WotD: quadruped

1. der Vierbeiner
2. de viervoeter
3. el cuadrúpedo
4. el quadrúpede
5. le quadrupède
6. y pedwarcarnol
7. an ceathairchosach
8. czworonóg
9. 네발짐승
10. 四足動物 sìzúdòngwù

The male monster from the id

When I entred my teens, my mother began to drop cryptic warnings about dangerous queers. For instance, I remember once when we saw an announcement for a meeting of the local chapter of the Tolkien Society in St Louis' largest urban park. There was a section on the western end of this--I was never sure precisely where--that was so notorious as a cruising ground even straight people called it "the Fruit Loop". I'd made a half-hearted stab at dressing up as an elf, which basically means I wore yellow and green (woodland colours, you know?) and used some eyebrow pencil to try to give me something resembling arched brows. Even though it was the middle of the afternoon and I was leaving with all three of my siblings, my mother said something about being on the lookout for men "who like boys who look pretty".

There was also a time several years later when my best friend was house-sitting for his boyfriend over the weekend and invited me over to hang out. I was out to myself and to him, but neither of us was out to my mother. When I told her where I was going, she speculated that my buddy wanted me there as "protection" against the older man, who she knew was a hairdresser and suspected was gay. I remember rolling my eyes and dying a little inside at the thought of how steeped in homophobia she was from growing up in such a narrow-minded milieu.

At the time, I bracketed such remarks together with her embarrassing moments of racial bigotry. (Anytime she attempted a bit of Ebonics for "comic effect", I wanted to die with shame on the spot.) And I never thought to revisit this judgment until a few weeks back when I got into a (friend-locked) discussion on mollpeartree's journal about a murderous incident involving a man frustrated by his lack of success with the female sex. In response to questions about what insight a gay man and a straight woman might have into the mind of such a person, she responded:

If you have sex with men, your life literally depends on telling the ones who might kill you from the ones who won't, because sooner or later you're going to end up naked in an enclosed, private space with them.

I was turning that over in my head later and occurred to me that what I had ascribed to a bias against gay men might have had its roots into a more general distrust of men and their appetites, which was only expressed in a homophobic way to me because the homos where the only ones I had to worry about. I don't remember my sister being on the receiving end of the same sorts of cautions, but perhaps that's simply because my mother made them in private with her. She probably had an easier time talking about sex with her daughter than with her sons in any case.

So, Mom, bigoted? Yeah, but perhaps she wasn't being as crazy as I used to think.