Group items tagged

On the prevalence of homophobia in today's teenage world Dan: "When I was a kid, not everybody looked at me and thought, 'Oh, he must be gay because he likes musicals and he's a fairy.' They looked at me and thought, 'Weirdo.' And now they would look at me and think, 'Faggot.' We've also had 20 years of an anti-gay hate campaign waged by the religious right where they've been telling parents who then expose their straight children to this rhetoric that 'gay people are an attack on the family, that they're trying to destroy the family.' And [parents] at the megachurch listen to this stuff and they go to the ballot box and abuse gay and lesbian abstractions with their votes. Their kids go to school on Monday and there's the queer kid or the kid who's perceived to be queer because he's gender-nonconforming in some way. And they feel they have license to attack that kid because that kid attacked them first by simply existing. That's what the religious right has injected into the culture over the past 20 years."

The knee-jerk way to review a colossus like this is to chip away at it, to whittle it down to one's own intellectual size by regretfully pointing to what Dickstein left out: What about comic strips or radio shows or doggerel poetry? (See? I'm not above such tricks.) But Dickstein puts a stop to this kind of gamesmanship at the outset when he tells readers that he "made no effort to cover everything."