FOREWORD
This blog entry is the second in a series of monthly installments that present the rationale behind my second novel, Thinking Straight. The series is written from the point of view of a gay man—which I am not—so I'm labeling it as a fictional open letter to humanity, addressed to anyone who will read it and consider its points. My hope is that it will further understanding and acceptance.
The installments will be presented in logical order (Part I and the full list of installments was posted in April), and I encourage readers to start at the beginning and proceed through. The series will be highlighted each month on DREAMWalkergroup.com in the DREAMScene newsletter.
THE CARDS: INTRO AND CARD ONE (UNNATURAL)
I’m going to do only five cards for you in these installments. You can do the rest yourself. But when you see how I do them, I’m hoping you’ll get the process. You’ll need it, because you’re going to have to go through every last thing in your faggot-bag and destroy it. That means you. Whether you’re gay or not.
Here’s the process: 1. Define/Dissect and reduce to smallest elements. 2. Apply provable facts and repeatable, rational tests. 3. Attempt to reconstruct (you’ll fail, but don’t let me spoil it for you). As you’ll see, there are challenges, but that’s what makes this fun. Here’s how it works.
You know, I’ve actually had homophobic bigots say this to me directly: “What you are is unnatural.” Once upon a time, I wouldn’t have known how to respond to that without sarcasm. But I do now.
Define “unnatural.” If you look it up, you’ll find something along the lines of (paraphrasing, here) not according to the laws of nature or normality. This isn’t terribly helpful, because trying to get any two people to agree on what the laws of nature are—or on what’s normal—is rather tricky. In fact, I had a discussion about this with an ex-boyfriend before the “ex” part applied, someone with whom I share so many opinions that talking with him was almost like talking with myself. Wonder why we broke up…
Anyway, I was making the case that plastic was unnatural, because it didn’t come to us from nature as plastic. Patrick (oops… wasn’t going to identify him. Oh, well…) said, “It’s made from natural substances, and processes that exist in nature are used to make it.”
To which I countered, “But it doesn’t biodegrade!” Ha, I thought, I’ve got him.
But then he said, “Sure it does. It might take hundreds of years, depending on the type of plastic, but it does biodegrade. What parameter do you want to use? If it degrades in a hundred years is it natural, but five hundred—not so much? How about fifty years? Or fifteen? What’s the rule?”
He sounded rather like Abraham arguing with God about how many good people there had to be in the city of Sodom before God would agree not kill off everybody there. But more on the bible later. My point is that even two people who were, at the time anyway, agreeing on just about everything including who got which side of the bed were unable to agree on the definition of “unnatural.”
The cheating way, of course, is to say it’s the opposite of “natural.” But that doesn’t get us any farther along, really. So, how about if we just say that something that’s natural is something that we haven’t messed with since it came to us from nature? That would make anything we’ve messed with unnatural by default. You might not agree with that, but we need to start somewhere, and this is my letter, so I’m starting there.
Apply facts and/or rational tests to it. That’s next. So, rhetorically speaking, is it natural to wear glasses to improve the faulty sight that some of us have, or that comes on us as we age? What about hearing aids? Is it natural to fly through the air in a metal-sheathed behemoth at heights so great that if we fell we’d be nothing but a pile of atoms when we hit whatever was under us? Is it natural to heat and cool our living environments? Is it natural to cook food? What about microwaves? Is it natural to irradiate our food so that it doesn’t decay as quickly? What about having your heart cut out of your chest and replaced with one from a dead person? And are any two people going to answer all those questions the same?
Probably not. So instead, let’s apply the term only to the subject at hand. Sex.
What makes sex natural or unnatural? Let me turn to my homophobic challenger, the guy who told me that I was unnatural. In the spirit of seeking understanding, I might say to him, “Why? Seriously; why? What am I doing that’s unnatural?”
I’ll let you imagine his response, which is possibly going to be graphic and offensive.
So I take a different tack. “So, if you think what I do is unnatural, and if you say it in that insulting tone of voice, you must think it’s bad. That must mean that you think what you do is natural, and therefore good. So help me out, here. What do you do?”
He’s probably not used to having someone respond in good faith, which I’m trying really hard to do here (as opposed to sarcasm, of course), so he sputters and maybe even tries not to answer. Let’s say I get him to hang around long enough to work with me on this, since he thinks it’s so important.
He might say, “You know very well what I do.”
“Well, actually, I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ve ever done it. Wouldn’t you like to prove your point? Tell me. Really. What do you do?”
More sputtering, and then, “All right. If you insist. I put my penis into my wife’s vagina and ejaculate.”
Well, the first thing that goes through my mind is, “Eeeewww.” And then, “Why?” But I don’t say those things. I say, “Okay, and what is it about that action that makes it more natural than what I do? I’m working with natural body parts, too.”
[I’m going to ask you to imagine sputtering ahead of almost everything the guy says.] “Yeah, but you can’t get pregnant.”
“Ah, so reproduction is the objective of natural sex. How many kids do you and your wife have?”
“Three.”
“Planning on more?”
“No way; three’s more than enough.”
“So I guess you aren’t ever having sex again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well…,” I say, “you seem to have a pretty low opinion of unnatural sex. And you’ve just told me that what makes sex natural is reproduction. That means birth control is unnatural, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to do that. It would put you in the same boat as me.” And while he’s still sputtering I add, “By the way, you do know, don’t you, that if you put it in her mouth she won’t get pregnant, right?”
He doesn’t much like this line of questioning, as you can imagine, so I give him a break. I ask, “Is your wife the very first biologically efficacious female who would have you?”
“What? No. Of course not.” Swaggers a little. “She was hardly my first, after all.”
I refrain from reminding him that all sex previous to his wife was almost certainly unnatural by his own definition. “So why didn’t you marry and commit yourself for life to the very first one?”
“Well… she wasn’t the one. The right one. You know.”
“Why not? Wasn’t she pretty enough? Rich enough? Submissive enough? Strong-willed enough? Practical enough? Helpless enough? What was it?”
”I didn’t love that one, okay?”
“Okay. That’s fine. You’re telling me you shouldn’t be expected to marry someone you can’t love. Guess what. Neither should I.”
Truth is, we aren’t likely to get much farther with this Neanderthal, so let’s leave him behind for now. I think you can see what I’m driving at. He hasn’t given any thought to what it means for sex to be natural. Not thinking will be a recurring theme; see if you can pick up on where else it rears its ugly head.
There’s another way to approach this “natural” concept. It’s called Biology. So let’s take a look at what we know about that (provable facts), in terms of sex.
I probably don’t need to tell you that pheromones are sex scents. There seems to be some debate in the scientific community about precisely what constitutes human pheromones and how our bodies know what they are on a biological level, but there the debate ends. Our biological response can be measured. At least in men.
[Background biological fact: the hypothalamus is the part of the brain responsible for governing sexual response.]
Researchers, including those at the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, have done some fascinating studies. And while they may not be ready to declare some kind of foolproof litmus test for homosexuality in humans, they have shown this: the hypothalamus of self-identified homosexual men initiates a sexual response when it detects male pheromones, and a particularly strong one when exposed to the pheromones of male homosexuals. And there is no biological response whatsoever in the hypothalamus of these men when exposed to female pheromones.
So here’s how it works. A straight man meets up with another guy, and his hypothalamus takes a sniff. Nothing. Okay, fine. So the first guy raises his hand up to receive a high-five from the second guy and maybe make some comment about a sports team. And if they’re really glad to see each other, there might maybe just possibly be a hug, but you’d better believe it’ll be the hips-apart-two-slaps-on-the-back kind of thing. I mean, there’s a line, here, they’re thinking; we like guy things, not guys.
But if it’s a woman instead who approaches guy number one, his hypothalamus goes, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Could be a little action tonight.” Now because he’s human, if this is his mother-in-law he doesn’t feel compelled to jump her bones. He can put the kibosh on that. But what he can’t do, even if he were brave enough to try, is get his hypothalamus to generate a sexual response to guy number two.
Similar thing with a straight woman. If she meets another woman, her hypothalamus goes, “Oh,hi! How are you?... Listen, we could be friends, as long as we’re not after the same guy.” But if she encounters a straight man instead, her brain goes, “Oh, my. Yes; could be a little romance in the air.” Unless, of course, it’s that jerk who wanted to get to third base with her and didn’t even pay for dinner. Again, she can stop the process. But she can’t get her hypothalamus to respond sexually in a different way from how it’s programmed.
Guess what? Neither can I. So although I don’t necessarily feel compelled to jump into the sack with every gay guy I meet (I can stop the process as well as anyone else), what I can’t do, no matter how hard I might be foolish enough to try, is force myself to have a natural, biological, sexual response to a woman. Can’t get there.
But wait; there’s more. Most women responded somewhat negatively to gay male pheromones, even though they responded positively to straight male pheromones. And the gay men’s response to straight men wasn’t as powerful as their response to gay men. It’s like gays are getting ourselves out of the way of the heteros. Why don’t they appreciate this?
So when that homophobic bigot says, “What you do is unnatural,” all I want him to do is qualify it a little bit. He needs to add, “For me.” Then I would agree with him, because it would be unnatural for him. And that leaves the door open for me to say, “Okay, I get it. Because what you do is unnatural for me.”
One place homophobic bigots like to point to when they’re screaming “Unnatural!” at me is the non-human animal kingdom. They might say, “You don’t see animals doing what you do!”
But they’re wrong. In fact, shepherds have known since the year dot that between eight and ten rams out of every hundred are gay. They don’t talk about it, because it’s so much a part of their work. It wouldn’t occur to them to present it as news any more than they’re likely to say, “You know, only ewes can give birth to lambs.” It’s a given. And it makes sense for them to know; from a ram, they want pregnant ewes.
And it’s not just sheep. It’s giraffes, and ostriches, and zebra finches—the list goes on. In fact, it’s over 1,500 species long, and growing. I was particularly amused when the U.S. political right-wing contingent tried to adopt the penguin as its mascot not too long ago. It was the same year that “March of the Penguins” was big; remember that? It was tempting; it had everything associated with “family values” (with the exception of beating gays to death and imprisoning all the liberals). Well, two things happened that quashed that propaganda effort pretty quickly. One was that someone pointed out to them—probably one of those troublesome scientists who believe in evolution—that Emperor penguins are monogamous only to a point. That point is the end of the year. Then they’re on to someone new. The other thing? Gay penguins. New York, Germany, all over the place.
I got into a debate once with a guy who didn’t think this pheromone thing supported my position. To quote him: “Some people have genetic and physiological predispositions towards violence and addiction.”
It took me a few minutes to realize what he’d done. Can you see it? I mean, besides practically equating the gay orientation with criminals. To me, his response was so completely irrelevant that it threw me. And that’s because his starting point was “Gay Equals Bad.” And even though my starting point is the opposite, and even though I admit that I think his is utterly totally wrong, I wasn’t trying to use “natural” as a term to support my position as much as I was trying to say “You can’t use that card [unnatural] to prove yours.” I’m just killing cards, here, at the moment. So even if his starting point is “Gay Equals Bad,” he can’t say “Gay Equals Unnatural.” It just ain’t true. And, as I reminded him, he follows the dictates of his hypothalamus, too.
And as for the animals? He said, “We see [homosexuality] in nature, yes. And animals eat their young. Animals are amoral; humans aren't. We don't base our morality on what animals do.” Again, huh? WTF? Like, dude, kind of not the point. All I was trying to say was that the animals are not being gay to be perverse, to annoy their parents, to rebel against their church, or any other darn fool reason. They’re gay because they’re biologically programmed that way. So homosexuality is not unnatural. That’s all I’m trying to prove. At the moment. Animals eating their young is nothing more than a red herring. Smoke screen. Some dang fool thing to try and obscure the real point: Homosexuality is a naturally occurring phenomenon. We aren’t talking about morality. Yet.
The conclusion I come to—tell me if you reach another—is that calling something “unnatural” is not only debatable, subjective, and difficult to prove, but it’s also relative. It’s not an absolute term. At least not when it comes to sex. And homosexuality, occurring as it does “in nature,” cannot be reasonably be called unnatural.
One down.
In the next installment, I’ll apply this process to two more cards: Abnormal and Promiscuous.
