Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 2005 | Page 87

America’s New McCarthyism: Homosexual Stereotypes, Myths, and the Politics of Fear Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. You toodle along, thinking that all gay men wear leather after dark and should never, ever be permitted around a Little League field. And then one day your best fiiend fi*om college, the one your kids adore, comes out to you. —^Anna Quindlen Throughout history stereotypes and myths have been used to incite fear and fuel prejudice against minorities and people who are “different.” AfiicanAmericans, Hispanics, Asians, Jews and, of course, women have all suffered fi-om fi*audulent (and usually mean-spirited) misrepresentations used by those in power to keep minorities “in their place.” As gay Americans strive toward equality for themselves and their families, stereotypes and myths have once again become primary weapons to keep them “in their place.” And once again, those using the most vile stereotypes and myths bill themselves as “Christian” defenders of morality and “traditional values.” One of the most fi-equently heard stereotypes claims homosexuals are inveterate child molesters: crazed sexual perverts vAio prey upon and recruit children. But as University of Chicago historian George Chauncey pointed out in Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (Basic Books, 2004), the claim that homosexuals recruit children and the stereotype of them as child molesters are relatively new and grew out of: . . . the anxious years following the Second World War, wJien communists, criminal syndicates, and other half-invisible specters seemed to threaten the nation and when demonic new stereotypes of homosexuals were created and backed by government sanctions___The old tropes of anti-Semitic rhetoric. . . were especially influential in shaping depictions of homosexuals___And like Jews, they were depicted as a threat to children. In the most dangerous element of this new image, the escalation of antigay policing was accompanied, inspired, and justified by press and police campaigns that fomented stereotypes of homosexuals as child molesters. (1819)