Johnny Weir took sixth place in the men’s figure skating finals during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Though the Olympics are over, the 25-year-old athlete has remained in the spotlight due to the homophobic assault unleashed by capitalist media.
 Figure skater Johnny Weir |
During Weir’s run on Feb. 18, Réseau des Sports commentators Alain Goldberg and Claude Mailhot unleashed vicious verbal assaults on Weir’s gender expression as well as his presumed sexuality. The pair “joked” that Weir should compete in the women’s events instead of the men’s, and denigrated him for being a “bad example” for male figure skaters. They further suggested that Weir be forced to undergo tests to determine his gender. Several major media outlets in the United States, including CNN, have raised the question whether Weir is “too gay” for figure skating.
Professional sports in the United States have historically been a battleground for issues of oppression. During the 1968 Olympics, two Black athletes raised their fists in the Black power salute during their medal ceremony drawing attention to national liberation movements. There were bitter struggles to integrate major league baseball and football. Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 allowed women more access to sports.
Last year, Caster Semenya, a decorated South African runner, was subject to vicious bigotry and gender testing to verify that she was “legally female” despite her birth certificate and her right to define her own gender.
The attacks on Weir illustrate the role of corporate media in defining the acceptable limits for gender expression in capitalist society. On one hand, the ongoing and militant LGBT movement has succeeded in opening up some space for athletes who are not heterosexual or do not fit traditional gender norms. On the other hand, there will be a culture of homophobia and heterosexism as long as capitalism exists.
The roots of LGBT oppression and the fight for equality
The traditional nuclear family and its component gender roles are presented as fixed and natural. Frederick Engels’ “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State” uses anthropological evidence to expose this myth.
Engels describes how the family has evolved over time in correspondence to different modes of production. Originally, early human kinship was organized in loose affiliations called gens. The scarcity of food and resources necessitated that women and men work cooperatively. Accordingly, same-sex couples, or “pairings,” were viewed no differently than their heterosexual counterparts.
Over time, technological advances altered social relations. The accumulation of surplus-value required a transformation in the organization of society. The oppression of women arose with the emergence of the first class societies, those based on slavery. As men asserted control over the means of production and the resulting surplus, women were confined to the home, reduced to the property of their husbands. Women became valued for the children they could bear, not for their intrinsic value as human beings. Matriarchy gave way to patriarchy.
The development of the nuclear family based on the heterosexual couple thus accompanied the development of class society. The oppression of LGBT people and all who fell outside the framework of the nuclear, heterosexual family, too, emerged with the development of class society.
In modern capitalist society, bigotry against LGBT people, much like racism and sexism, is a wedge that divides the working class. Not surprisingly, corporate media sows these divisions at every opportunity. Though hate violence and other abuses against LGBT people may receive occasional condemnation, the media actively promotes the very bigotry that is the root cause of these crimes.
This is the context in which the attacks on Weir must be understood. The media message to the rest of society is that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways of expressing one’s gender or sexual orientation, which does nothing but perpetuate the bigotry that divides the working class. The Party for Socialism and Liberation fights for free gender expression and for LGBT liberation.
