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If fifteen-year-old Sam Manzie had been dating a forty-year-old woman, his family and community would have shaken their heads and chuckled. Even if he’d paid her for sex. But Sam Manzie is a gay child. Accurately assessing the homophobia of his family and community in Jackson Township, New Jersey, Sam did not go to high school dances looking for a boyfriend; he went on the Internet.
There he met and began a sexual relationship with an older man, an experience the press calls "child molestation." When his parents discovered his secret life, they shamed him, humiliated him, and called in the police. When the government imposed electronic tracking technology to entrap his boyfriend, Sam tried to protect the man by smashing the equipment. These are some of the conditions surrounding the state of rage that resulted in Sam murdering eleven-year-old Edward Werner.
I too was a sixteen year old homosexual, "caught" by homophobic parents. I too was
pathologized, humiliated, and deprived of my family status because I cared about another girl and she cared about me. Fortunately, I was rescued by a generous community of gay men and women who had also been punished by their families and neighbors even though they had never done anything wrong. Sam Manzie was not so lucky.
Although rage is an appropriate reaction to injustice, the consequences of familial homophobia are rarely as dramatic as the tragedy of Sam Manzie and Edward Werner. The most common scenario produces deprived gay people who go about their lives without the familial support that they deserve. But this system also produces heterosexual teenagers and adults for whom familial homophobia is a form of social currency. They rely on achieving familial status and approval through dating, partnering, and service to other heterosexuals.
These very same actions, when taken by gay people, are grounds for punishment and exclusion. It is time for a broad cultural agreement that homophobia is the pathology. That it destroys families and causes violence. That homophobia is an anti-social behavior that ruins gay people’s lives. We need to develop systems of family therapy aimed at the homophobic family, not the pathologized gay child. We need courts and social workers who recognize homophobia in a community or family as something that needs to be confronted and stigmatized. We need institutions that advocate for gay children inside homophobic families.
The paradigm of reward and punishment must be flipped, so that coming out is recognized for what it is: a profound experience of self-awareness and individuality, one that should make parents proud. Gay children need special protection by their families, not
scapegoating.
In one of the final scenes of Paul Rudnick’s new movie In and Out, a crowd of heterosexual family members and neighbors stand up in support of a gay man who is being
pathologized. "I’m gay," each of them says, in solidarity. It’s great science fiction.
More accurate in daily life are the comments Manzie’s neighbors gave to the press. "He should be raped in prison," Tracy Devine of Jackson Township told reporters, a message that Sam Manzie clearly understood long before the death of Edward Werner.
-- Sarah Schulman
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