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

a work of fiction by Robin Reardon

FOREWORD

The only thing wrong with being gay is how some people treat you when they find out.

This blog entry is the fifth in a series of monthly installments that present the rationale behind 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; see Archives to the right), 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: THERE’S NO NEED TO THINK; I FEEL INSTINCTIVELY THIS IS WRONG

Yeah, I know, this one’s kind of long for a card. But it covers so much ground that it will be worth it. Promise.

How much of this do we need to define? More than you might think. In fact, let’s start with that word: think. Thinking requires the use of our gray matter. Thinking is something most humans believe sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. There may be a few species we see as capable of thought on some level, but we’re sure we leave them in the dust. Our cerebral cortex is without peer. At least on this planet.

Thinking also requires reason. Reasoning. Rationality. It involves the progression of logical ideas, reflection, consideration. It’s necessary for analysis and synthesis. It raises the understanding of consequence above mere pattern recognition. It makes planning possible.

I could stop right here and point out that as long as we want to consider ourselves at the top of the food chain, we do need to think, and say that settles it. But there’s more thinking to be done about this. So let’s keep going, and let’s think.

Next we examine the phrase “feel instinctively.” Did you ever try to instinct? Can’t do it, can you? An instinct is something you react to, because it causes you to have some sort of feeling. Instincts are unlearned, unemotional, non-verbal and non-cognitive. There is some debate among scientists and others studying this phenomenon about just how many distinct instincts exist—the number seems to be somewhere between one and five—but there’s no debate at all that the most important one, the one to which all others yield, is survival.

An instinctive reaction typically causes us to feel something; that’s where the emotion comes in. Fear is the most common, given the priorities of our instincts. Being non-cognitive, instincts don’t live in our cerebral cortex. In fact, the seat of instinct is said to be the R-25 complex. The reptilian brain. I like to call it the lizard brain; it’s easier to say and to type. Our lizard brain is essentially not different from that of other creatures in the animal kingdom, which means that when we’re not thinking, we’re basically lizards. If we don’t want to be lizards, I suggest we think.

But thinking takes time and energy and focus. It’s a lot of trouble. It can be painful and complicated and frustrating. So much easier to be a lizard, isn’t it? Besides, caution is safer. If we think there’s a danger and there isn’t, that’s not likely to harm us. But if we think there isn’t and there is—you do the math. So Lizardhood is seductive.

Let’s try some application and see if we can get away with as little thinking as possible. Your lizard brain, the seat of instinct, has your survival as its prime directive; therefore, the more paranoid it is, the better it’s doing its job. Let’s give it a test.

Say I’m visiting London, where they drive on the wrong side of the street. I’m in the middle of a city block, and there’s traffic going in both directions in front of me. Directly across from is me is a sex toy store I’ve been hearing about. It would be a gas to bring back a certain item to a friend of mine, and all that fun stuff is in my head when I decide not to walk to the corner and press the button for a “walk” signal. I’m not thinking. Or, I’m not thinking about what I’m actually doing. So I look rather automatically to my left (not instinctively, since this is learned behavior; if I were merely following instinct, I wouldn’t look only to my left) to see if anything’s coming at me, and nothing is, so I step out.

Instantly there’s a blaring horn and the squeal of brakes coming from the red double-decker bus hurtling toward me from my right. My lizard brain, with immediate access to my adrenaline system, responds so fast that my body is back on the sidewalk before my cerebral cortex has any idea what happened. The R-25 didn’t waste time explaining to my human brain what was happening or what it was going to do about it. In fact, it had no way to do that. It just forced my body to react. It saved my life.

So now I’m back on the sidewalk, a little breathless from all the adrenaline, and my human brain scrambles to explain what just happened. I might say something like, “Holy crap. That stupid bus driver nearly hit me!”

Was the driver stupid? Maybe, maybe not. But my immediate need is to confabulate something that explains why I got into such a dangerous spot and justifies whatever I needed to do to get out of it. You might call this thinking, but it doesn’t go very deep. If I jay-walk again, will my lizard brain save me? It will do its damnedest, but maybe I’ll be farther out into the street before the horn sounds. Maybe I’ll trip before I can make it back to safety. Maybe the next bus’s brakes won’t be as good. Aside from never jay-walking again, which isn’t likely to be a reform I’m prepared to make for the rest of my life, what can I do to help avoid death in this way?

Well, I’m might think. Really think. I shouldn’t stop at blaming the bus driver. I need to apply my human brain, at which point I will realize that I’m in London where they drive on the wrong side of the street, and I’ll make a plan that as long as I’m here, I’ll take extra precautions. Maybe I won’t jay-walk until I’m home again. Maybe I’ll look both ways no matter what I expect from the traffic. But I need to think.

Was my lizard brain right? Absolutely. Can it do the task alone? Not as well as it can do it if I think.

Here’s another scenario. Let’s say I’ve never seen a little person (I’m talking about dwarves; apologies to anyone I’ve offended using that word). I’m half-walking, half-running along a city street in a great rush to get someplace. I round the corner of a building with no windows I can see through, and I nearly collide with a little person (LP). My wordless lizard brain screams bloody murder and force-feeds me adrenaline, just like with the London bus—much, much more adrenaline than if that person had looked like people I was used to seeing. The bus was about to kill me. Is the LP? If he’s not carrying a knife or a gun or leading a pack of wolves, is he a threat to me?

I hope I would have the grace to apologize, make sure he was all right, maybe explain that I was in a huge rush, and go on my way. Adrenaline is still coursing through my system. I won’t feel normal again for nearly an hour. I could dine out on that story for a month.

Was my lizard brain right this time? You know the answer; you have a cerebral cortex.

Here’s a scenario that actually happened. A few years ago, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court was debating whether or not the state constitution prohibited legal same-sex marriage, there was a lot of bru-ha-ha about it. One enterprising journalist took a microphone out onto the street and asked people what their position was, and why. I’ll never forget one answer given by an unidentified woman. She said she was against same-sex marriage, because—this is a direct quote—“If we allow men to marry men and women to marry women, pretty soon there won’t be enough children in the world.”

When I heard that, I began sputtering even more helplessly than our homophobic friend when I grilled him about what made sex natural. There are so many flaws in this absurd statement that it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ll start with the most obvious.

Children. How many children are on the planet today? How many of them are unwanted, or starving, or neglected, or all three? How many people would have to become suddenly barren for us to be in any danger whatsoever of running out of children? Whatever the number is, you can bet your ass it’s a hell of a lot higher than the number of gay people in the world.

Next, children. Even if this ridiculous person were correct about running out of children, her conclusion makes sense only if no gay people ever have children. Wrong. Very wrong.

Finally (though there are many more, I’m going to expose only three fallacies), no—not children this time. Nature. Her conclusion implies that if the law refused to recognize the union of the lesbians who brought the suit to court in Massachusetts, those women would wave wistfully at each other and go and find eligible men with whom to settle down and procreate. WRONG AGAIN! Why? Because although we could choose to live straight lives, that won’t make us straight. It would be unnatural. For us. Sure, there are those who make this decision, and in my experience some succeed better than others, but for most of us it would mean a life of lying. Lying to our spouses. Lying to our birth families and our families-in-law. Lying to our friends. Lying to our co-workers. Lying to our children (and weren’t children the most important thing?). Lying to ourselves.

Was that woman thinking? She thought so, but she wasn’t. (Even worse, she votes.) She got about as far as “That stupid bus driver nearly hit me!” Which is to say that she reacted to what her lizard brain dictated, confabulated desperately to try and make sense out of what fear drove her to conclude, and came up with something that makes no sense whatsoever when exposed to actual thought processes. To reason.

If you don’t have to make sense (and your lizard brain doesn’t expect sense), you can say anything at all. And that’s what she did.

You might be wondering about now what her lizard brain has to do with this particular example. After all, it’s not like the bus, or even the LP.

Her lizard brain sees her as the center of the universe. Its primary job is her survival, and it’s more efficient at this if it presumes that anything that’s different from her is a threat until and unless it’s proven otherwise.

Gay people are not forced to wear arm bands (this year). Therefore, many straight people are likely to say, “Oh, I don’t know any gay people.” Absurd. They just don’t know who the gay people are. That is, until something happens that forces them to acknowledge it. Take the example of me in the corporate conference room, answering questions about Hawai’I (see Part I). It could be that no one in that room knew I was gay, and they wouldn’t have known, if I hadn’t said that I had a male domestic partner. Then it’s WHAM! And suddenly they have to deal with it.

What I’m saying is that very often, when someone like this woman finds out someone is gay, either it comes as a surprise, or it is suddenly something she must deal with (like having an opinion about current events), or both. To her lizard brain, because this orientation goes against what’s natural for her, this phenomenon is a threat. It’s dangerous. It’s wrong.

This woman, for personal reasons I’m not privy to, evidently decided against going the religious route. She didn’t say anything about God or the bible or even morality. She based her entire response on something she obviously believed to be vitally important: children. No argument from me, in principle. But her lizard brain’s profoundly negative and fear-inspiring reaction to me sends her cerebral cortex into panic mode, screaming at it to do something QUICKLY! And that’s when confabulation begins. Her lizard brain forces her to react in a way that her cerebral cortex feels obliged to try and make sense out of. But it can’t make sense out of it, because I’m not a threat to her. Really. So she failed to make sense; she just didn’t know it.

Some of you may be demanding to know why homosexuals’ lizard brains don’t scream when we are surprised by heterosexuals, or when we suddenly have to deal with them. The fact is, we aren’t surprised, ever; not only are there more straights than gays in the world, so we’re used the encounters, but also most gay people spent some portion of our lives thinking of ourselves as straight because we weren’t presented with any other option. So our cerebral cortexes have already calmed our R-25 complexes out of a knee-jerk Eeeewww reaction to heterosexuals.

But back to the lizard in Massachusetts. While all of us, at some point or points in our lives, do and say things that are foolish or that don’t make sense, the worst possible times are when our foolishness has detrimental effects on others. This woman, voting as her lizard brain dictates, wanted to take away my civil rights. While I would agree that she’s as entitled to her opinion as I am to mine, I would insist that she not be allowed to deny me my civil rights without a damned good reason. As a start, she could try thinking. How would she react if I told her that what she does in bed is so awful that she shouldn’t be allowed to marry because the last thing I want to do is encourage that behavior, and that I was casting a vote to take that right away from her?

Once upon a time, white people reacted to black people in much the same way as many heteros react to gays today. Many white people still do. Something in their lizard brains goes berserk at this creature that is different from what is normal and natural for that particular lizard brain’s host, and all hell breaks loose. Don’t think it was hell? Ask a black person.

Thank God many of us white folks have done our best to quell this knee-jerk reaction to the “different” among us, and there are now laws to help us (though the work’s far from over). And although I’m sure there are some bigoted whities out there who feel otherwise, it would have been a stupid, narrow-minded, horrible thing if in the 1950s we had amended our Constitution to forbid a person of color to marry a person of—well, of what? Of no color? White people aren’t really white. Black people are seldom really black. What we all are is people. But it would not have been out of the question, not so long ago, to forbid a lawful marriage between, say, Isaiah Washington and Sandra Oh. Except that she—well, is she white?

Goodness, this is difficult, isn’t it? My point is that it would have been a huge mistake to have passed a law like that. But many fewer people would have thought so in 1955 than now. Many things seem less threatening if we just give ourselves a little time to get used to them. And when you consider that the gay rights movement didn’t even get started until June of 1969 (remember the Stonewall riots?), there hasn’t been a lot of time for heteros to get used to gays. But given time and frequent exposure to things that seem different from us, our cerebral cortex has a chance to influence the knee-jerk reaction of our lizard brains and calm the fear that it inspires. “It’s okay,” we can say to the reptile, “it’s just an LP.” “It’s just Isaiah Washington.” “It’s just a gay person.”

So in summary, there was the bus scenario. Would your lizard brain save you in that case? Maybe, but a second dangerous situation could be avoided if you apply enough brain power to figure out what really happened. There was the surprise encounter with the LP. Would your lizard brain save you there? From what? There was the blithering idiot in Massachusetts. If nothing else, she needs to be saved from blithering idiocy, at least in public. Her lizard brain not only didn’t save her from that, but it actually caused it.

Do we need to think? I’m going to say yes. And that’s the fifth one down.

Card Summary

Unnatural: shredded. It would be just as unnatural for me to force my unwilling physiology to have a sexual response to a woman as it would be unnatural for my homophobic friend to force himself to respond sexually to me. Plus, there’s the 1,500+ animal species with gay individuals among their populations.

Abnormal: shredded. The word is a statistical term, not a moral judgment, and it’s normal for some percentage of the human race (and other animal species) to be homosexual.

Promiscuous: shredded. If I’m gay, and I’m promiscuous, it has a lot more to do with the fact that I’m male than the fact that I’m gay. Being gay just makes me more successful at it—if I want to be.

Pedophile: shredded. There’s nothing about the definition of a homosexual that makes him any more likely to abuse children sexually than for a heterosexual to do so. Neither I nor my homophobic friend can have a biological, sexual response to a child. Pedophilia has no basis in sexual orientation.

No need to think when we feel instinctively about something: shredded. Shredded for so many reasons I’m not going to go over them again. If you need to, re-read that section. Trust me; it’s shredded.

Now it’s your turn. Here’s one way to go about it, if you don’t have a real live faggot-bag to work with. Take a piece of lined paper, the kind with a vertical line down the left to leave a small margin. Use a legal size—you’ll need the room. Go someplace quiet with your paper and a pen, and to the right of the margin on each line write something different that you’ve heard about how terrible it is to be gay. All those assumptions that some people try to use to support the conclusion that gay is wrong. Want me to get you started? How about “twisted” and “sick” and “just wrong” and “perverted” and “selfish” and “deluded” and “dangerous” and and and do I need to spell them out for you? You know what they are, whether you hurled them or had them hurled at you. Write down everything you can think of. When you get to the end, go ask a homophobe, and you’ll get a few more.

Now, go back to that quiet corner with your list and your pen. Start at the top with the first one—or any one, it doesn’t matter—and go through our process. Define it. Break it down to the teeniest pieces you can. Apply known facts and rational tests to it. See if you can reconstruct that assumption again so that it supports the fallacy that gay equals bad.

The last thing is to examine gay people in light of this thing. For each line, ask yourself, “Does this apply to any gay people that I know of?” Maybe the piece you’re examining is promiscuity. Does it apply? If not, leave the left margin on that line blank and go to the next line. If it does, ask yourself a second question: “Does it apply to them because they’re gay?” You already know the answer to that one. Again, leave the left margin blank and go on to the next line. When you’re finished, you shouldn’t have any check marks in the left margin. If you do, go back. Define again. Break it down again, and be creative in how you do that. Do some research. Apply science, apply psychology, apply anything that’s reasonably provable. Now try and reconstruct it again. I’ll bet you can’t. I’ll bet you’ll have to cross out that check mark.

The next installment will describe and demonstrate a system that we’ll need when we begin to examine cards that can’t be deconstructed with reason alone. It’s a system that underpins all accepted project management methodologies. It’s also a model for life. Think it sounds boring? Wait until you see how I apply it.