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What makes a BULLY? - social views of homosexuality as cause of aggressive behaviour in gay youth
Advocate, The, July 3, 2001 by David Kirby
Society's negative attitudes toward gay people are determining only the victims of harassment but also the perpetrators
You can't grow up without encountering a bully. And whether that bully is an older sibling, a menacing classmate, or a sand kicking beach bum, it's not a stretch to suggest that our culture is built, in part, on a culture of bullying, It's in the school yard, on the playing field, and in the workplace.
But for many of the nation's youth, this rite of passage has become a dead end. Name-calling has escalated to school shootings, and button pushing has led to suicides--leaving many people across the country to ask, "Where have we gone wrong?"
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Yet despite all the soul-searching, few news reports have made a direct connection between bullying and sexual orientation--even though several of the last major school shootings were sparked, in part, by antigay taunts.
"Few are seeing the all-too-obvious pattern," says Kevin Jennings, executive director of the New York City-based Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. "Young people are being taunted with antigay epithets and are then lashing out."
Taking it a step further, few news reports have examined how society's fixed notion of gender roles may determine more than just who is being bullied. It may also prompt gay, lesbian, or sexually confused youth who are determined to conform to those ideals to become bullies themselves.
A prime example of this may be director Larry Clark's new movie, Bully, which tells the true story of a teenage boy in Florida who was pushed to strike out at others because of his tortured and confused sexual desires.
This particular bully, 18-year-old Bobby Kent (played by Nick Stahl), visited gay bars, watched gay porn while having sex with girls, made amateur videos of gay men masturbating, and brutally forced his best friend, Marty Puccio (played by Brad Renfro), to have sex with men and strip at a gay club. The abuse against Puccio and other friends got so bad that they finally mustered up the courage to fight back, killing Kent and unceremoniously dumping his body in a rock pit near the Everglades in 1993.
As extreme an example of bullying as Kent's story is, Clark's movie nevertheless raises the important question of whether gay self-loathing may lead to abusive behavior targeted at others. "Nobody ever saw Bobby and Marty have sex with each other, but there was always that kind of speculation," says Clark, who also directed Kids in 1995. "And they pretended to be gay when they went into the clubs, so it's a very strange relationship these kids had."
But Bully does little more than raise the question--its chief focus is the victims' retribution. While gay and lesbian moviegoers may walk away with a clear connection between Kent's repressed sexuality and his bullying, it's not certain everyone else will. Nor does the film portray the violence that Kent and his friends reportedly directed against many gay men.
Yet Bully's inconclusiveness is fitting, in a way, simply because pitifully little is known about the role self-directed homophobia plays in gay bashing and other types of bullying. Not that there aren't case studies out there to examine.
Amber Boone, 26, of Martha's Vineyard, Mass., says she belittled people in high school--especially her softball coach--in an effort to mask her own attraction to women. "We'd make jokes behind [the coach's] back about her sexuality," says Boone, who grew up in central Florida, not far from where the events portrayed in Bully occurred. While the coach never heard Boone's taunts, two girls on the team who were dating each other did. "I found out that my teammates who were gay were afraid to tell people for fear of me making fun of them," she says.
Jenna Ard, a 20-year-old student at Loyola University in New Orleans, says she became a bully after she was teased in the fourth grade by someone who thought she was gay. After that, Ard says, she transformed herself from a soccer-playing tomboy into a sorority girl and self-described "hostess of homophobia": "I used words like `dykey' and `fag' to describe kids who seemed even the slightest bit [gay], and my friends laughed every time I did it."
And Ron Deutsch, 39, of Los Angeles says that when his classmates started to pick up on the fact that he might be gay, he masked his sexual orientation by bullying another boy on the school bus every day. "I really verbally abused him a lot, when I knew that I was wrestling with my own sexuality and that I was sort of attracted to him," Deutsch says. "When you are being oppressed, it is easy to become the oppressor."
Deutsch may be on to something. Discussing gay bashers with The Advocate, Harvard Medical School psychologist Arthur Ciaramicoli said that they often "take what they don't want to see and can't accept in their own self-image and project it onto someone else. Then they can hate it because they've divorced it from who they are."
The same might be said of many school-yard bullies, Jennings says. "When we teach young people that it's OK to hate gay people, we shouldn't be surprised that some of them turn that message on each other or on themselves," he says.
