By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THROUGHOUT the last week of September 2018, the Zimbabwean press was seized with the story of Dr Neal Hovelmeier, the then deputy headmaster at St. John’s College in Harare.
Dr Hovelmeier had taught at the school for more than 15 years without causing any stir.
However, towards the end of September 2018, the Form Six drama instructor felt he needed to make a bold and heroic announcement to the entire school assembly – that he was a homosexual and there was nothing wrong with that sexual orientation.
In the West and (to a lesser extent) here, the press routinely recognises at least half a dozen different sexual orientations — lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and ‘straight’.
But some critics point out that what is referred to as ‘straight’ actually encompasses a collection of several orientations, some of them even incompatible: monogamous, promiscuous, polygamous and celibate might be considered orientations.
Recently, social media has been used to create a niche just for those wishing to specialise in adulterous relationships because of their ‘exciting’ risk-taking.
This reality raises the question: What is so exceptional about being gay that a whole deputy headmaster would seize upon an entire school assembly to announce it and to moralise it?
Since some of the so-called sexual minorities end up demanding that public institutions should create new arrangements to make people of their orientation feel at home, what would happen to a school, church or hospital if most of the individuals belonging to these different orientations simply demanded their rights to feel at home and to be accommodated in our institutions according to their preferred sexual orientation?
To make demands like that, such people must feel that their particular orientation is extra-special and that its survival depends on public advocacy!
Therefore, the use of one’s sexual orientation to demand special attention in public can be based only on the assumption that one’s own private sexual orientation is the only one that matters or that should matter.
Therefore, it is the one requiring public ventilation.
But it definitely is not the only one that matters or should matter.
According to Richard Sennett, in The Fall of Public Man: On the Social psychology of Capitalism, a decent public life, an optional institutional life, depends on a delicate balance “…between public and private life, a balance between an impersonal realm in which men and women could invest one kind of passion and a personal realm in which they could invest another.”
Civilisation depends for its sanity, order and creativity upon the distinction between private (intimate) passions and public pursuits.
The politics of sexual identity and sexual orientation seeks to conflate, to collapse the two realms and merge the two passions into only one — based on intimacy and sexual identity.
In the case of the St. John’s College instructor, the main grievance appeared to be that he was tired of living his sexual experience in private.
He wanted it brought out and shared.
Those to blame for his feelings remained vague.
What was clear was Dr Hovelmeier’s obsession with himself. This is clear from the statement he released at the time of his resignation.
According to the Daily News of September 28 2018, the teacher’s speech contained sentences which started as follows:
“I have been simply overwhelmed by the volume of support…. I deeply appreciate every boy, parent, former student and member of the community…
I also fully appreciate that my announcement has caused grievous and deep concern.
I am a man with utmost respect for people who hold strong views…
I am deeply apologetic for any distress I have caused…
I ask for forgiveness and understanding…
I have fortunately prepared my examination classes…”
Yet one would be forgiven to think that the posture, language and manner of a teacher at the level of deputy headmaster would project a ‘we’ approach to everything about the school!
The focus of this speech and the event it marks is on personal feeling, personal integrity and the state of one’s mind as an individual facing society.
The focus is not on any specific action or programme of action with a beginning and an end.
As Sennett has written: “Thus the quality of a narcissistic impulse is that it must be a continual subjective state.”
As those sentences in the Daily News seemed to show, there is very little room in that psychological state for the feelings, let alone thoughts, of others.
To quote Sennett again:“We believe that disclosure of oneself to others is a moral good in itself, no matter what the social conditions which surround this disclosure… The (gay) community idea involved here is the belief that when people disclose themselves to each other, a tissue grows to bind them together. If there is no psychological openness, there can be no social bond…”
I use the title ‘Liberation’ as ‘Escalation of Intimate Disclosure’ to make it serve as a warning: To say that once a society embarks on the politics of intimacy it will never stop.
This politics has been around for more than half a century in North America and Europe.
So one could think that all those who felt oppressed by intimate sexual stories they had kept private would by now feel completely liberated, cleansed and happy.
No.
Actually, the sexual confession movement has now escalated to a much more complicated and more alarming phase called #Me Too Movement.
Mostly women in their 50s and 60s are coming out to name and shame men, some former boyfriends or schoolmates, who they now believe abused or handled them improperly during their adolescence or youth.
Although those doing the confessing, naming and shaming generally feel good about doing it, there are just too many social, moral, legal and philosophical issues which raise alarm:
– Usually viewers of the encounter have no access to any alternative ‘evidence’ to evaluate the allegations. Everything depends on the apparent credibility or lack of credibility of the accuser and the accused on television! It is one person’s word against another individual’s word, on camera!
– Because the alleged events happened 30 or 40 years ago, too much depends on ability to recall what happened or what could have happened. Such recall is often highly subjective and unreliable. The psychology of recall is at best very tricky.
– Given what psychologists know about consciousness-raising and conversion, it is possible that the accuser has merely re-interpreted what was a good experience 40 years ago and transformed it into a real horror story based on what she knows, feels and believes now.
In other words, the public subjected to these confessions and counter-confessions does not know how to judge the parties fairly.
The cost to society
– The first cost is that a politics based on intimacy creates the problem of pseudo-speciation, which means creating a single-issue group or movement which wants to be treated as if it were a separate species of human beings from the rest of society.
When this is encouraged, one school might have to organise a special assembly to air gay confessions; another one for lesbian confessions; yet another one for polygamists; and another for bisexuals; still another for adulterers; and so on!
– The second problem is escalation.
We may start by accepting the spurious assumption that only a woman may represent women since no man can feel like a woman.
This then is extended to youths, boys and girls.
But before you know, that illogic leads to the demand that lesbians be represented by lesbians; gays by gays; transvestites by other transvestites.
The social burden is not only that this leads to ridiculous conclusions, it also forces everyone to start having to confess their personal sexual orientation in order to prove that he/she should be able to represent lesbians, gays, bi-sexuals and so forth.
This approach leads to the proliferation of confessional manifestos based on demonstrations of passion rather than manifestos which can be verified.
– The third problem is that leaders are no longer evaluated on the basis of tangible programmes of action.
They are evaluated on sex, gender, sexual orientation or being able to show feelings, not on real tangible performance.
– The fourth problem is what Richard Sennett stated in his book more than 20 years ago:
“ But an intimate community of power can only be an illusion in a society like that of the industrial West, one in which stability has been achieved by a progressive extension to the international scale of structures of economic (power and ) control.
In sum, the belief in direct human relations on an intimate scale has seduced us from converting our understanding of the realities of power into guides for our own political behaviour. The result is that forces of (real) domination and inequality remain unchallenged.”
In other words, the corporate control of real tangible assets and resources has gone global and can be tackled effectively through global efforts.
Therefore, one reason global corporations and multinational financial institutions are fond of sponsoring single-issue politics based on gender and sexual orientation is precisely to divert whole nations from the global heights of really tangible power and domination.
In other words, the false revolutionary jargon used by these single-issue non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is in fact a cover for real impotence and ineffectiveness in the face of the real global reach of the multinational corporation, in the face of real inequality which is monumental.
Such words as empowerment, transformation, participation, access, equality and even devolution of power may be helping to mask levels of escalating powerlessness and helplessness in the face of what David Korten called ‘global corporate cannibalism’.
This broader history of capitalism and imperialism is important.
Europe and North-America are known sponsors of the politics pushed by the likes of Dr Hovelmeier.
But Europe and North America also created NATO which in 2011 destroyed Libyan society when Hillary Clinton was US Secretary of State.
NATO superintended over massacres of African and Arab men, women and children.
Of all the three NATO leaders celebrating the massacre, Mrs Clinton stood out when she said on the TV camera, with an obscene orgasmic grin, and in reference to the open murder of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw and he (Colonel Gaddafi) is dead.”
Mrs Clinton’s obscene display of pleasure in the murder of President Gaddafi stood out for the following reasons:
– Hillary Clinton knew the whole world was watching;
– Hillary Clinton knew that her display would have meant her instant resignation if the death had been that of a white president of an Anglo-Saxon nation, even if that president was disliked by many;
– Mrs Clinton’s obscene remarks and grin represented a direct assault on all viewers, using the summary macabre massacre of Colonel Gaddafi and his supposed followers and relatives;
– Hillary Clinton is a known mother and a supposed champion of gay and lesbian rights, women’s rights and women’s equality who stood out at the 1995 Beijing Conference on Gender as the First Lady of a supposed democratic North America where racism was shunned and all racial and ethnic groups enjoyed equality which was now to be extended to the rest of the world and to include the abolition of all forms of discrimination against women. Yet the Clinton we saw in Libya was a million moral years away from the mother and feminist who appealed to women of the world in Beijing in 1995.
NATO-sponsored massacres in Libya did not distinguish whether the killed men, women and children were gay, lesbian, bisexual or straight. NATO did not care.
In the case of her obscene grin and utterances, Clinton assaulted the viewer’s senses as a white mother celebrating the gratuitous and graphic murder of an Arab woman’s son on the screen.
And she did so on soil just recently stolen by the empire from Arab and Moslem mothers, their children and children’s children.
This is the history schools like St. John’s College ought to teach our children.
The display of vampire-like excitement by NATO leaders (both male and female) at the sight of Arab or Moslem blood raised serious questions about the imperialist-sponsored gender equality and feminism which Hillary Clinton represents and which we see donor-sponsored NGOs peddling here.