Jerry Sandusky, an assistant football coach at Penn State, had such a passion for underprivileged boys that he started his own foundation, The Second Mile, to help them whether they wanted it or not. "Sometimes they don't want it. Sometimes they don't understand what you're trying to do, but they want to be disciplined." That was a statement from his creepy '87 interview with NBC.
Now he's facing 40 counts of rape and assault, including two occasions at the school. Once, a janitor saw him "hugging" a young boy in the shower. Another time, an assistant coach actually saw him raping a kid. They both reported the occasions to their bosses, and when the bosses did nothing, they didn't pursue.
And if Sandusky's a criminal and perv, what do you call the circle of more than 15 men who knew he was abusing kids and let it go on? Even a bishop would have been troubled enough, at least for the sake of the institution, to move the guy to a different parish. But in the cloistered world of football, old Jerry stayed right where he was.
As for the students who rioted on behalf of the legendary head coach Joe Paterno, who got canned for turning a blind eye, well, I guess they don't think the lives of "underprivileged" boys count for much, not next to that of the winningest coach ever. With a wife and five kids, all Penn State grads, doing their bit to stack the stadium with 17(!) grandkids, Paterno had nothing to do with that homo Sandusky.
Yeah, that's right. Already in sports forums online, commenters are once again busy conflating homosexuality with pedophilia. Probably somewhere down the line, we'll even hear that poor Jerry was abused himself as a child. And the circle of guilt and blame will be offloaded -- again -- onto us queers, homos, fags (words not invoked in our slightly ironic, bittersweet way, but hatefully, with a slightly curled lip).
My only new thought is that the persistence of this stereotype is partly our own fault. The closer we get to legal equality, the more closeted we get about gay sex. Maybe it started with AIDS, when we wanted to separate gayness from sex because of the stigma of the disease.
But this sexlessness has gotten even more intense as our institutions have begun to focus on same-sex marriage. We mostly stick to talking points about the equal rights we want to win, like social security benefits, or the ability to file joint taxes. But more than anything, we wax lyrical about consecrating the love between two people who just happen to be of the same gender. Love, love, love, love, love. We want them to forget that those happily married couples will no doubt have sex, because that's what the bigots hate.
Two men getting it on. Two women. They have dirty minds. They imagine us as animals. With children. They work themselves up into pure disgust. That's probably what kept the Penn State guys in denial about Sandusky (who actually was doing all that), as much as the fear of what it would do to their football program.
And our fear of that fear, that disgust, is what drives lesbians and gay men into the sex closet, even as more and more of us are open about our "identities." It's why we've abandoned gay kids to bullies in schools. Get too close, somebody might think something ugly about us. And on the few occasions that lesbians or gay men have tried to do something about schools, our worst critics have been other queers.
I was a Lesbian Avenger. In 1992, for our first action, we demonstrated in favor of New York City's ill-fated Rainbow Curriculum, which was supposed to teach kids to respect each other. Most of it was about ethnicity, but out of the 440-something pages, six actually mentioned lesbians and gay men. So there was a huge backlash.
Our action: going to an elementary school with a marching band, handing out pamphlets with info about famous LGBT people, and balloons that said, "Ask about lesbian lives." Our t-shirts read, "I was a lesbian child." A few parents were upset, but most weren't. Our intent was clear: telling people to get informed and chill out about the whole thing.
And while Christian extremists responded the way they always did, the surprise was the queers. They were horrified that we'd gone to a school, like they were sacred places. Full of children. My god.
It's the same today. We'd rather let kids get bullied and abused and kill themselves than help them and risk getting called pedophiles ourselves. What does that say about us? And nothing will change until we get those bigots out of our heads and scream to the world, "We fuck. So what?"
I myself DON"T want to talk about sex. Sex IS private and if straight people talk about it all the time that offends me. However I agree gay people are homophobic too and accept second class status and are not in your face enough. It's hard to overcome a lifetime of hateful propoganda. Not being able to marry never used to worry me. Now I am angry that I am a second class citizen.
People do not understand the deep dynamics of this sort of situation.
http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF08L46.pdf
This is a much more complex issue than this author and most commenters think.
Your attempt to find comparisons between 'we' and a handful of disgusting people at PSU....
Or the vindicated posture you used to remind your readers that straight men have the dispostion to rape young boys, as well....
In some way, beyond my understanding, you have subconsciously asserted that you belong to the more noble orientation.....
At the end of the day, this was a perversion against society.....the fact that it was homosexual by design was merely a coincidence, though
As a straight woman and mom,
my first thought about Sandusky was NOT that he is homosexual.
I thought: he is a child rapist, a sicko, a monster, a pedophile.
By this time, the majority of straight people should really understand the (vast) difference!
Keep writing, keep talking, keep "being out there"!
Following the Sandusky story, one thought came to mind to me - I wondered if the reason he molested boys was because he had access to boys. Many child abusers are not choosy about the gender of their victims (given that they are committing a crime that is about power and domination, not sex) and commit crimes of opportunity. Most sexually abused children know their attacker and private access to young girls would have been harder for someone like Sandusky to orchestrate.
If Sandusky had molested girls, would heterosexual people have been outraged if the LGBT community pointed at ALL of them and called them molesters? Simple answer is, I'm sure they would. Except people blaming LGBT people have a narrative and they won't be shaken from it. It doesn't register to them that Sandusky was married to the same woman in a hetero relationship for decades.
The simple truth is that stats show most abuse is perpetrated by men on girls. Does that mean we are entitled to assume that ALL straight men are offenders?! Using the tortured (and very much incorrect) logic of people use the Sandusky case to victimise LGBT people, then the answer is yes.
So when kids are sexual with each other, society looks the other way, but when those same kids for some psychological reason never give up on their childhood play fantasies, they become pedophiles.
Society should take both the victims and the pedophiles and send them to therapy together instead of punishing both the victims ( because they always feel they have done something wrong ) and the adult who never grew out of his childhood and is now punished as a pedophile
people tend to exploit the situation for financial gain or for the publicity
and if there is any indication that the adult showered with kids with limited non-sexual touching, there is a tendency for everyone involved in the situation to exploit the situation.
Also, two weeks ago a 9 year old girl was charged with threatening to kill a police officer by using a chair : http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/11/02/year-old-florida-girl-charged-with-threatening-to-kill-police-officer/
And a 13 year old boy was arrested for raping a 5 year old girl : http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57324126-504083/13-year-old-charged-with-alleged-rape-of-5-year-old-at-mcdonalds/
So if society is capable of charging minors with a crime, should the same society not jump to the conclusion that every pedophile is evil and every minor is totally innocent ? even though minors have sometimes been charged as adults for committing crimes.
Also, since we know these boys came from troubled homes, they themselves carry a lot of psychological damage to begin with and I would not be surprised if they craved the attention of any adult and sometimes kids do act out sexually to get attention from adults
What is the best solution ?
Therapy will help both the pedophile and the victims and at the same time prevent the exploitation of the situation by the adults involved
The child who has been abused is a helpless victim. The ADULT who abuses that child has all the power and does irreparable harm to their victim. The ADULT is a grown up who broke the law and HURT KIDS, often repeatedly, for his or her own gratification. They deserve to be punished, or at the least kept from society, as treatment for offenders is historically NOT successful.