{"id":5848,"date":"2008-12-15T11:06:47","date_gmt":"2008-12-15T18:26:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5848"},"modified":"2008-12-15T11:06:47","modified_gmt":"2008-12-15T18:26:35","slug":"5848","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5848","title":{"rendered":"Two Brothers Targetted by Homophobic Violence; One Dies"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Pharyngula<\/a>, an article about how two brothers who were holding each other’s arms as they walked were assaulted, and one of them killed, because passersby in an SUV thought they were gay<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[Jose] Sucuzhanay (suh-KOO-chen-eye) and his brother Romel, 38, were walking arm-in-arm after a night out when a sport utility vehicle pulled up near them at a Brooklyn stoplight, police said.<\/p>\n

Witnesses said they heard the men in the car shouting anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs at the brothers. The attackers jumped out of the car and smashed a beer bottle over Jose Sucuzhanay’s head, hit him in the head with an aluminum baseball bat and kicked him, police said. Romel Sucuzhanay was able to get away; the attackers drove off after he returned and said he had called police, authorities said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This reminds me of stories my father tells of when he used to walk arm-in-arm with a blind friend of his, and people would shout epithets at them out of car windows.<\/p>\n

Both of these would, of course, be equally reprehensible if they involved actual gay couples. (In my father’s case, I think the harassment would be much more reprehensible if it had involved an actual gay couple, because my father and his friend could laugh off the insults in a way that would have been more difficult if the insults had functioned, as intended, as a way of reinforcing second-class status based on sexual orientation.) However, situations like these do remind me of something else that strikes me as important: Occasionally, I see discussions cropping up about why many men in America often aren’t physically affectionate with their each other. Well. There you go. A man’s being physically affectionate with a brother, or a male friend, isn’t just a violation of taboos about showing femininity. It’s assuming a risk of harassment and violence.<\/p>\n

The lives of gay men are more affected by this, of course, in shocking and horrible ways. But the enforcement of masculinity and heterosexuality is bad for many men, gay and straight.*<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

I hesitate to say that it’s bad for all men. Was it bad for the murderers? I suppose I could say that it twisted them, and that’s a kind of hurt. Those kinds of arguments have often been made — for instance, it was a common abolitionist argument to talk about how badly slavery hurt white slave-owners who were warped by the experience of owning other people (these were politically expedient arguments, so it makes sense that they were often repeated). But these arguments always feel distasteful to me. To compare the hurt of murdering someone with the hurt of being murdered seems like an inadequate, and disrespectful, analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Pharyngula, an article about how two brothers who were holding each other’s arms as they walked were assaulted, and one of them killed, because passersby in an SUV thought they were gay: [Jose] Sucuzhanay (suh-KOO-chen-eye) and his brother Romel, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lesbian-gay-bi-trans-and-queer-issues","category-sexism-hurts-men"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}