Gay Apartheid and the Paladino Conundrum
By Michael Boyajian
A reader recently challenged my assertion that Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino was advocating a form of Apartheid for the gay community. You see that is just the thing with Paladino and his supporters. They say one thing, then back track, then forward track and in the end mean just what they originally stated. In this case they made homophobic remarks and then denied they were homophobes in a form of circular logic and that is the Paladino conundrum. It is the riddle of what he truly stands for other than profits through government rents and tax breaks.
The reader thought himself an expert on Apartheid yet what he did not know was that I studied Apartheid under the foremost authority on the practice, Professor Williams of Stony Brook University while Apartheid still existed in South Africa. The whys and wherefores of the practice all come into focus when you come to understand that the entire purpose of the separateness system was according to Williams, “to keep blacks down, hunched over looking at the ground,” forbidden to even gaze upon a white person. It is a form of racial superiority much the same as is Paladino’s heterosexual orthodoxy over members of the gay community.
And that is exactly the views of Paladino that gays are “dysfunctional” and therefore not part of the mainstream society. That gay pride parades are “disgusting” and should be out of sight of heterosexuals and that children should be kept away from gay people while being taught it is not a “valid lifestyle option.”
That my friends is what we call de facto Apartheid where gays are to be kept away from the dominant heterosexual culture yet still allowed to exist and that is all they are to be allowed is to exist invisible to the rest of us in the words of Ralph Ellison.
Well, we straight allies refuse to subscribe to this Apartheid and we embrace gays and their lifestyles and their wish for inclusion and marriage equality. In my world we are all one, in Paladino’s we are all separate and apart and unequal and angry. You chose the world you want to live in.
End