hotbed?

The home of my youth was a hotbed of emotional repression.
So was everyone else's - i know.
Okay, how about this? The home of my youth was a hotbed of sexism, homophobia, and...racism?
Hmmm. Well, i've got MY attention.
The first two conditions are something i rebelled against...though perhaps not as assertively as i ought. Self-image is a tricky thing - we can fool most of the people most of the time, and no one more than ourselves. My self-image as a humyn rights hero might be at odds with the image others have had of me.
And perhaps some were...right?
Let's travel back to a place called 870 Weber. A nice home in the northeast suburbs, with a pool in the yard...a magnet for teenage friends and good times. Among the five kids, there was a choral all-star/academic achiever, an instrumental all-star, three theatrical all-stars, and one guitarist with a basement band. No sports stars, but hardcore play and spectator devotion.
When mom left, the signs had been on the wall and it seemed the only sane choice. I saw it through feminist eyes - mom needed the freedom she'd been denied under both father and husband.
I was eighteen. The split hit my brothers harder, perhaps affecting their ability to form adult relationships. Big sis was already nearly through college, and gone. Thus, 870 became testosterone central - for the next decade, a place of food and funny films, barbs and bros, nicknames and games. I lived there on and off for five years after college, partly to be there for my brothers. Joyous it was...with no dark side, to us. No physical violence. The drug use (alcohol, pot, eventually psychedelics) was the domain of my brothers, and always seemed under control. As for the sexist or homophobic energy, i always assumed it was simply the reality of every suburban home.
Recently though, one of my brothers opined that we had a toxicity conspicuously absent in most of the homes of our peers.
He might be right.
For without a doubt, 870 was a place of aggressive, chauvinist heteronormativity.
Like all boys in a greed-based patriarchy, we'd been taught (inside the home and out) to banish any weakness or differentness. These things were pounced upon. We called it "rikking" - verbal slams crafted with humor and flair...and in retrospect, without mercy. One brother was a bit out of shape, and perhaps overly fond of electronic entertainment. I dubbed him "chair", a name that stuck. Is an apology long overdue?
Being the oldest brother and verbally-inclined, i helped found the rik movement. To me, it was good-natured fun. An expression of love. I'm sure it was, on some level...
But the emotional repression was more pervasive than any of us knew. Males didn't share feelings, they used sports talk to sublimate and impersonalize such things.
And woe unto anyone who strayed from the norm. I tried to craft my riks in a feminist way, but such control was conspicuously absent in everyone else. Much of that stemmed from our father, in the degradation of anything feminine. Equating womynhood with weakness.
"GINA BOY!!" "PUSSY BOY!!" And yes, "GAYBOY!!"
Is it possible i used either of those first two terms (or something similar) in my early teens, before i realized their malevolent underpinnings? One brother assures me i didn't, but i'm not sure beyond a shadow of a doubt. In any event, by the time of the great testosteronization, i was the only one not using any of them. Did my protest extend beyond silence? I'm pretty sure at some point i directed a calm diatribe at father and brothers. Did it have any effect? Maybe. Could i have done more? It's never been my way to correct or control. People do and think what they want. Plus, advice-giving has a pernicious side - we're all constantly trying to re-shape the world in our own image. So i've always tried to maintain a dignified silence, in a world full of people overeager to tell each other what to do. We're all great idiots. I try to shut the hell up.
There is much strength in this approach, yet also perhaps a weakness, in a world so damaged. It's only in recent years that i've allowed myself to be more vocal in expressing what's right or wrong. I still mostly restrict that to impersonal writings, though.
Did mother or sister perceive the female-trashing? How could they not?? Well, no gloria steinems, they.
The homophobia took longer for me to perceive and reject. As a pubescent, i found homosexuality so objectionable i thought i might have a violent reaction the first time i met someone gay.
A violent reaction.
Me.
Avowed pacifist by sixteen. Content to go to jail rather than war. Never struck another humyn in my life (except a bullying older sister when i was nine).
A violent reaction.
Behold the power of cultural taboo, that even as gentle a child as myself, imagined doing violence.
I was seventeen when i finally "met" a gay person. In a community theater production, i found out one of my companions was gay. I had worked joyously with him for many weeks, and the revelation was the least disturbing thing imaginable. Not that i'd suspected, but...he was so wonderful, it was a perfect non-issue.
But Weber would not have been welcoming, i fear. In our circle of friends, there was one who had less-than-macho energy. He was teased. I thought he was great, and would have defended him had anyone earnestly disrespected him...yet nothing seemed amiss to me. Even as a fledgling humyn rights advocate, i couldn't perceive that the ribbing might have been hurtful. Ribbing is how we expressed love. Perhaps he ultimately avoided our house. I don't know.
As for the chauvinism, it's not like there were never any female friends around. There were. Were they disturbed by, or aware of, the sexism? If so, it didn't show.
Rampant homophobic sexism. To me, it wasn't virulent, just annoying.
But...racism?
Our home??
There are some things sitting on the tip of our nose, that we never see.
In my heart, i recall being anti-racist as early as i was anti-feminist. As an adolescent, MLK was one of my heroes. Gandhi, too. By my mid-teens, i daydreamed about an asian womyn being the love of my life.
I'm a white boy from the suburbs - what do you want?
In my twenties, we learned that one of our neighborhood parents had belonged to a white supremacist group. We were all shocked.
There was one black family in our neighborhood, with a son near my age. I might have befriended him, but he seemed way too cool for me.
As a child, i remember being viscerally turned off by my grandfather's racist jokes. I recall a more benign, yet still quite racist joke appearing in our midst years later, perpetuated by my father, or maybe even my mother (Years later, i discovered my seemingly-progressive mom drew the line at interracial babies. Just too problematic for her.).
My youngest brother recently pointed out some of the more unsavory, racist WASP-normativity that went unchecked. One of our friends was from Guatemala. Our father called him "guatemala al". No one else called him that, but we accepted it. We understood that dad was abrasive, but we loved him as best we could, and he could be great fun. Al didn't seem to mind, yet in retrospect, did he ever want to say, "Yes, i'm not from Iowa. We can SEE that. Does it NEED to be pointed out?"
And...
Something i'd forgotten entirely. One of my brothers, for a while, had a set response if someone asked him to do some work. He'd fix a playful eye on you, and say...
"What color am i?"
I cringed, but accepted it. I assumed he was being ironic. He always seemed the gentlest among us.
Can you imagine a bigger "benefit of the doubt"?
We were sheltered kids in a changing world, trying to make sense of everything our culture was throwing at us, in the first full bloom of the mass media age. We knew our grandparent's generation was fundamentally, horribly wrong. We were suspicious of our parents.
And yet...870 was a place spilling with warmth and welcome. Had one of us brought home a non-white lover, they would have been embraced (son/daughter double standard notwithstanding). Had one of us brought home a gay lover...they would have been accepted. Probably. Had one of us brought home a trans lover...brains would have short-circuited.
All this begs the question - was 870 a place of genuine racism, or just clueless, careless language? More the latter. I don't think you'd have found malevolence in our hearts. Ignorance (plus double standards and entitlement, in most of us)...but not malevolence.
Small comfort for those we might have hurt. Nor can i swear that all of us were ultimately able to equally overcome our bad socialization...