I’ve been re-reading Isaac Asimov’s autobiography In Memory Yet Green at bedtime for the past few weeks. In some ways it’s a perfect book for that as it’s broken up into short easily digestible sections, some no longer than a few paragraphs, some as long as a few pages, so it makes it easy to read a few pages each night before turning out the light.

There are several things about the book struck me on re-reading. For example, this passage from when, as a 21-year-old in the summer of 1941, Isaac was forced to take a vacation for the first time on his own.

It was a curious week. I had thought I would be terrified, but I wasn’t. I remembered the place vaguely from the time, ten years before, when I had been there last, although of course it looked (quite predictably) considerably smaller and less consequential than I remembered.

The Siegels were pleasant to me and fed me well (and I was far less picky at my food than when I was young). I had good quarters and, in general, I felt reasonably at home and longed only moderately for more familiar scenes. To combat possible homesickness, I took my typewriter and did some work on “Legal Rites,” which was then in progress. I also took improving books to read. There have always been sharp limits to my “vacations.”

The most peculiar aspect of the week was that I was an outsider. There were not many people boarding at the Siegels off-season, and those who were there all knew each other. What’s more, they were a peculiar group of people. They were all Jewish, all eastern European immigrants, and all, after two years of Nazi military victory, seemed to concentrate their hatred solely on the Soviet Union.

At every meal, the conversation turned on how happy life had been under the Tsars and how wicked the Bolsheviks were. I kept raising the point that the immediate danger was Nazi Germany but they shrugged it off. One person even said that she hoped Hitler would attack the Soviet Union and that the United States would then form an alliance with Nazi Germany and invade the Soviet Union from the Pacific side. For a while I thought this was an elaborate scheme to make fun of me, but she was serious, quite serious.

At one point when there was some discussion of the unfair treatment of Jews by anti-Semites (anti-Semites in general, not Nazi Germany in particular), a few of them reeled off some of the false attitudes toward Jews that were possessed by many who didn’t really know Jews.

I nodded and said, “Yes, and that sort of thing is pretty general. Consider how we whites mistreat Negroes.”

There was a horrified silence and then one of them, in an awful voice, said, “What’s wrong with the way we treat Negroes?” She then went on to say about the Negroes exactly what she had just complained that anti-Semites said about Jews.

That week was a liberal education concerning the blindness and bigotry of people, and how the pleasures of hatred rise superior even to the instinct of self-preservation.

I quote that passage because it reminded me that some of the most bigoted people that I have known, of both the anti-Black and anti-Semite varieties, have been gay people.

Naïve me, I used to think that if one belonged to a despised minority group then one would just automatically empathize with other despised minority groups.

Silly me. That’s not the way human nature works. It seems some people must have a need to feel superior to some other group.

I remember back in the early 80s one day when John brought his latest boyfriend over to introduce him. John went through boyfriends like other folks went through boxes of tissues, so I was used to meeting a new one every week or two.

The conversation was going along swimmingly until somehow the subject of Jews came up and all of a sudden John’s current squeeze let out with “I hate ’em!” 

And he didn’t stop at that. He went on.

I was too shocked to respond, not just at what he was saying but that John had brought this bigot into my apartment.

But he was far from the only example I encountered over the years.

Even some of those folks who had Black friends, once their Black friends had safely left the room, could be prone to fall back on some pretty ugly stereotypes or worse.

There’s one fellow I know, now well into his 80s, whenever I call him, which is rarely these days, he nearly always manages to complain about something involving Black people. The last time it had to do with him thinking of cancelling his subscription to the Philadelphia Inquirer because it was devoting way too much space to stories about Blacks.