Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human [Paperback]

Robert N. Minor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

A cultural critique of gowing up in the USA, including such topics as our universities as purveyors of hopelessness and the dynamics of "getting laid" taught in high school, which emphasizes that taking on the "straight" role is damaging to all human beings regardless of sexual orientation. This role is taught to us from the moment of birth through all of the instiutions of our society and the major methods by which it is installed are fear-based. Thus it sets up gender roles for men and women and oppressor and victim roles for heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals. The final chapter "How to Be Human" is on how to heal the hurts all human beings suffer from the methods by which we are conditioned to live these roles. Each chapter includes recommended further readings.

Editorial Reviews

Review

...a breath of fresh air ...The only reader who won't benefit ... is the one determined in advance not to. -- Professor L. William Countryman, author of Dirt, Greed and Sex on book back cover

...a quick-read if it didn't cause you to pause occasionally to consider the merit and value given human potential. -- Stonewall News Northwest, October 2001

...clear, totally free of academic jargon, and brilliant. -- Liberty Press, June 2001

Finalist, 2002 Lambda Literary Award, Small Press Books -- Lambda Literary Foundation, Washington, D.C., February 6, 2002

Minor investigates what makes up our collective tick, and he does it in a way that makes sense. -- The Express, Florida, December 17, 2001

This is a brilliant book. It ought to be required reading for every human being.... -- White Crane Journal, October 2001

a message we all must hear....models the kind of approach that is needed... to eliminate discrimation -- Jane Ralph, Human Resources Manager, GLAAD, New York in Liberty Press, June 2001

the author...takes his readers on an extraordinary journey, right to the core of their most pertinent personal problems. --Greenwich Village Gazette, January 19, 2002

About the Author

Robert N. Minor, Ph.D. is a popular workshop leader, lecturer, and writer on issues of gender, sexual orientation, and active change. He is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas where he has taught over twenty-four years and was Department Chair for six. His first five books were scholarly writings on his first specialty, religious thought and practice in South Asia and their relationships to culture, and his current research is on gender studies and the relationships of religion, gender, and sexuality. At the University of Kansas one of his popular courses is "Religious Perspectives on Selfhood and Sexuality.

Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: New Leaf Distributing Co Inc (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0970958102
• ISBN-13: 978-0970958105
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,139,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

A national resource for information on gender issues and gay/straight relationships for organizations, businesses, educational institutions, and media outlets such as NBC and USA Today, Robert N. Minor, Ph.D. has been speaking, consulting, and leading workshops for fifteen years.

He is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas where he taught for thirty-three years and was the chair of the Religious Studies Department for six. A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he received the Ph.D. in Religion from the University of Iowa in 1975 and an M.A. in Biblical Studies from Trinity Divinity School in Chicago.

He is the author of eight books. His first five were scholarly writings on his first specialty, religious thought and practice in South Asia and their relationships to culture. His current research is on gender studies and the relationships of religion, gender, and sexuality. At the University of Kansas one of his popular courses is "Religious Perspectives on Selfhood and Sexuality." 

His newest book, When Religion is an Addiction was published by HumanityWorks! in St. Louis. Previously he wrote Gay and Healthy in a Sick Society: The Minor Details published by HumanityWorks! in November, 2003, which was a Finalist for the Independent Publisher Book Award in 2004, and was named in national reviews as one of the best gay books of 2003. His Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human, also published by HumanityWorks! in 2002 was named a Finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award. In little more than a month from their publication, Menstuff.org, the premier men's issues website, named each of them "Book of the Week."

Dr. Minor also writes articles including two popular columns -- one a monthly column of analysis and opinion entitled "Minor Details" on issues affecting the progressive and gay communities which is printed nationally in on-line and print publications around the country; the second, "Romance and Dating," a bimonthly column for Baby Boomers on dating, romance, and relationships for the popular website, 50PlusPrime.com.

He is the parent of a thirty-two year old son. In 1994 he was a member of the Values Panel for the Kansas City Star (the daily newspaper for Kansas City) for its award-winning "Raising Kansas City Project."

He was a member of the Communities Against Hate Crimes Task Force of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Kansas and the Diversity Advisory Committee of KCPT, the public television station for Kansas City, MO. He serves on other boards and task forces, such as the Advisory Board of the nationally acclaimed Center for Religious Experience and Study of Kansas City, the LGBT Task Force of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Western Missouri, and the Organizing Committee of Kansas City Jobs with Justice as its Co-Chair.

He is past president of the Board of Directors of the Lesbian & Gay Community Center of Greater Kansas City, and currently a member of the Board of Directors of the American Men's Studies Association and President of the Board of Directors of Ecumenical Christian Ministries of the University of Kansas.

"Bob" leads workshops on gender roles, homophobia, and racism for universities, colleges, churches, businesses, government organizations, and community and religious groups throughout the US as well as workshops for non-heterosexuals on personal growth beyond "coming out" and how to be a healthy activist. He is a regular conference presenter for the NGLTF's "Creating Change " Conference, and for PFLAG, locally, regionally, and nationally. He worked closely with the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in its Kansas City "Communities of Faith" projects. In 1999 GLAAD awarded him its Leadership Award for Education.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for Gays & Straights, Conservatives & Liberals ..., July 23, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human (Paperback)

From the criticism of our universities as purveyors of hopelessness to the dynamics of "getting laid," Scared Straight is an eye-opening and penetrating analysis of U.S. culture, explaining why accepting the full humanity of gay people divides people and organizations.

Dr. Minor shows how homophobia is a major ingredient in our way of defining the world. Without sparing any of our cultural institutions, Scared Straight identifies our culture as fear-based and in denial. Like software installed in a computer, our system's messages install a "straight role" in us which actually has little, if anything, to do with sexual orientation. In the end it has little to do with religion, tradition, or the Bible, and everything to do with maintaining quite limiting definitions of a "human being," a "real man" and a "real woman."

People of all sexual orientations are hurt by the "straight" role, torn from their full human potential, and squeezed into the molds which support our dominant institutions. Human relationships with either sex are incomplete and unfulfilling. Chapters on "How to Be Straight" and "How to Be Gay" describe the roles straight and gay people are conditioned to live in order to maintain this status quo. Yet, not content to merely identify the problem and its depth, in the final chapter Dr. Minor describes the dual elements of healing that this cultural disease requires.

An insightful analysis for anyone interested in gender studies, religious studies, queer theory, feminism, and cultural critique. Though it was only released a few weeks ago by HumanityWorks! and PersonalEnrichment.Org, this book is receiving much attention at many religious conferences and gay pride festivals all over the country! Find out what all the buzz is about!

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Book!, February 4, 2004

By 

"whitecranejournal" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human (Paperback)

This is a brilliant book. It ought to be required reading for every human being--and certainly every gay or lesbian human being.

For, as Scared Straight explains in exacting detail, indoctrination into the way of thinking it argues against is, in fact, "required" of every person living in modern human society.

Robert Minor, a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas, describes the process of conditioning into conventional gender roles that dominates and directs our lives. He uses an interesting bit of computer terminology that helps make his argument clear: he refers to gender conditioning as being "installed" the way a piece of software is installed. A small program analyzes your computer and determines what needs to be where for a desired application to work, and then inserts whatever pieces of code are needed.

Now in the installation of gender role conditioning what's needed are a set of beliefs, opinions and unverifiable assumptions about the nature of human life and sexuality that support and explain the existing system. Using the familiar story about the fish who observes "I've been swimming in it all my life, but all I know about it is it's water," Minor shows how in fact we're all "wet" with the tenets of male dominant gender conditioning but can't realize it because we can never--or at least seldom--get out of the water enough to see what it is.

What it is is the installed beliefs that male is better than female, that males should compete with other males to prove they're "real men" and not like females, that females should effectively be victims to males' desires and priorities in order to be "real women," that men should want to "get laid" and women should want to "get a man," and that nobody should question these beliefs lest the males demonstrate they're like women and the females demonstrate they're unworthy to be men--thus proving the assumptions.

In a way, of course, this is a further reiteration of the original feminist critique. It's not new. But in this book it is brilliantly and exhaustively argued and explained.

The consequence of this installation of gender roles is unquestioning acceptance of male dominance, hierarchical ordering, competition, scarcity and dualistic thinking--especially the notion of right and wrong--as though these were "God-given." Even the idea of that "God" is a self-serving, self-verifying artifact of the male dominant conditioning.

Minor shows how heterosexuals are forced into being "straight" at the cost of men's emotional well-being and freedom and women's self-respect, autonomy and intelligence. He very insightfully explains that being straight is not at all the same thing as being heterosexual, that "straight" means acquiescing to the gender role conditioning, and that because the conditioning suppresses natural responsiveness to feelings, it in fact disempowers real heterosexuality. People don't respond to their actual heterosexual feelings as much as they react to and obey gender conditioning. No wonder straight marriage is under seige.

Minor then shows how gay people are taught to be gay by a system that demands everybody be "straight." Thus we see the notorious terms applied to gay people: "straight-looking, straight-acting." Even homosexuals try to be "straight."

The reason homosexuality is so scorned by the system is because the very choice of "coming out" means choosing to be true to one's own feelings instead of buckling under to conditioning. In order to be gay, at least on the surface level, one has to decide to violate the conditioning, that is, to jump out of the water. This, in turn, threatens the system because it shows that human beings can survive without agreeing to the tenets of male dominant heterosexism.

On a deeper level, of course, gay men and lesbians continue to struggle with the installed program of conditioned expectations, values, and self-assessments. But at least we're potentially aware of what's going on. And with our struggle we call the "straights" to wake up and be aware.

The gay and lesbian rights movement then is not just another attempt by one group to compete with and dominate another (that's how the conditioning would portray it and that's why straights feel threatened, why, for instance, they think that gay marriage threatens their relationships). Our movement is about the human race waking up from a set of assumptions about the nature of life and God that (maybe!) made sense at the start of agrarianism, when our ancestors were coming down from the trees and moving into villages, but that don't fit modern, technological, egalitarian, psychologically-enlightened society.

To pursue the computer analogy, we're part of the "deinstall" routine. And deinstalling the conditioning promises to make heterosexuals and homosexuals alike happier and more responsive to their natural humanity. Reading this book, itself, is a kind of routine for deinstalling the conditioning. For what activates the deinstallation is precisely the awareness of the installation process itself. Every one of us would benefit from running that routine.

Reviewed by Toby Johnson in White Crane Journal #50

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Scared Straight, June 13, 2003

By 

Michael S. Waren "schoeder" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human (Paperback)

I was fortunate enough to attend Mr. Minor's workshop on homophobia and gender conditioning when he was here in Chicago in the early spring. There is nothing new in the book that hasn't been written about before. In fact, Mr. Minor reiterated the fact several times during the workshop however, Mr. Minor takes a lot of research and condenses it down into an easy, resourceful text. A must for scholars interested in gender conditioning and/or gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered studies.

Then again, everyone can benefit from this book (and I don't often say that about books.) Minor shows that homophobia hurts everyone regardless of their sexual orientation. In fact, as Mr. Minor points out, the actual issue of sexual orientation has very little to do with the oppression than the issue that someone is perceived "different." Which also means that gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people must stop playing the "victim role" when dealing with the oppression. His last chapter on being human is one that I will have to go back and re-read time and time again, because it is a revolutionary light and insight into an age-old way of thinking.