God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence (review)

In God Hates Fags, Michael Cobb argues that anti-gay rhetoric steeped in conservative Christian values provides queer theory with new opportunities for development. Cobb's basic idea recalls the familiar minority strategy of adopting denigrating, mainstream put-downs as self-descriptors—Black, Chicano, and Queer itself come immediately to mind. But Cobb, an English professor at the University of Toronto, grounds his argument in literary theory which he uses to frame gay-related political and policy debates, analyses of Supreme Court cases, and the interpretation of fiction and non-fiction. His central point is that, however dire circumstances appear to be given events like the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard and the political influence of homophobe lobbies like Focus on the Family, the time is ripe for queer theorists to respond creatively to religious anti-gay hate speech to create new openings in American public discourse for the GLBTQ community.

In several critical steps, Cobb establishes his interpretive logic. He first argues that religious anti-gay hate speech is in the tradition of the Puritan jeremiad. In post 9/11 America, it is a language of national security that seeks to buttress the nation's moral unity by identifying the GLBTQ community as enemy, a rhetoric Cobb sees as the dominant discourse of America's civil orthodoxy today. He then evokes Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer, a religiously ambiguous figure originally found in Roman law whose exilic, taboo status lends him a numinous power, a posture Cobb claims for the queer theorist. Having laid out a power-in-the-margin argument, Cobb then devotes most of the book to mining writers from James Baldwin and Tennessee Williams to Dorothy Allison and Jacob Riis for rhetorical strategies they used to combat oppressive class, racial, and sexual orthodoxies and to carve out social and existential space for those deemed deviant. Cobb sees these strategies as arming the queer theorist whose role is to take up a comparable task today.

This summary makes the argument sounds sleeker than it is, and much of the book's appeal is that Cobb mixes theoretical reflection with an urgent personal voice. He is also fond of digressing whether into nuanced implications of court decisions or the creativity of Christians in crafting gay-hating theological arguments. A thorny issue Cobb returns to repeatedly is the "like race" argument—that hatred and oppression of gays makes their minority status like, but not the same as, that of African-Americans. Cobb is very explicit about not seeking to subsume race into queer theory, but his sensitivity to the charge suggests this is a hot button issue among critical theorists, who are sure to have fine-tuned responses to his arguments. For general readers, however, God Hates Fags is a excellent way to become immersed in the issues and rhetorical arguments of a sub-cultural world of American religious and political discourse.