Right-wing Women

walked through the group of them, and the two lesbian feminists

and 1 exited. I was shaking a lot. The woman I knew said quietly:

we saw you up there and thought you might be in trouble, you just

kept getting closer and closer to that railing, they were crowding

you pretty bad, you shouldn’t have been up there alone with them.

She was right; but in common with so many other women I did

not take the danger to myself seriously—a self-deprecating habit.

Jew , lesbian, feminist: I knew the hatred was real, but I had not

imagined these apparently docile women hating so much that with

tiny steps they would become a gang: so full of unexamined hate

that they would have pushed me over that railing “accidentally” in

defense of Christianity, the family, and the happily heterosexual,

churchgoing child molester down the block. In my own body, bent

back over that railing, I knew the cold terror of being a homosexual

Jew in a Christian country.

*

“Anti-Sem itism , ” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, “does not fall within the

category of ideas protected by the right of free opinion. Indeed, it

is something quite other than an idea. It is first of all a p a s sio n ”6

The great hatreds that suffuse history, pushing it forward to inevitable and repeated horror, are all first passions, not ideas. Hatred of blacks, hatred of Jew s, and long-standing, intense, blood-drenched nationalist hatreds* are forms of race hatred. Hatred of

women and hatred of homosexuals are forms of sex hatred. Race

hatred and sex hatred are the erotic obsessions of human history:

passions, not ideas. “If the Jew did not exist, ” Sartre wrote, “the

anti-Semite would invent him . ” 7 The carrier of the passion needs

the victim and so creates the victim; the victim is an occasion for

indulging the passion. One passion touches on another, overlays it,

burrows into it, enfolds it, is grafted onto it; the configurations of

oppression emerge.

In patriarchal history, one passion is necessarily fundamental

and unchanging: the hatred of women. The other passions molt.

Racism is a continuous passion, but the race or races abused

change over the face of the earth and over time. The United States

is built on a hatred of blacks. In Western Europe, the Jew is the

primary target. This does not stop the black from being hated by

those who hate Jew s first, or the Jew from being hated by those

who hate blacks first. It means instead that one, and not the other,

signifies for the dominant culture its bottom, its despised, its

expendables. Homosexuality is elevated and honored in some societies, abhorred in others. In societies where hatred of homo­

* Noting the high opinion Amerikan slaveholders had of Irish laborers,

English actress Fanny Kemble wrote in 1839: “How is it that it never

occurs to these emphatical denouncers o f the whole Negro race that the

Irish at home are esteemed much as they esteem their slaves. . . ” See

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 18 3 8 -18 3 9 (New York: New

American Library, 1975), p. 129.