IGF CultureWatch

This video is making the rounds, and deservedly so.  It’s a pretty amusing parody of the “No homo” tick hip-hop invented to defend itself against The Gay.

But it’s got more going for it than that.  What makes it both funny and pointed is that it shows how closeted gay men are as irritating to heterosexuals as they are to homosexuals.  We all have a direct interest in making sure that people don’t delude themselves about their own sexual orientation.  Straight is cool, gay is cool, bi is cool (if confusing); but for God’s sake, man, figure yourself out.

And the video is especially timely because its humor comes from the same tortured logic that gave us Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  The delusion of mostly older heterosexuals, and mostly men, is that if only gay men could “keep quiet about it” everything would be OK.

“No homo” is risible in the hip-hop world because it is such a lame attempt to acknowledge that some relationships and interests of heterosexual men are non-sexual but can look a little iffy.  That “if” only matters when there is a stigma about being gay, a stigma that has historically been able to drive homosexuality into the netherworld of the closet.  As that stigma recedes (and it is), the feints and jabs at its fading shadow look more pathetic – and sillier.

DADT is not just some military policy based on that stigma, it is a piece of social engineering designed to hold up the eroding barricades of prejudice in that small part of the world where prejudice can actually be enforced every day.  But in the end it is just another limp cry of “no homo,” this time in a uniform.

We can laugh about that in the civilian world.  But in the military, DADT has real consequences, both for national security and for the lives of the men and women whom the law requires to lie, every day, every hour, every minute.  This not only undermines their lives, it makes the military look as duped and misfocused as the laughable character in this video.

There may still be vestiges of the stigma against homosexuals left among a number of younger military personnel.  We’ll see when the results of the military’s survey come out (and hopefully we’ll be able to discount for the biased structure of the questions; the survey looks like it was intended to goad the most anti-gay answers out of the respondents).  But at its worst, that survey would only show us that a lot of military folks believe some things most of the rest of us just find pretty funny.

Unlike “No homo,” DADT is a dead serious matter.  They are similar only in this: No one benefits, and problems arise when we urge or demand that people deny the truth about themselves.