WE DO NOT KNOW who killed Jody Dobrowski. Two men have been charged since the attack on Clapham Common around midnight two weeks ago but we must not presume their involvement, the circumstances of the incident or any motives.
But on the face of it this did look like a particularly awful example of an evil we are not yet rid of in Britain: queer-bashing. The Dobrowski story has sparked much discussion of what the media have more politely called “homophobic attacks”.
Commentators line up to declare that the persistence in Britain of mindless violence against gay men shows how far we have still to go in promoting the acceptance of homosexuality. That there still exist brutes who would assault their fellow citizens solely on account of their sexuality is cited as evidence — a kind of visible symbol — of a deep vein of hatred and violence towards homosexuals, running beneath the polite surface of society.
Lobbyists for homosexual equality have tended to encourage this belief, and partly for the best of reasons: to shock people into acknowledging that the fight for equality is not over.
Those of us who are gay know very well that the smarter suburbs of London and the trendier streets of cosmopolitan cities do not accurately reflect attitudes still common in provincial and rural Britain. Here gay people may still face incomprehension, pity or even hostility. It is right to draw attention to this. We in the media are too quick to assume that attitudes we encounter in the circles where we move and at the tables where we dine, are nearly universal. They are not, and this needs saying again and again.
But the speed with which attitudes have changed is breathtaking, and not in London alone. In hardly a decade the intolerance of homosexuals, which when I was young seemed to surround me, has moved from being the conventional (though often challenged) moral wisdom, to being a lingering social prejudice, sneakily admitted to when, and only when, the speaker thinks he is in sympathetic company. There are now large parts of Britain where being openly anti-gay rather reminds me of what it was once like to be gay: an inclination you did best to keep to yourself unless you were quite sure you were in safe company. All over England, homophobes are going into the closet. As we come out, they go in.
Homophobia is becoming the hate that dare not speak its name. That is not quite an eclipse, but a spectacular reverse, and the only way any social change does proceed. The movements for the equality of women and of races, have equally to contend with stubborn prejudice that goes underground but does not die. But that is a mark of success. I’m all for buried prejudices. They are infinitely preferable to unburied ones. Give me my spade.
So the warning that some homosexual voices have been sounding over these past couple of weeks serves a good purpose if it calls to arms those who had thoughtlessly assumed that the battle was now won. Beneath these voices, however, and in a minor key, we sometimes detect another note. Self-pity has been a besetting sin within the movement for gay equality. As with the black anti-racist lobby, ours too has spawned its share of individuals who have a vested emotional interest in victimhood.
Nobody, of course, is other than horrified when gay men are murdered; but the modern woes of homosexuals are sometimes reported by our activists with something almost approaching glee. This is no way to give confidence to those whose circumstances make coming out still seem a potential problem. They need to be told that we are winning, and that the life ahead of them is full of promise.
Because we are, and it is, and they should be careful but they shouldn’t worry. When news like the killing of Jody Dobrowski hits the headlines they, and we, should be very cautious about what we read into it. I believe we should not read too much.
For just suppose that the speculation about the causes of his death and the motives of his killers turned out to be right. There would be an immediate temptation to call so brutal a murder the “visible tip” of a great iceberg of homophobia: as though the people who did this thing were only an extreme example of a widespread hatred of homosexuals; a handful who had taken a prejudice that inhabits millions just one grisly step farther than the rest would be prepared to go. “Homophobia,” we would then say, “killed Jody Dobrowski.”
The newspaper commentaries would write themselves. We owe it to Jody’s memory, we would declare, to root out all prejudice against homosexuals. If that prejudice could only be exterminated, murders like this would never happen again, and Jody would not have died in vain. All stirring stuff. And true in at least one sense.
But he did die in vain and he wouldn’t have been killed by homophobia. He would have been killed by one or more psychopaths, and if they hadn’t latched on to homophobia they would have latched on to another hatred, and killed a black, or a Jew or a French tourist. Homophobia would not have been the reason; it would have been the excuse.
Every age produces its small, sick crop of brutes. Every culture reaps among its harvests the tares of human failure. Every body of human beings has its leg ulcers.
And they need excuses, these pathetic riff-raff. Every blood-lust needs to rationalise. Even the least human among us is human enough to seek reasons for our brutality. There will always be young men whose heads and lives are so comprehensively messed up that they are crazed by the urge to wound, destroy and kill. It is they — and not Jody — who are the outcasts.
In another age or another place these pieces of psychological wreckage would choose other victims. “Cure” them of their homophobia and who knows whom they would hunt instead — witches, gypsies? Maybe even homophobes. All we know is that the urge to mutilate would still be there.
Were you to meet such a beast in the marketplace one morning, and he was say to you: “Today I kill. But whom? What manner of man? Tell me, and he will die before midnight,” then you would at that moment be conscious both of your power, and of your impotence. In just this sense, prejudice may appoint the victim but has not perpetrated the crime.
That is worth noting. It enables us to distinguish it from the prejudice that does add to the sum total of human suffering.
Pope Benedict XVI does not tend a flock of psychopaths who need to hate and will anyway hate. His flock are normal, balanced people — more than a billion — who begin each day with no desire to wound, who do not hunger for someone to despise, but who seek from his Church guidance as to what kind of life and what manner of men to approve or disapprove.
When he teaches them to hate, there will be more haters in the world. The hatred will be new, a net increase in both haters and hated. Pope Benedict XVI therefore has the power to enlarge the circle of darkness, to widen the skirts of human misery.
He has recently pronounced that candidates for holy orders, even when celibate and resolved to remain so, should be disqualified if by inclination they are gay. By this pronouncement he does more than lay down criteria for a job: he points to millions of his fellow men, people whom there would be no other reason to shun, and calls them offensive to God.
To what kind of philosophical shambles can our Government have been reduced, when it promotes laws to criminalise me if I encourage hatred of such a Pope, yet looks away when such a Pope encourages hatred of me? For whoever killed Jody I can feel the forgiveness that comes with pity. For men like Ratzinger I can feel none.
