High school was a tough time for your typical geek. Between weekend long D&D marathons, hacking military and business computers, and being mercilessly beaten and humiliated by more popular, athletic kids, it’s a wonder they managed to find the time to go to class. Granted, only one of the above things ever actually happened to any of them, but geeks like to pretend that they were horribly victimized while in their adolescence by those of their peers with the foresight to get some exercise once in awhile.
Luckily for the geek, there’s a quick and easy way to displace all the pent up anger and humiliation that pretending to be someone else’s whipping boy: pick on someone else! As we’ve already seen, lording your geek superiority over another geek can be useful in establishing your place in the pecking order amongst other geeks, but that lacks the usefulness of an engaging us/them dynamic. Picking on the mundanes would be the natural first choice of a geek, but doing that would give the lie to their self-professed “underdog outsider” status. For the geeks there’s a group ready-made for them to despise, and that’s gays and lesbians.
It may seem surprising that geeks would gravitate towards a knee-jerk antipathy to gays and gay rights, but it’s worth remembering that American culture, as a whole, still has not become comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, and the middle-class, white, right-libertarian tendencies of the geek are well documented. There is no realistic other option for a group for them to feel superior to. Race-based antipathy is socially frowned on and would only draw attention to the overwhelming white-ness of geeks, and it’s hard to feel like an outsider when you’re essentially The Man. Gender-based antagonism only reduces the likelihood of a geek finding a woman desperate enough to have sex with him, as despite the frequent geek complaint to the contrary, chicks really don’t dig jerks.
It may also seem surprising that geeks would gravitate towards homophobia because so much anti-gay sentiment is rooted in Judeo-Christian ideology, and your typical geek is trying very hard to distance himself as much from that system of religion as possible. But in that strange, cross-over world of American politics, where people who vote Republican because Jesus loves little babies become convinced that Jesus hates climatologists who discuss global warming as well, geeks gravitate strongly towards the right-wing Libertarian ideologies of Ron Paul and Ayn Rand. They believe that technology is the answer to all problems, and that no government regulation or taxation or copyright legislation should be allowed to stand in the way of that technological utopia. And as that crowd includes a more than representative example of “natural law” thinkers and those who fear that, for example, legalizing gay marriage will create a strain on the health care industry because of the millions of straight people who will enter into fake gay marriage for insurance benefits, a good amount of only tangentially based in reality anti-gay thought creeps into the geek’s world-view.
I may be a horrifying psychopath, but at least I'm not GAY!
This sniggering response to anything that could even be remotely seen as gay is what gave rise to the unrelenting hilarity of the nonstop “Brokebat Mountain” jokes that arose on the internet after the casting of Heath Ledger as the Joker was announced before filming for The Dark Knight began. That it took the death of Ledger for geeks to realize that the jokes weren’t funny is a testament to the lengths they’re willing to go to for the sakes of maintaining their disapproval of both gays and humor. (It’s also not a little ironic that now his depiction of the Joker is considered “iconic” by fans and became the number one geek costume of last Halloween.)
Should the question of actual anti-gay discrimination come up, the geek will be the first to adopt a “blame the victim” attitude. After all, a woman who identifies as a lesbian in her gamer profile is clearly asking for it, as sexuality should have no place in video gaming. Just ask “LadiesMan69″ or “LuvsTitties.” Clearly, gays and lesbians are asking to be discriminated against. If they weren’t, why would they ever let anyone know about their failure to live up to the manly, heterosexual ideal of the geek?
A group of people more hated than themselves? Small wonder geeks LOVE Homophobia!
Blantant gay-baiting that blames the people being discriminated against rather than cop to their own (obvious) homophobia? It’s okay if you’re a Republican, uh, I mean, geek!
Excellent.
Hey, the Republican bashing was uncalled for. I know plenty of ‘democrats’ who bash gays, Republicans who don’t, and vis versa. You shouldn’t put people into categories, everyone is an individual.
But why are they lowercase, inverted comma ‘democrats’ then?
Dead on.
I don’t get it either, Allison. The writer is singling Republicans out as if they’ve made it a platform to treat gay people as subhuman or something. But everyone knows they haven’t…
oh, right.
Sorry, Allison, as an actual, bona-fide homosexual-American, I have to say that, if anything, the author of this article was too nice to Republicans.
Go ahead, name me ONE prominent Republican politician or commentator who is not opposed to basic human rights for gays and lesbians.
Just one.
I’ll wait. But I won’t hold my breath.
Well, somebody told me Lois Lane is a Republican…
Oh, wait. She’s fictional. Never mind.
[...] Fandom | A takedown of homophobia in “geek culture.” [Stuff Geeks Love] [...]
eh the geeks i knew in high school allied with the gays… there was alot of outsider solidarity going around
ironically this made us – the gay/geek/goth alliance- the biggest group in school
And the ridiculously bullying and intolerantly incendiary non-word “homophobia” continues its march over reason. Anything even remotely opposed to homosexuality (not homosexuals as people, mind you) is immediately slapped with the label to silence and condemn. There are an awful lot of legitimate, non-biased psychological and scientific studies out there that are blatantly “homophobic”, I guess. You just don’t hear about them, much, do you? Hmmm…
Oh, Hash…
Thanks for the laugh…
I don’t dislike conservatives as people, I just think the conservative ideology is morally and ethically bankrupt, utterly repugnant, intellectually stunted, and should be eliminated from the philosophical arena. Conservatives themselves are just fine, so long as they don’t either act on their conservative ideology or demand special privileges such as being able to vote.
Wait, what? We’re homophobic now? I am honest-to-god surprised at this one. I’ve followed this blog for a little now. I’ve nodded sadly at seeing myself sometimes, quietly resolving to be a less obnoxious human being. Or sometimes tongue-clucked when I thought something was a bit too mean-spirited to be funny. But I swear I thought the barb would come from the other direction: We were *obnoxiously* open-minded, defending all bizzare permutations of the screw-act in our stubborn quest for individuality and already mentioned fondness for sex.
There are parts of the geek-world like that, but there is definitely a very loud faction of geek homophobes. Not sure what the statistics are, but when you’ve got a bunch of young males who aren’t fully secure in their masculinity, this sort of thing happens.
And remember, if you find any entry on this list that doesn’t apply to you…well, then it isn’t about you. But no, there are plenty of homophobic geeks out there. Hell, the ones who play XBox Live have made “gay” the standard expression for “bad”.
“Race-based antipathy is socially frowned on and would only draw attention to the overwhelming white-ness of geeks, and it’s hard to feel like an outsider when you’re essentially The Man. Gender-based antagonism only reduces the likelihood of a geek finding a woman desperate enough to have sex with him, as despite the frequent geek complaint to the contrary, chicks really don’t dig jerks.”
Ha, that doesn’t stop them. Surely you must know that.
Hey, what about the blacks and the chinks too?
Dorian, you’re obviously a geek.
I’d always thought of geeks as less likely to pick on gay people in particular, and more likely to compare themselves to gay folk in order to garner oppression points, due to their sad, pasty-white lack thereof. Because, you know, growing up unpopular and middle class is pretty much like being a Polish Jew circa 1939.
I’ve found that this trend is entirely averted for girl geeks, as the popularity of slashfic should indicate. I’ve never known a lesbian or bisexual-woman who wasn’t also a huge geek. To an extent that’s self-selecting, birds of a feather and all, but of eighteen geek girls I’ve known in high school and college whose sexualities I’ve known for sure, four were bisexuals and two were lesbians.
Sorry for the late comment, just arrived at the blog by way of a meandering path from TVTropes. I probably won’t stick around – the blog’s not very friendly, and I don’t identify with most of these anyway.
P.S. Watchmen sucked, mostly because of what a Antihero Sue Rorschach was. Seriously, his mommy issues were enough to cause an existential crisis in a trained criminal psychologist? That completely undermined his (Rorschach’s) character for me. The point was to show how screwed up people would have to be to become masked heroes, and eschewing straight-up sociopathy for the oldest, lamest Freudian excuse in the book (female sexuality did it!) left a horrible taste in my mouth.
Transmetropolitan ftw.
While not disputing Rorschach’s Sueness, his upbringing wasn’t what turned him into his final form; it didn’t even make him put on the mask. He started crimefighting in reaction to the apathy he saw when Kitty Genovese died; he became the sort of Nietzschean monster that could Hannibal-Lecture the psychologist after he killed the child murderer who fed his victims to his dogs.
Sure, you could argue that his mother was the root of his issues with women, but it’s certainly not his entire backstory, and it doesn’t define his entire character.
Much of the geekworld homophobia grew out of being bullied by jock closet-cases, imo. It’s an over-correction in attitude as defense mechanism for a segment of society that wasn’t allowed to develop a sense of sexual security while going through puberty. The vast majority of geeks I know, once able to achieve a modicum of sexual maturity, drop the homophobia of their teens with far more ease than the “mundanes” are able.
Man, what?
This is not indicative of my experiences with the geek community generally.
I see. We’re stretching the term “geek” to mean “anybody who plays a computer/video game online.” If only it really were just geeks who could get online. 1993 changed everything.
This actually IS true. I mean, a great deal of geeks are heterosexual males, and lets be honest here – I doubt there are a single group of people with a bullshit sense of entitlement quite like that of a straight male.
This is less of a problem in female-dominated corners of the internet, like fandom, where you are practically guaran-fucking-teed to find gay/bi fanfic writers around.
I think it’s rather hypocritical to talk about a victim-blaming mentality when repeatedly I’ve seen the sentiment expressed here that geeks aren’t REALLY outsiders who are bullied and excluded, they just like feeling oppressed and are a bunch of whiners.
There’s this myth that people believe, not just about geeks but a lot of other “weird” types as well (alternative sexualities included), that people who don’t fit in “just want to be (seen as) different” – that they’re perfectly normal people who woke up one day feeling masochistic and wanting to play at being a minority. I can tell you that, from at least my experience, this is a misrepresentation. It goes the other way. After years of just wanting to do your own thing as you like it, or simply exist as you are in some cases, and getting excluded, insulted and – yes – outright attacked for it, you stop wanting to belong to the mainstream that people pick on you for not fitting into. Your life is your life, and not theirs, and why try to warp yourself in order to fit into a group that has done nothing but hate you for completely arbitrary reasons? The fact that someone is picked on is not negated or made less real by the fact that that person refuses to stop being different. As comfortable as the “trying to be weird and feel oppressed” myth is to believe, it’s just that, a myth, and a particularly mean-spirited method of victim-blaming at that.
On another note, I won’t deny that there are homophobic nerds (as seen in one of the above posts), but I think it’s overstated here, and probably only or mostly based on comments made on the internet. The internet is not a good sample, simply because of what it brings out in people – “normals” as well as “geeks” – and, conversely, the kind of people it can attract. There are homophobic geeks in real life, but, as I and a number of others here have seen, they are outnumbered by allies, if not members, of the LBQTA-etc. community.