A word like "homophobia" should not be used lightly. Not all people - maybe not even a majority - who have qualms about the idea of homosexuality are actually afraid of lesbians and gay men. But for those people who truly do hold a deep and irrational terror about homosexuals, "homophobia" is the only word that will do. A recent episode of the ABC-TV reality series Wife Swap offers up Exhibit A.
For those who have not seen the show (and prior to this episode, I was among them), Wife Swap takes two families and has them "trade" wives for several days. At the end of the show, the families are restored, and they sit across a table from one another to discuss their experiences. On the Feb. 9, episode, a self-described "traditional Christian" family, the Gillespies, traded their mother, Kris, for Kristine, one half of a lesbian couple who are raising a daughter.
The traditional Kris is a tightly-wound woman who is a stay-at-home mom in a "millionaire suburb" in Texas. Her children are well-behaved, obey orders, make their beds and set the table for dinner each night with place mats and silverware in exactly the right places. The children are not allowed to see PG-rated films, and each member of the family has a personal Bible that they bring to the dinner table for nightly readings.
Kristine, in contast, has a laissez-faire liberal approach to parenting, letting her daughter watch PG-13 movies on the TV in her bedroom (forbidden in Kris's home). The front lawn is barely alive in her lower middle class Arizona home, and there's not a place mat to be found - which is probably okay, because paper plates don't go with place mats.
The differences among families are the show's very heart, but this episode revealed something much less superficial: real homophobia. The theme begins early. When Kris first gets the chance to rifle through her new home, she finds a book on defiant children, and sighs. Then she finds a book on lesbian parenting, her first indication that she's not in Texas anymore. She holds the two books up, and rhetorically asks if there might be a connection.
At the end of the show, when the families discuss what they have been through, Kris states, quite clearly and repeatedly, that she was worried the whole time that the lesbian now living in her home would try to molest her daughter. Kristine is devastated by this, and when she confronts Kris with how this is insulting, Kris says she was only trying to "protect" her family. Kris also goes a step further and says that, in her opinion, Kristine and her partner, Nicki, are "depraved."
This is a word she uses three times in the show, twice to Kristine and Nicki's faces. Very few people, when discussing homosexuals, will actually use such a word. It describes people who are monstrous, ungoverned, inhuman. This is the sort of abusive insult that only the most extreme will use, and seldom to the face of someone they purport to be describing. Kris's multiple use of it on the show, directly to Kristine and her partner, was stunning.
While the lesbian moms - and even the Christian kids - admit to being a bit changed by the experience, Kris is adamant that all this experience did was reaffirm how happy she is with her own life and her own husband. The underlying appeal of shows like this (including the current run of makeover shows, and even the A-list reality shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race) is in the balance of transformation and reaffirmation - how something dramatically out of the ordinary can both change us and prompt greater appreciation.
But Kris was not about to be changed. Her fear and loathing of homosexuals is a constant - an important constant - in her life, and nothing, not even experience, will change that. Kris is literally afraid of homosexuals in the most blatant and unabashed way. Her fear that Kristine would molest Kris's daughter had no basis in fact or reality - something quite obvious to anyone watching Kristine interact with Kris's family. That fear arises solely from notions that Kris holds about what homosexual people are like.
People like Kris cannot be changed or persuaded. In fact, she actually demonstrates a certain amount of pride in her feelings of fear. Even if Kristine did not actually molest - or intend to molest - her daughter, Kris's fear of this remains justified in her mind, a feeling not only appropriate, but necessary. To her, the problem is people who lack her fear of such depraved individuals.
The Wife Swap producers may not have intended this message. Indeed, their focus seems to have been on extreme opposites, playing up, for example, the Gillepsies's Christian beliefs while editing out any mention of the fact that Kristine and Nicki are also Christians who attend church weekly. But the show was a rare display to mainstream America of what real homophobia looks like. And it is something that should inspire real fear.
The depravity Kris sees is nowhere in evidence. It is an understood depravity, not something arising in fact. It is a definitional state, it can not be forgiven, can not be washed away, can not be overcome by any amount of goodness, ordinary humanity, decency, or anything else.
Open lesbians and gay men have changed lives and minds. But some minds will be forever closed. What a shame for them.