"A Density of Souls" is the first book by Christopher Rice, the son of Anne Rice, who is equally loved and hated for her sprawling Gothic horror, much of which features whiny vampires. I try to like her books but I often fail, and I had no idea what Christopher Rice's writing would be like, but the reviews on amazon.com alone convinced me that I had to check this book out. Most people either lauded this book as awesome and amazing and a bunch of other flowery adjectives or they decried it as a piece of garbage that was only published because Rice is related to someone famous (after all, his mom DID have to find a publisher for him) but I don't think either position is fair. This is neither the best nor by far the worst book ever written, but it made me think very long and very hard. As many of you know if you read this column, I'm obsessed with my own thoughts. They glitter in my mind like bright shiny objects and I love to chase them to my heart's content, and this book let me do that. In particular, it got me thinking about something it discusses in detail: why some people have such a strong hatred for gay people.

People always say that hate is the opposite of love (at least they say it to me all the time, because I tend to get into deep discussions about topics like this with my other boring nerdy geek friends) and I just don't know if I agree with that. See, love and hate both require such a strong passion that I see them as more alike than they are different... they're like two sides of the same coin. Love, when allowed to burn and smolder, or when it's unrequited, can turn into hate, and sometimes we hate something with such great passion and focus that we come to find that we really love it. I just can't see them as being opposites. To me, apathy or indifference would be the opposite of love, because they're so uncaring and dispassionate and unfocused. One could even make the argument that selfishness is the opposite of love, because love requires such a devotion to another person that it often continues irregardless of the other person's feelings or actions (which is why some people take months or even years to get over a failed relationship). Love is about someone else, not about you, so selfishness, thinking only of yourself, would be the antithesis of love. But those who hate people or groups of people often spend all their time and focus on said people, focusing on them and scrutinizing their actions and movements with a devotion that looks a lot like love, were it not so dark and angry and violent.

I said all that to say this: hate is passionate. Whether you agree with me about the whole love and hate concept, there's lots of evidence that hate is fiery and passionate and often uncontrollable. Given this, and given the fact that hate takes so much time and effort and hate IS so dark and violent and painful, I often wonder why people bother to hate others. Why take all that time to focus on something that bothers you so much? What provokes such a strong reaction? We all know that love makes no sense and that it can often lead us to act like idiots in pursuit of the object of our affections, and it's clear that those who hate are prone to sweeping displays of emotion as well. While people in love might get up on a table in a crowded school cafeteria to declare their affection or pay large amounts of money to have a marriage proposal scroll across the screen at a football game, people express their hate in violent ways, by blowing up an abortion clinic or gunning down a classmate at school. It's easy to see why people who are in love would want to spend their time focusing on the object of their affection, writing sappy poetry and sending gifts and thinking about that person every waking moment. Even if the love is unrequited, we can understand why someone would spend so much time motivated by love, because love is seen as positive (though from my experience I can tell you that love fucks up your brain and heart and life as much if not more than hate does). Hate though, that's not positive. It makes you angry, furious even, fills your mind with
darkness...it's not something people would WANT to feel. So why do people hate?

"A Density of Souls" spends a lot of time showing us the frightening extent to which some characters go to express their hatred for gay people. After all my rambling about love and hate in general, I should explain here that it always confuses me why people specifically hate gay people. I can understand disagreeing with them, saying they can be changed, saying they choose their orientation, that kind of thing I get, even though I don't agree with it. Hatred, though? We've already discussed how much effort it takes to HATE someone, how dark and scary and violent hate can be, and I really don't understand why someone would focus all that energy on gay people. I can understand why people might hate members of a religion. I'm not saying that I agree with hating religions, but I can intellectually understand why someone would hate people of a certain religion, especially if that religion tries to convert others and says that people who doesn't belong to that religion are going to be eternally
damned. I can understand how people who don't belong to that religion would be offended and would not want to hear that they are damned for
eternity and especially how they wouldn't want their children to be told that they're damned for eternity because of what they believe, and I can understand how that kind of anger and indignation could lead to hate. Again, I don't agree with it, but I understand how it could happen.

Gay people though? What do they do except have sex with members of their own gender? Yeah yeah yeah, they love people of their own gender, they don't just have sex, I hear people yelling that now. I understand that. But for purposes of what we're discussing here, I think it's the sex between two people of the same gender rather than the love between two people of the same gender that causes all the hate. It's the sex that squicks people out, so the sex is what I'm going to focus on. Stop yelling at me. Ok, so gay people want to have sex with members of the same gender and that's icky. Ok, I get that. I can understand people not wanting to participate in that activity themselves... but to hate the people who DO participate in it? That seems strange to me. Why hate it? Because it's different? That's probably a big part of it. When I was in college, a lot of the international students hung out together because they were all outcasts at my little hick school, but one of the Korean students told me that he normally wouldn't want to associate with a Japanese person because he was raised to hate Japanese people. I said "but you know this guy, and you like him enough to be friends with him" and he said "It doesn't matter, if I weren't at this school I wouldn't talk to
him, and once I graduate I won't ever associate with his kind again." That's exactly what he said, too, "his KIND." Those words were kind of chilling to me, but they made sense in a way. One of the girls I work with told me that when I first started working there she was afraid of me because I dressed all in black. It's funny those judgments we make based on our limited knowledge; what we can see. So I suppose that's one reason why people hate gay people; after all, they ARE different.

Read Part Two of Long Winded: Hate is So Gay, a look at "Density of Souls" >>