Front-page image provokes emotional student response

Front-page image provokes emotional student response

Donald Carpenter-Rios

Perhaps you can imagine my surprise on Monday. Having casually
followed the same thoroughly routinized route to campus through a
slight and lifting fog, stopping at the same old leaf ­ and
newspaper-strewn kiosk for my morning dose of the Daily Bruin, I
saw the paper and gasped until my complexion shaded blue.

Two men were kissing on the cover of my favorite college
tabloid. I was staring at taboo instead of browsing my normally
tame and boring bit of campus news. Two men were kissing! Right on
cue, I recoiled. "Yuck!," I thought, realizing immediately that I
had indeed let the word slip out.

The thought of my reflex rejection left me in a state of
quandary. Was I actually homophobic? Was there something inherently
wrong with that particular expression of love and affection, or was
there something wrong with me? After all, I rationalized, I’m a
graduate student; I’m supposed to be analytical, unemotional and
objective. But there I was betraying my professional training with
a picture of a kiss. There I was grappling with a visceral reaction
that embarrassed and confused me. I’m not homophobic, I demanded of
myself, but still, since my social training had gotten the better
of me, I wasn’t quite sure.

I suspended final judgment and trudged off to class. It was on
the way that I found I wasn’t alone in my initial revulsion.
Eavesdropping being my favorite vocation, I turned my ear to The
Bruin browsing crowd. "Did you see the cover of The Bruin this
morning?" one masculine voice queried, hardly able to hide his
disdain. "God, it’s gross!" another masculine voice rejoined. "I
can’t believe it," a woman remarked. "I was so shocked," she
continued. Her female friend offered a consoling, "Well, the paper
is just doing this for shock value."

Everyone on campus, from the Medical Center to Lot 3, was
talking about the image of two men kissing. Rounding the corner to
Campbell Hall, I saw a man grab the paper from a woman standing
nearby. "Let me see that," he demanded. Staring at the picture, his
chin falling to his lap, he boasted his rejection and asserted his
masculinity. "I’m homophobic! I hate faggots!" There was no
ambivalence in his sexuality. His orientation was clearly
delineated. His sexuality gave him someone to hate. Embarrassed,
the woman took back the paper and attempted to defend the image
against his tirade. "Well, to each his or her own," she said.

Was this my solution too? Was I shallowly masking in my own
disgust and inherent hatred for something clearly unfamiliar and
unwanted? These are the questions that plagued me most. What would
be more acceptable to me and the other homophobes whose company I
keep at UCLA ­ we who were so severely disturbed by this
window on campus life? It appeared, after all, to be at least an
expression of affection.

I’m surprised that I winced so thoroughly at this foreign image
of love. I would probably be far more comfortable with an image of
dead Haitian soldiers, dead Iraqi soldiers, dead teen-agers in
Bosnia, dead teen-agers on the East side ­ give me anybody
dead, but do not give me two men kissing. Give me something I know,
something I see everyday on TV. Give me some blood or some guts.
Give me some raunchy, tortuous or violent image of death, give me
misogyny, give me racism, give me a nuclear holocaust, but don’t,
please don’t give me two men loving.

And especially don’t give me two men kissing. Two men killing,
please, please, please, something familiar, something I can
tolerate ­ anything but two men kissing.

Donald Francis Carpenter-Rios is a graduate student in Near
Eastern Languages and Cultures.