Jesse Monteagudo: Jesse Monteagudo is a free-lance writer and gay book lover who lives in South Florida with his partner and many books. You can reach him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com online. This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VIII Issue 39). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.com online.
In his first book, “Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People And Why It's So Hard to Be Human” (2001), Dr. Robert N. Minor wrote about things as they are. In his new book, “Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society: The Minor Details,” Dr. Minor writes about things as they ought to be, or as they can be, in spite of the sickness around us. Originally written as a series of monthly articles for Liberty Press and Gay Today, these “minor details” are a welcome tonic at a time when everything from the federal and state governments to the corporate media are the tools of conformity and control. In “Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society” Robert Minor urges us to think for ourselves, and to stand on our own too feet.
As gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people, we are in a unique position to defy the sickness around us. There are certain “straight roles” that we are all supposed to fill, and GLBT people, as social “deviants”, live outside those roles. “Gay people have decided that based upon whom they love, they are in some sense outside the role,” Minor writes. “Once they've made this decision, they can do everything possible to mimic the straight role, to act as if they really aren't different from straight people.”
On the other hand, “gay people can see themselves as healthy because they are outside the dominant role. They can decide to redefine the values of the culture so as to be agents of healing. They can recognize that a culture that minimizes them is really laden with straight problems…Our culture needs the perspective that people outside the role have to offer. And it will be a different perspective than that installed by our straight-acting cultural institutions.”
Because we are different, we can do great things. GLBT people, Dr. Minor tells us, “are more likely to be our culture's healers, pioneers, and models of emotional, spiritual, and human health.”
“When one finally accepts that most difficult realization that one stands outside the dominant sexual orientation, and faces the consequences of that ‘queerness,' a new freedom opens….Those who have embraced this freedom have led progressive movements for change, produced great art, challenged the limits cultures place on creativity, refused to be stifled by gender roles, broken the sick fears of the dominant culture around sex and pleasure, and defined life in whole new terms. We [GLBT] people do have important gifts to give to our culture that will shake it up for all humanity's sake if we don't hide.”
All this would be obvious except for the fact that society uses every tool at its disposal to enforce its prescribed roles, especially its gender roles.
GLBT “people are targeted for discrimination” because it “is the major means our society uses to keep men and women in their place, to keep them in strictly defined and ‘opposite' gender roles. It ensures that men will be ‘masculine' and women will be ‘feminine.'...As long as gender is strictly defined and enforced with little if any fluidity, gay men and lesbians will be attacked, demeaned, and thought of as second class citizens because the oppression has nothing to do with them and everything to do with gender roles - roles that are not human, freely chosen, or healthy. These roles result in inhuman relationships; one role relating to another rather than one human being relating to another.” Anyone who challenges this hateful system, post-911, is quickly labeled “un-American.”
So, Where's the Sex in All of This?
Dr. Minor, in an essay thus titled, is clear about it: “Sex, and I do mean genital activity and everything surrounding it, is really a great thing. It's a means of communicating between people that can embody a range of possible messages.”
But “our culture has done everything it can to pass on its sickness about sex to all of us…The dominant religious sexual morals ingrained in us successfully divert our attention in order to maintain the political, economic, and religiously controlling status quo.
With all the condemning and shaming messages about sex, our psyches fill with guilt over our sexualities. This ensures that our energy will never threaten what's really wrong with our culture - the systemic, anti-human institutions that are profit-oriented and coping-oriented and not functional for human beings and their healing.”
“Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society” deals with a variety of people and issues; everything from the value of GLBT consumers to the sexuality of singer Ricky Martin. In each case, Dr. Minor “tries to arrive at reasoned opinions…as seen in a large perspective,” which is Will and Ariel Durant's definition of a philosopher. (Dr. Minor is a Ph.D.)
The reader will learn much from this book, even when he or she does not agree with some of the author's conclusions. Sometimes it's hard to go the distance with Robert Minor. But we can admire this good Doctor's dedication, commitment, idealism, and optimism. When all is said and done, all that we “are asking for is nothing more - and certainly nothing less - than changing a fear-based society to a love-based one.” This is one goal well-worth fighting for.
commenting closed for this article