Today on AOL there was a news item about an episode of the TV show "Law & Order: SVU," which I have never watched. The article was about the show's dealing with a taboo topic, male-to-male sexual violence. To put that even more bluntly, that would be a man raping another man. Yes, it can happen but it's rare. I think it's more the rarity than the taboo nature which is the reason you don't normally hear about it. (I believe I recall one news item that in fact was in our mainstream newspapers some years ago, about a man who got attacked in a downtown parking garage.)
Anyway, I knew--I just KNEW--that there would be a comment on the article that sought to tar all gay men with the (doubtless new to them) brush! The person wrote something like, "And this is why we need gays in the military?"
The online articles on AOL (which I confess to spending a lot of time reading, these days) normally allow the posting of comments, and replies to others' comments. In this instance I didn't see any provision for writing my rebuttal to that comment, so I'm using my blog as my forum.
As I hope nearly anyone would recognize, that's a ridiculous comment. Gay men do not typically go around raping other men. A large fraction of men raping men undoubtedly goes on in prisons; and it's well known that even that is not a result of the rapists' being gay. Sociologists (or whichever branch of scholarship studies such matters) call that "adventitious homosexuality," meaning that men will turn to other males when they don't have any other sexual outlet available. These men don't consider themselves gay, and once they are out of prison the resort to exclusively heterosexual behavior.
Religious Right and other homophobic types try to blame gay men for child sexual abuse, when statistics have shown, over and over, that the percentage of men abusing girls is much higher than for boys. But those people all too often don't care about facts and prefer to keep repeating the same misconceptions, distortions, and out-and-out lies.
Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein
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