Anti-homosexual activists deny that their depiction of gays and lesbians as anti-family sexual predators incites hatred or violence against gays, and most churches officially condemn gay bashing. Pro-gay advocates believe that demonization of homosexuality itself invites violence. Attorney Kendall Thomas argues that while “homosexual sodomy statutes express the official 'theory' of homophobia, private acts of violence against gay men and lesbians 'translate' that theory into brutal practice” (1485). When individual citizens act on behalf of the state, they erase the boundary between public and private, an erasure Bowers v. Hardwick legitimized as constitutional. Legally, Hardwick has no private area in which to be homosexual; his sexuality is always a public concern, an intrusion into and disruption of social order, even when conducted in the privacy of his own home, and so he deserves punishment. The harassment of African American males by the Ku Klux Klan was rationalized on similar grounds: incursions by black men into white public areas endangered “white culture, ” and the most inflammatory image depicting the mixing of races was, not surprisingly, a sexual one: that of black men molesting white women. Propaganda against gay men substitutes the image of a molested boy for the white woman. Thus, gay rights advocates argue that queer bashing has the same function that lynchings had for African Americans: to keep a whole stigmatized group afraid to assert its rights, to keep it invisible in the closet (Mohr 5). History suggests that whenever a social group is demonized, it automatically becomes a target for harassment  and violence. The targeted minority may be defined by race, religion, ideology, or merely geographic location, but the disparaging myths generally follow the same formula: to portray the Other as immoral and degenerate (Rubin). For centuries the Jews in Europe were labeled sexually deviant, sexually addicted, carriers of disease, slaves of Satan, and the enemies of God, virtually the same accusations made of LGBTs today. Does this commonality prove a shared goal? (Boswell 14-15; Blumenthal, “History/Hysteria”).

Gay rights advocates point to similarities between fascist ideology and orthodox Christian theology to imply that traditional thinking links despised groups in a chain of binaries that reinforce one another. Gestapo leader, Heinrich Himmler, adapted the “natural law” theology of sexuality to portray homosexuality as “anti-family.” State policy encouraged all German women and men to produce children with clearly marked gender roles, boys destined to be future warriors, girls to be future mothers. The Nazis outlawed anything deemed destructive to family values: contraceptives, abortion, prostitution, and homosexuality. The Reich legal director, Hans Frank, proclaimed that homosexual activity meant the “negation of the community”—not only because it did not produce children but because it encouraged social tolerance. On May 14, 1928, the Nazi party issued an official policy towards homosexuality:

Community before Individual:

It is not necessary that you and I live, but it is necessary that the German people live. And they can live only if they can fight, for life means fighting. And they can fight only if they maintain their masculinity. They can only maintain their masculinity if they exercise discipline, especially in matters of love…. Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes them a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is a fight, and it is madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally. Natural history teaches us the opposite. Might makes right. And the stronger always win over the weak. (Porter xii)

The gay embrace undermines gender, racial, and national distinctions that properly structure the world and society. Like Eric Fuchs who argues that only heterosexuals experience “in their flesh the order of differentiation which structures the world, ” the Nazis reasoned that gender differences stand as a structural model for all group dynamics. To maintain their natural superiority, men, nations and races must exploit the subordinated Other, women as breeding stock, nonwhites as slaves, non-Aryans as enemies, or else become exploited themselves, feminized and weakened by tolerance and democracy. The Nazis fought homosexuality with propaganda, repressive laws, prison sentences, and finally death in concentration camps. No one has a final count of the homosexual dead, but estimates vary between 20,000 and 500,000 (Feig 80-84; Porter x).

Orthodox Christian thinking also ties perversions together, but with important differences. Pat Robertson declared in 1992 on his televised 700 Club that fascism and homosexuality were compatible:

When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved in Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals—the two things seem to go together. (“Religious Political”)

The traditional model for perversion connects the flip side of binaries—order/disorder, truth/heresy, God/Satan, heterosexuality/homosexuality, and freedom/fascism. The distaff position signals a usurpation of right reason and a violation of God's plan, which set up all binary structures in the first place. As America's sodomy laws suggest, social deviance and sexual deviance are allied in traditional thinking, and so Robertson reasons that fascists, like homosexuals, must also be sexually disordered. Thus, while having the appearance of stability and logic, binary thinking contains slip-pages as each term bleeds into the other, producing variations. Neo-nazi groups in the United States also use traditional binaries to establish a natural hierarchy of value. Take the Blue Boys, a small group of young gay bashers in Los Angeles who cruise Hollywood with blue aluminum bats looking for victims. When interviewed, the group's leader, Cap, formulated his own theory of perversion to justify his actions:

Fags call each other fags, and a fag thinks that everyone is a fag. I tell you, [the] Blue Boys are male. We're heteros. We have girlfriends and wives. We're out there fucking chicks every night and we have nothing to do with any fag shit…. These queers fucking deserve [AIDS]. They are going around spreading their disease wherever they want under the rules of privacy given them by this fraudulent Constitution, with niggers in the Supreme Court saying what we can do and what we cannot do. This nation was built by white people for white people and is not to be confused with a bunch of faggots and niggers taking over. (Herek and Berrill 194, 197)

The position of the “enemy” can be filled by any of the three despised groups: gay men (who are emasculated but threaten to emasculate heterosexuals), “chicks” (who must be sexually exploited to prove one's manhood), and African Americans (who compete with whites for political power). Life is a struggle between the strong and the weak; thus, democracy is fraudulent because it is altruistic, protecting the weak who then conspire to dominate the naturally superior, sexually correct Nazi males. While Robertson would consider the Blue Boys to be Satanic, in fact, their beliefs resemble those of Christian Reconstructionism, a fringe group which holds that only white, Anglo-Saxon/Germanic Christians should exercise dominion over all the earth through the power of God's Law (Robinson, “Christian”). Binaries do not line up the same way for everyone. How one positions oneself in a binarized social hierarchy (as an outsider or insider, Christian or Jew, black or white, male or female) changes the way binaries are connected, and, consequently, whom one is allied with or against.

Although African Americans have also been victimized by prejudice and demonized as sexual predators, and consequently commonly assumed to be allies of LGBTs, in fact, as a group they are less liberal about social issues than white Americans, and many oppose homosexuality on religious grounds, as a sinful lifestyle that forfeits any right to legal redress. Some black gays have encountered racist white gays (blacks seldom occupy leadership positions in gay rights groups); others resent any comparison of suffering or disenfranchisement between LGBTs and African Americans as denigrating the latter (Gallagher, “Blacks and Gays, ” 400; Button et al. 186, 89-90). Like the Blue Boys, some African Americans theorize a hierarchy of value in which ranking becomes the only access to power and self-esteem: devalued by white culture, straight blacks can at least feel superior to gays, especially gay blacks. Indeed, the combined effect of being despised by whites for being black and by blacks for being queer has produced an attempted suicide rate for gay men and lesbians of color that is almost double that of white gay men and lesbians (Tremblay). In a review of statements by black intellectuals and religious leaders, Howard University Professor Ron Simmons found a variety of pathologizing explanations for why some African Americans are gay, all of them tied to racial and gender binary oppositions: that it is an emasculation of black men by white oppression, that it is a sinister plot perpetuated by diabolical white racists who want to destroy the black race, that it is a white man's disease. Nathan and Julia Hare, in their 1984 book, The Endangered Black Family: Coping with the Unisexualization and Coming Extinction of the Black Race, argue that black children are feminized by white female schoolteachers as part of a genocidal plot masterminded by the “white liberal-radical-moderate-establishment coalition” (211-212). Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, argued in 1990 that adulterers, child molesters, rapists and homosexuals should be executed for the benefit of family and national values:

Do you know why [in biblical times] they [stoned you to death] for adultery? Because there is nothing more sacred than marriage and family. Nothing…. And every time you stone [an adulterer] you're killing the thought in your own mind…. You make an example [by stoning someone] because the individual is not more important than the community [or the] nation. So you sacrifice the individual for the preservation of a nation. (Simmons 222)

Like Himmler and Robertson, Farrakhan bases his condemnation of sexual diversity on the premise that it is detrimental to all structured social relations. He uses anti-gay remarks to rekindle pride in straight black men, to reassert their value and power in a white nation that discounts them, but he reads value as requiring a despised Other. Simmons sees this goading tactic as ultimately self-destructive:

Persecuting gays reinforces a false sense of manhood. Rather than confront the real enemy—those who actually cause and control the oppression—their frustrations caused by powerlessness are soothed by intimidating those who they consider weak. It's easy to prove your manhood by putting down “faggots.”

Simmons' argument is that homoprejudice suppresses any emotion that diverges from fixed gender roles: “in the black community, a male is often forced to denounce sexual diversity in order to avoid suspicion [and] too often the homophobia and heterosexism within the African American community forces men to be the 'hardest hard, '” nullifying “unmanly” feelings (214, 217) as well as heterosexual females who may fear that being strong, ambitious, or self-assured may open them to charges of lesbianism.

Farrakhan's prescription to kill a person to kill the thought, silencing yourself by silencing others, suggests that anti-gay violence is an attempt to erase difference, not just in others but in oneself, and this may be why gay bashings are more vicious than other kinds of violent crimes, to erase any hint of likeness or self-doubt. In a review of gay bashings resulting in murder listed in 17 newspapers and two police department files over a five year period, researchers found that most victims were “more apt to be stabbed a dozen times or more, mutilated, and strangled, [and] in a number of instances stabbed or mutilated after being fatally shot” (Comstock 47). Melissa Mertz, coordinator of the Victims of Violent Assault Assistant Program of Bellevue Hospital in New York, reports:

Attacks against gay men were the most heinous and brutal I encountered…. They frequently involved torture, cutting, mutilation, and beating, and showed the absolute intent to rub out the human being because of his [sexual] orientation. (Comstock 46)

How much of this hostility can be attributed to latent homosexuality is unknown. In 1914 Sandor Ferenczi, the Hungarian psychoanalyst, hypothesized that feelings of disgust toward gay men by heterosexual men are defensive, a denial against their own unconscious attraction to other men (Goleman). Ferenczi's theory fell into disrepute in the 1970s, but it has recently received tenuous support from researchers at the University of Georgia. Adams, Wright, and Lohr recruited 64 Caucasian heterosexual male volunteers from the Psychology Department Research Subject Pool, who were then screened by the Kinsey Heterosexual-Homosexual Ratings Scale. Only those men who reported exclusive heterosexual arousal and experiences were allowed to participate. They were further divided into two groups—homophobic and non-homophobic men—using the Index of Homophobia Test, a group of 25 questions, developed by Hudson and Ricketts, which assesses how much discomfort the respondent would anticipate feeling interacting with homosexuals. An Aggression Questionnaire showed that the two groups did not differ from one another in terms of general aggressiveness; only hostility towards homosexuals was being appraised. A rubber circumferential strain gauge was then strapped around each subject's penis to measure swelling while three different videotapes were shown: one of nude men engaging in sex, one of lesbian women engaging in sex, and one of a heterosexual couple engaging in sex. Both groups of men—homophobic and non-homophobic alike—responded to the heterosexual and lesbian erotic scenes with erections; but only the homophobic men experienced significant swelling when shown gay male sex scenes. In the homophobic group, 20% showed no significant swelling, 26% showed moderate swelling, and 54% showed definite erections in response to the male homosexual video; in the non-homophobic group, the scores were the reverse: 66% showed no significant swelling, 10% showed moderate swelling, and only 25% showed definite erections. None of these subjects reported being conscious of having same-sex impulses, which may suggest either Freudian-style repression and denial or an unspoken cultural imperative. . .