Isaac Katz, Son Of “Proud Homophobe” Professor Jonathan Katz, Comes Out

Isaac Katz has come out. Isaac is the son of Jonathan Katz, the Washington University physics professor, who was inexplicably hired by the Obama administration this past spring as a part of the scientific team appointed to attack the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and was then summarily removed when he defended authorship of a ten year old paper published online titled “In Defense of Homophobia, Katz writing that he was “proud homophobe,” arguing in the 1999 piece that gays should be shunned by society because they are physically and morally responsible for AIDS, although that original article once available on the university site, has since been removed. In an essay published Monday by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Isaac writes “When I was perhaps 10 years old, my brother called me a faggot. Neither of us was old enough to understand the concept of sexual orientation; he was merely teasing me in the way older brothers do and using a word that had surely passed from the public sphere into his vocabulary via sheer osmosis. My father overheard him, however, and reacted in a manner I had never before seen. He was genuinely angry: not with violence (he never has been violent), but with pure, unadulterated offense. Profanity was rather strictly forbidden for us children, but the word ‘faggot,’ to my father, was simply beyond the pale. Why was the slur so offensive to my dad? Not because the anti-gay slur is so contemptuous but, rather, because to merely call another person homosexual is to insult him or her in the worst way. My dad was angry not because my brother used a curse word- but because, simply and literally, he said I was gay ... More than a decade has passed since my brother used that notorious homophobic slur. I am 22 now, and, as it happens, I am gay. Further, I personally, was depressed throughout much of my adolescence. Although anti-gay bullying was never a problem for me as a student at Clayton High School, being in the closet hardly helped my mental well-being. I was hospitalized for depression the summer after my sophomore year in college and tried to overdose on pills later that fall.”