OutRight

The American Taliban’s Gay Dad
What can we make of the fact that John Walker’s father was gay?
by Dale Carpenter

It turns out everyone is gay. I mean, not only the notable historical figures like Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Lincoln, and Hitler, but the main actors in our modern dramas, too.

September 11 is the most recent example. The terrorists who flew the planes into the buildings were gay, we’re told. One of the pilots wrested from his seat at the controls of the plane the gay terrorists flew into the Pentagon was gay. The guy who saved the White House from certain destruction by foiling the gay hijackers was gay.

At least, I’ve been consoling myself, John Walker, the 20-year-old wretch who joined the Taliban and was recently captured in Afghanistan, isn’t gay.

Well, if reports now surfacing can be believed, his dad is.

Walker’s life story is gradually coming to light and some cultural critics are having lots of fun with it. Walker was raised by his parents, Frank and Marilyn Lindh, in Northern California, specifically Marin County, home to beautiful vistas, affluence, and oh-so-politically-correct politics.

His mother, whom Newsweek describes as "a child of the ’60s," home-schooled him for a while. After that, his parents sent him to a progressive private school where students determine their own curriculum and are required only to update a teacher on their progress once a week.

At about the age of 16, Walker took his interest in Islam from a teenage hip-hop obsession to a fanatical devotion. He began wearing a white robe, a pillbox hat, and started calling himself Suleyman. He regularly attended mosque and determined to memorize every verse in the Koran. Walker’s parents were "proud of John for pursuing an alternative course," says his dad. They didn’t object when he dropped out of high school and took the high-school equivalency exam. At the same time, his parents split up.

Unhappy in America, Walker eventually journeyed to the Middle East and wound up in league with the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists of them all. When captured, he told reporters he "supported" the September 11 attack.

Walker’s turn to religious extremism, some cultural critics are hypothesizing, must have been a product of his excessively indulgent upbringing. Having drifted in the I’m-OK-You’re-OK moral relativism that dominated his childhood milieu, Walker was desperately seeking structure and guidance in life. Fundamentalist Islam would fill that need by commanding him how to think, dress, act, speak, and eat.

That proposition in itself is debatable. Lots of kids grow up in a rudderless home environment but very few become religious fanatics. And at least a few kids grow up in good Christian homes only to become wanton murderers. Think Columbine.

Now we can add to this speculative hypothesizing one more element sure to draw more attention when and if Walker is ever tried in an American court. According to a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, when Walker’s parents split up, Frank Lindh left the family to move in with his male lover. This, according to unidentified sources "close to the family," left the 16-year-old Walker "startled and flustered."

There will, I suspect, be a strong temptation in gay circles to deny that the homosexuality of Walker’s dad was connected in any way to his son’s bizarre life path. Already, columnist Michelangelo Signorile has written that "[t]he sexual orientation of John Walker’s parents, like their liberal politics and tolerant attitude toward child-rearing, did not cause Walker to join the Taliban." It will be said that the suggestion that there is such a connection is homophobic.

Why are we afraid of the obvious? If it turns out that Walker’s dad left the house when Walker was 16 to live with his gay lover, and if it’s true that Walker’s turn to bizarre fundamentalism followed that event, it is not necessarily homophobic and indeed quite plausible to assume that the event at least partly explains the boy’s turn to extreme religion. Suddenly learning that one’s parent is gay must be a very traumatic event in a person’s life, especially in a teenage boy’s, and might influence all manner of rebellion.

Conceding this relationship is just a recognition of reality in modern America, where homosexuality is still a shameful thing in most families.

The real problem arises when commentators use the relationship between the father’s homosexuality and Walker’s behavior to draw policy conclusions like, "This shows homosexuality is damaging and must be repressed" or "This shows gays are bad parents."

The opposite would be the right conclusion. If homosexuality weren’t stigmatized, the emotional trauma of the revelation to Walker wouldn’t have been as severe as it presumably was, or at least it wouldn’t have been more severe than the revelation that his father had left his mother to run off with another woman. The major shock would come in the fact that the father left the mother for a lover, not in learning the sex of the lover.

Additionally, in a world that didn’t stigmatize gays, Walker’s father might have realized earlier in life that he was gay, or he might have acted openly on the realization earlier in life. Either way, the absence of stigma might have prevented a disastrous marriage and the traitorous product of it.

Walker's dad did exactly what the religious right wants men to do: He married a woman. To the extent that the son's sins can be laid at the father's feet at all, they are just another harmful consequence of socially enforced heterosexuality.

Of course, before we psychoanalyze Walker too closely, it might be best to wait to hear from him directly.

But let’s not lose too much sleep when it turns out some bad person, or the relative of some bad person, is gay. After all, as we’ve been saying, we’re everywhere.