To live as a homosexual

A clearly mentally unbalanced fifty-year-old married man with six children tried to hire a hit man to kill his wife. The hit man in question turned out to be a police informant, and the man subsequently got fifteen years for his troubles. What is amazing, though, is the motive:

James Gau pleaded guilty to solicitation of murder for asking a police informant in July to go to his wife’s American Fork, Utah, home, pretend to be a robber, and strangle her.

Gau said left his family and moved to Reno because he wanted to live as a homosexual.

The article (from the AP) makes note of this point twice in its five sentences: he wanted, apparently, to ‘live as a homosexual’. What does that mean, and just how much underlying homophobia is there in this particular formulation? (On the other hand, the jokes basically do write themselves…)

The phrase to live as X generally entails, I believe, the notion to adopt the characteristics of other Xs. If the article said ‘moved to Brooklyn to live as a Hasidic Jew’ we would know what it meant: we would suppose he grew a beard and sidelocks, stopped watching television, and attempted to commit fraud on federal subsidies. Of course, I don’t mean to paint Hasidim with such a broad brush, but this is exactly my point: the phrasing to live as X brings up a particular set of images, not all of which may be appropriate, but many of which would certainly be present, rightly or wrongly. So what does ‘he moved to Reno because he wanted to live as a homosexual’ entail? Certainly it evokes particular images—both of Reno and of a specific type of homosexual—again, rightly or wrongly. Does this reflect latent homophobia? Possibly, but I’d be more inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt, if only because ‘to adopt a homosexual lifestyle’ would have been far too obvious and ‘because he realised he was gay’ doesn’t really have the same ‘ring’ as a motivation for murder, does it? Mental instability, sure, but homosexuality? Doesn’t really work.

Hat-tip: Jess.