THE CASE FOR ACCEPTANCE: An Open Letter to Humanity, Part III

FOREWORD

This entry is the third 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, continued: ABNORMAL and PROMISCUOUS

Abnormal

I’m going to let our homophobic bigot friend (from Part II) back into the conversation for just a minute. He says, “What you are is abnormal.” As with “unnatural,” he says this in a tone of voice that makes it sound like something worthy of Satan himself.

So, you tell me this time. What’s the definition of abnormal? I hear you saying, “The opposite of normal.” But you know I’m not going to let you get away with that. What’s normal?

If you take the insulting tone out of the word abnormal, it reverts back to its true meaning. It wasn’t coined to mean “perverted” or “sick” or “just plain wrong.” If we’re talking about the comparison of two characteristics (like—oh, I don’t know, gay and straight?), abnormal indicates the rate of occurrence of that characteristic, in a defined sampling of specimens, that is less than fifty percent. So, strictly speaking, homosexuality in the population of, say, the human race, is abnormal. But so is left-handedness. And blonde hair. And blue eyes. And being born in March as opposed to any other time of the year. So “abnormal” is not a judgment. There’s nothing pejorative about it.

I’m right-handed. Let’s say I’m a caterer, and I’m working this weekend at a convention for left-handed people. If the specimen sample is everyone in the convention center at its height, I’m abnormal. But just let me walk back out onto the street, and change the sample to everyone within several city blocks, and—presto, chango—I’m normal again.

There’s another way to apply a test for normality, too. You don’t have to confine your examination to a single point in time. So, for example, we can look at a characteristic as it appears in the human race over a period of time, and apply the findings that way.

When I was born, it was illegal to be gay just about every place in these United States. This was true when Dr. Alfred Kinsey was doing his research. It isn’t true today; at least, it’s not illegal in as many places. Today we have entire television networks dedicated to a viewership that accepts homosexuality in society. We have major gay characters in some very successful television shows. Depending on where you live, it can be viewed as edgy, as almost fashionable, to be gay. Or at least no big deal. (I did say “depending on where you live.”)

There’s a lot of controversy around the findings of Dr. Kinsey’s reports on sexuality, and there’s a lot of debate today over what the percentage is of people who are gay. After all, there are people who answer polls in the negative incorrectly, because they haven’t yet figured out that they’re gay, and there are people who won’t admit to themselves that they’re gay, and people who know damn well that they’re gay and lie about it. But one thing everyone has agreed on is that as far as anyone can tell, the percentage hasn’t changed. So if roughly the same percentage of people are gay over decades, regardless of law and fashion, that percentage becomes a statistical norm.

So it’s normal for a reliable percentage of people to be gay. And for that group of people, it’s natural to respond sexually to people of the same sex. Therefore, there is no rational support for basing the conclusion that “Gay Equals Bad” on the topic of normality.

Another one down.

Are we having fun yet?

Promiscuous

This card is almost certainly more often hurled in the faces of gay men than gay women. And the reason for that gives you a clue as to how we’re going to destroy this one.

Step one: define, in terms of sex (it has other definitions, too). I’ve heard it said that promiscuous is a word you apply to someone who has more sex than you. This one might be as tough to define as unnatural. Is someone promiscuous if he (notice the pronoun) has sex with two different people in a month? A week? A weekend? What if he knows them, and he sees them regularly? What if he doesn’t even know their names? What if it’s someone who is married, has promised monogamy, and has sex once a year or so with a prostitute or with someone he encounters casually?

Tricky, defining this one. Let’s just say it means having indiscriminate sex, which isn’t terribly specific, but probably each of you has your own idea of what this might mean, and that’s okay for now. And as long as we’re calling it indiscriminate, let’s agree that it would be committed by someone who had very little trouble treating sex as “just sex” when they wanted to. What’s “just sex?” Read on.

Apply it. Here’s a scenario: Heterosexual married couple, arguing bitterly. One of them says, “But, honey, it meant nothing to me!” The injured party replies, “Nothing? Does it mean nothing to you when you have sex with me?”

So, it’s pretty clear what they’re arguing about. One of them has been unfaithful. But which one? The husband or the wife? It could, of course, be either, but be honest. In your mind, didn’t you picture the first person who spoke as the man? Let’s face it: historically, it’s far more common for a husband to be unfaithful than for a wife. While I’m not excusing infidelity, I’m going to propose that there are two reasons men are more likely to stray. There may be lots more, but I’m limiting myself here.

One reason has a lot to do with how a man and woman experience heterosexual intercourse differently. If you think about it, the woman, who is probably smaller and almost certainly less physically powerful than her male partner, must trust him enough to allow the insertion of an object with which she may be more or less familiar, but that she does not in fact own or control, into an extremely intimate and sensitive part of herself. Over. And over. And over. And … you get the picture. So while there are certainly women who love sex for “just sex,” there are likely to be fewer of them than there are men who can see it like that and be comfortable with it.

The seeds of another reason men might be more likely to be promiscuous are in the first reason. We know that like many other aspects of life, women are more complex than men. Maybe it’s got something to do with the genes on the extra leg of that second X chromosome. And their sexual response to their partners is more complicated. It’s typical (always leaving room for exceptions, of courses) for a woman to start thinking about romance or intimacy on her way to thinking about sex. With many women, that’s the only way they want to get there. So it starts in her head and/or heart, with emotions, and works its way down to the physical pleasure centers.

In comparison, the sexual response in men typically begins below the waist. It can work its way up to his head, and he can get just as into the emotional and spiritual aspects of the act as any woman, but for him it can begin and end all in the same place without moving much more than however many inches he can lay claim to. He’s more likely than she is to get the concept of “just sex” and think that’s okay. Like our husband in the scenario above, he thinks that telling his wife that an act of sex meant nothing to him will make sense to her. In most cases, it doesn’t.

Not too long ago I heard a woman ask a straight man if he thought it was true that gay men are more promiscuous than straight men. His response was all male: “They’re probably more successful at it.” Think about it: if a straight man wants to have sex with a woman, he needs to do whatever it is that gets her in the mood. She might be easy, but chances are she’s going to require more warming up than he does. But if two guys want to go at it just for the sex? Well, not only do they not need to feel mushy about each other, they don’t have to wait for anybody to get in the mood, if all they both want is “just sex.”

So, can we reconstruct this thing in a way that helps it support an assumption about gay men as a group? I’m going to say no. I don’t believe your average gay man wants sex more than, or wants more sex than, your average straight man. But does he get more? Maybe; but if so, being gay is just a facilitator, not an indicator of an inherent trait. So if I happen to be a promiscuous person, it might help that I’m gay, but it’s not because I’m gay.

Another one down.

In the next installment, I’ll apply this process to the card that reads “Pedophile.”

THE CASE FOR ACCEPTANCE: Addendum, Part II.5

Oh goody, a new card! (See the Comments for Part I.) This post (II.5, or however Roman Numerals indicate halves) is an interim installment to examine it.

“Anonymous” says the following: “There is one other thing wrong with being gay - besides some peoples' reaction to it. This also supports the ‘unnatural’ argument. Though I don't use right and wrong I have a pretty simple litmus test for behaviors. If everyone in the world did it, would the world be a better place. In the case of homosexuality, if everyone in the world was [gay], the human race would have become extinct long ago.”

First of all, “other?” That implies I’ve said there was at least one thing “wrong.” I haven’t. The homophobic bigot did, and I disagreed with him.

Second, while there are people who would consider it a boon to the universe if humans were extinct (if anyone knows a tongue-in-cheek emoticon, please share), this “litmus test” strikes me as not only specious but also as thoughtless. Let’s use the process I’ve proposed and examine it.

Define. “If everyone in the world did it, the world would be a better place.” First, better than what isn’t clear. Setting that aside, it might help to think of this in practical terms. There are things that take up not much time (for most people, this would probably include sexual activity), and there are things that take up enormous amounts of time. But “Anonymous” has applied this litmus test indiscriminately. So while the definition doesn’t necessarily mean that whatever we’re examining must be something that everyone on earth does, it nevertheless does hold that IF everyone did it, improvement would be obvious. I think that’s all the clarity we can get, as it’s stated.

Now, Apply. Let’s select a few activities and see what happens. Consider winemaking, academia, politics, computer technology, physics, undertaking (as in caring for dead bodies), finance, teaching, day care… is that enough? None of these activities, in and of itself, would perpetuate the human race and/or guarantee that we wouldn't become extinct. And each of these activities takes up so much time that if everyone did any one of them, nothing else would get done; the world would come to a grinding halt. What would the world be like if everyone made wine? Or if everyone taught physics? We need someone growing vegetables and grains. We need someone distributing these foodstuffs. If we apply logic, we can see that we need different people doing different things. There are many activities that, if everyone did them, the world would NOT be a better place. The litmus test “Anonymous” proposes would demand elimination of these activities.

Perhaps even more important: What is the underlying assumption “Anonymous” must hold in order for his/her litmus test to condemn any sexual orientation? How about this: the assumption is that sexual orientation is a CHOICE. IT IS NOT. Winemaking and teaching physics are choices, but sexual orientation is dictated by nature. Therefore, saying homosexuality is wrong because it would be bad if everyone were homosexual implies that everyone who is homosexual should just – what, not be homosexual? And how would that happen, exactly? (See my first installment for how I shredded the “Unnatural” card.)

So. Can we now Reconstruct? Hardly. We can't choose the color of our eyes, the date on which we were born, our parents, or our sexual orientation.

“Anonymous” says this test proves the “unnaturalness” of homosexuality. Evidently he/she didn't read the part in Part II about pheromones and how Nature gets gays out of the way of heteros so they can perpetuate the species (even though the comment was left after Part II was posted). I can't remember the name of the gay comic who said something like this to heteros: "Hey, just let us be gay, and we promise not to marry any of you."

Now, it's true that "Anonymous" used the word "behaviors." And while one's behavior can be said to be a choice, I'm hoping "Anonymous" won't turn out to be as ignorant about what it means to be gay as the Catholic church, whose contemporary position is that while the church recognizes homosexuality to be an orientation rather than a choice, it expects gays to remain chaste. (Here I need an emoticon for "Are you sh***ing me?") And anyway, even if all the gays in the world refrained from expressing this huge, compelling, critical component of who we are, it still wouldn't satisfy "Anonymous." It's not like we're going to apply this test to our lives, see that the human race will become extinct if the 5-7% of us who are gay don't go out and procreate, sigh wistfully at our true identities and go out and make babies for the sake of making babies.

So this litmus test gives only a nod to nature and ignores much more compelling evidence. What it has much more to do with is Choice. That kills any valid application of the test to any sexual orientation, which is not a choice. I think this "test" is a smoke screen for someone who has deeper problems with homosexuality. In other words, "Anonymous" is holding the card "Would the world be better if everyone did this?" in front of the card "There's no need to think; I feel instinctively this is wrong." I'll shred that one in Part V.

As for this card? SHREDDED.