped basketball (for which
I would have been a much better candidate at the time…but then what did I know?).
Attitude seems to be an important
dynamic in this largely unconscious life negotiation. Both parents were to some
degree sceptical of many things and critical to dismissive of the normal life
around them, apart from some degrees of gross decorum like boarding school and
right universities. They were not personally well connected in their class
system and often critical to condemning of their class peers. Finally, my
mother was ahead of her times in many ways, most notably in turning herself
into a high school teacher around the time I was leaving high school for
college. 20 years later she also came out publically in a letter to her local
newspaper supporting my sister’s self outing as a lesbian.
My version of their attitude
flowered extremely in my 5 boarding school years where it encountered in the
late 50’s two things: pointless formalisms (mostly left over from the inter-war
period which the headmaster was a graduate of himself) and mindless rules
mindlessly applied, both by teachers and prefects. The upshot was an NA (“negative
attitude”) of which I was the first bearer in my generation of our family. Many
of my boarding school classmates had robustly developed NA’s, too. This was in
parallel with the Beat period and similar emergent streams which gathered force
and publicity in the 60’s.
All this and more burbled along
under the surface of the post-war boom’s material expression of what a happy
and fulfilled people we Americans were – as parcelled up by Madison Avenue for
financing by Wall Street. In the background of the white picket fence* universe
of 50’s America was the slow public sexualisation of culture through rock and
roll’s incarnation of rhythm and blues, and the emergence of diversities in
most things and the discovery of government chicanery coverted in the Cold War
demands to keep the Commies down wherever they were. Three great anti-war
novels were published in the early 60’s – MASH, Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse
Five, ringing the bell on realities of violence in the music of humour.
And James Baldwin in Go Tell It on
the Mountain, 1953 to The Fire Next Time, 1963 was opening
the black (and gay) experience on one side while John Howard
Griffin’s Black like me (1961) made it
accessible to someone like me with neither the colour nor the acquaintances to
pick it up first hand.
So, if our attitude was sceptical
and dismissive / condemning, our feelings were conflicted and confused at the
deepest levels of being – where our values lie in wait to drive or deride us. My
conclusion about humanity around the time of my turning away from a baseless
rejection of a natural sexual preference was, and remains, that we are largely
potentially omni-sexual from which we are directed at birth to one or another more
constrained expression.
There’s also something here about
multiple stereotypes interacting, though not with any empirical ground for
their doing so – vis. gays and Jews and blacks and assorted other ethnics and
confessions arise together from my ramble through the woods of my upbringing. There
must have been something cooking for me, my sister and both brothers to all
have married out and stayed out ever since - a trend which intensified in the
next generation.
*I don’t think
there were any white picket fences in Lunenburg, Mass., and few in New Haven,
Conn. Yet, this image remains a strong present one for a certain world view.
Urban Dictionary defines white-picket-fence syndrome as:
a state of mind where a
person blindly holds on to the idea of their perfect lifestyle, regardless of
the inevitable life factors that make it impossible for it to be true.
