Bi The Way

There’s a bar I go to quite regularly. I normally drop in for a beer in the early evening, not that I’m a big drinker, just that it gets me out of the house and away from my computer for a couple of hours. Working from home you need a few places to “escape to” otherwise you never stop work. Due to my early evening drink, I tend to hit this pub when it’s at its quietest. So you get to know the staff and in particular I’ve gotten to know the landlord Jon.

Jon is a self-declared homophobe. Which on the face of it seems like odd label to claim for yourself. Now Jon isn’t a gay-basher or a thug, just a 40 year-old career publican with two divorces and a Catholic upbringing behind him. So we can allow him a degree of latitude in wanting to create a hard-man persona, however his self-declared homophobia has always amused me, especially as he seems to run such a Gay-Friendly Pub.

Jon will openly tell people, and frequently does, that he “can’t understand homosexuality”, that he thinks “its sick” and “unnatural”. But its difficult to take him seriously or find offence in his words because over the years he has hired so many Gay people, that at one point I think they actually outnumbered the straight staff.

He goes further, insisting that if saw a gay couple kissing in the bar, he’d ask them leave. “Not family friendly” he insists. Again though rather hard to take offence at this hypothetical because in 20 years, its never happened. Come to think of it, unless you count a couple of sixteen year-old’s having a quick snog over a slush-puppy I don’t think anyone has ever made-out in Jon’s pub, its just not that sort of bar.

So what purpose does Jon’s “homophobia” serve? His expression of it as an opinion, is on the face of it, protection from non-existent threat. A bit like bombing a series of remote mountain caves in an attempt to kill a dialysis patient, Jon’s homophobia is all for show, but for who’s benefit? Is he trying to compensate for his gay-friendliness so he doesn’t appear ‘weak?’ Does he have some homosexual feelings he’s yet to have inwardly accepted or resolved? Is he racked with Catholic guilt for some repressed homosexual encounter in his youth?

It would be easy to say “yes obviously” and cite the over-used and largely unproven hypothethis that all homophobia is born out of an individual’s own unresolved homosexual urges. But I honestly don’t think that is the case with Jon. Though as someone who believes in innate bisexuality I can’t dismiss this as a possibility.

For me though it seems like a defence mechanism, albeit one that misplaced and unnecessary. Jon’s biggest fear isn’t of being homosexual himself (because clearly he isn’t) or even of having gay people around him or (heaven forbid) hitting on him. What Jon fears is how his gay-tolerance might be perceived by other people.

This isn’t to say he isn’t really a homophobe, he believes his own rhetoric, he’s brainwashed himself with his homophobic mantras. My observation is just that his words don’t match his actions. And I honestly think that Jon’s homophobia is born out of fear of other people’s homophobia, rather than any real fear or hatred of homosexuals.

At any rate, he’s an interesting case study, largely because he’s the only homophobe I can tolerate enough to spend time with.

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