Some months ago, I ran across an article, just one of many, about homosexuality existing solely as choice, careening headlong into the labyrinth of immoral sexuality. This classic reflection is from 'The Family Research Institute' 2002, Volume 17, no.4. "Homosexuality is about rebelling against and trying to corrupt society, even as heterosexuality is about, for the most part, having and raising children. (Homosexuality) is also about coloring the world with SEX, regardless of the consequences. Its most prominent attitude is selfishness -- getting what's mine, what I deserve; getting back at all those who have hurt me, etc." and further on, "With rare exception, gays don't do these things because they are "confused as to whether they are a man or a woman." They know that they are men, they have just learned to enjoy sex with other men. They are not "sick," nor typically in great psychological distress. Rather they have acquired an evil habit, a bad habit, a socially injurious habit."
So, accordingly, gays are bad and straights, for the most part, are good. This kind of thinking and where it takes us is utterly absurd? It is a curious thing when I hear someone discussing homosexuality as an event of choice. It's highly implausible that anyone, especially children, could or would make a choice about something he or she cannot fully fathom and a choice which would bring obvious socially negative repercussions and often emotional and physical danger. One flock of thinkers remains convinced that homosexuality is a learned behavior. Well, for that matter, so is heterosexuality. We all must learn where and when and when not to have sex and how best to have it. Conversely, in cultures expressing abhorrence of homosexuality, the minority must learn the techniques of covert behavior, i.e. how not to get discovered, verbally offended, beaten or murdered.
In Thailand, where I now live, within the pulse of Buddhist tolerance, homosexuality, while certainly not embraced, is completely tolerated. Gay or transsexual students are not bullied nor intimidated by their peers.
Some Muslim countries, however, readily behead homosexuals, even though their culture was, and still is, naturally made up of the same percentage of homosexuals within the population as anywhere else on the planet and has been so for millennia.
Christian countries are hardly more tolerant. We need only conjure up the tragic image of Mathew Shepard, beaten senseless in 1998, his life slowly ebbing then ending in the cold Wyoming snow. Gay bashing is one of the most hideous symptoms of an intolerant culture and we are currently witnessing more and more of this dark hatred within our communities in the United States, especially in younger people.
A small group adheres to the notion of a 'gay gene', but most genetic scientists have generally disregarded this idea as having any provable merit. Every bit of evidence about genetic evolution indicates all creatures move relentlessly toward propagation of life in all its variations and a gene that would lean toward the contrary would eventually be eliminated from the gene pool. Sensible. Unless of course you are a Creationist from which nothing makes any sense at all. As a matter of fact, if the writer of the Family Heritage article were willing to take the investigative time, he or she might find that the percentage relationship of pornographic inter net sites between heterosexuals and homosexuals is about the same as the percentage of straights to gays. I would suspect that the straight to gay percentages remain fairly constant. For every 10,000 gay sites there are 100,000 straight porno sites. And we mustn't exclude all those in between. Very few of those sites are about procreation.
There is the possibility that the origins of homosexuality came along about the same time as the origins of heterosexuality. The truth is we just don't know. But historic records do show that same-sex fascination has been around for a long time. Aristotle opined that homosexuality was a naturally occurring way to prevent over-population. A real, altruistic possibility-a small part of us ordained to sacrifice the chance of pushing our own individual genes forward to help our species perpetuate. This doesn't always bear the right fruit, however, because religious/cultural pressures force a continuous cadre of gay men and women into marriage and having children. The ones I've known are damn good fathers and mothers and generally tend to instill a much needed and healthy breadth of tolerance in their sons and daughters.
Male homosexuality in ancient times was very much part of cultural militarism, Sparta and Athens as prime examples. In the 4th Century BC, The Greek military commander, Gorgidas, formed an elite army of homosexual lovers, consisting of the "heniochoi", the older man and charioteer along with his "parabaitai" or companion. (These terms are the same as the ancient Greek "erastes" and "eromenos.") This small army of 300 male lovers, called 'The Sacred Band', was formidable and unbeaten until it marched against Alexander the Great and his father Phillip II. It was Phillip's feared, long-speared Macedonian phalanx that fatally routed the Band; every couple died in battle rather than surrender. Phillip exclaimed "Perish the man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything unseemly."
As a side note, it's interesting to compare the Greek word phallos, (thought to be proto-Hellenic in origin, expressing an endearing, diminuitive slang for the penis, much like our weanie or pee-pee-Greek phi, pe, penis) with phalanx, Greek phalangos, meaning 'finger'. I suppose even the ancient Greeks had early on developed a gesture to redress an obvious rudeness.
Even earlier, a thousand years before the apex of classical Greece, on the Island of Crete, there were already homosexual rituals deeply ensconced in cultures in which it was inseparable from the norms of heterosexuality. As it evolved it took on the shape of male initiatory rites, i.e. the cultural process of bringing boys into manhood. Similar rites continued overtly well into the twentieth century in Africa, South America and Asia. And, certainly covertly, it existed and still does in all Christian cultures, particularly those of the Catholic persuasion, if we can use the preponderance of current sex-abuse lawsuits as a yardstick.
Same-sex behavior in non-human species has been observed in approximately four hundred and fifty different species. Canadian biologist and linguist, Bruce Bagemihl, whose massive tome 'Biological Exuberance' chronicles these events, proposes an interesting theory of sexual behavior in which reproduction is not necessarily the only function of sexuality. As important are the release of tensions and group cohesion.
In fact 'Biological Exuberance' was sited in the Supreme Court case, Lawrence v. Texas, as evidence that homosexuality is a natural occurrence.
If same-sex desire isn't genetic and if it isn't through choice or learned behavior, how is that it exists and has existed longer than human memory. Is it coded and articulated through a kind of genetic predisposition? Surely anything that's been with us long before the myths of Christianity were made must have some reason for existing. I'm more in agreement with Bagemihl's ideas. And I would go further and say that the concept of heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality, as we perceive them in modern terms, is an impoverished diminishment of human variation and possibility by Christian dogma. In the panorama of speciation, mammals have become quite inventive. Not every male gets to mount the female-only the dominant few. Yet, with few exceptions, the same fire, the chemical furnace of sexuality, drives us all. Nature gives us delightfully beautiful options.
For whatever merit we might possibly squeeze out of it, the church is and has always been anxious to perpetuate ignorance. For example, in 2008, overturning a Supreme Court's decision guaranteeing fundamental rights for all, the people and politicians of California, (and elsewhere) voted for Proposition Eight, which defines marriage as only valid between a man and a woman. Supporting such an outright ban on human decency is an act of unconscionable cowardice. Fortunately Proposition Eight was overturned this year. Perhaps one day we'll fully embrace the term pan sexuality as it more generously refers to an appropriate, honest discourse on the aggregation of human potential, and the words "heterosexuality", "bisexuality" and "homosexuality" will be buried along with other artifacts of ignorance-fear, hatred, racism, bigotry and greed.
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