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Gay Cosmos

The Gay Cosmos

As a proposition, homophobia was doomed the day of its birth because its underlying assumptions are false. Fact and reason, of course, can only answer that small part of homophobia that masquerades as factual and reasonable. No response is possible to those who hold that their views are received directly from their god or who merely claim to dislike gay people. But if homophobes would content themselves with those positions, reasonable people would never entertain homophobic concepts and few gay people would be in danger of internalizing homophobic ideas.

To ourselves and to candid, reasoning minds an answer may be offered for "How come homosexuality?"

Because the requisites of same-sex love are inherent in the human condition. Because for aeons human beings have survived better with capacity for same-sex love. Because human beings without society do not prosper. Because heterosexuality and homosexuality are the warp and the woof of the social fabric.

Human beings would not live long were every man against all others and every woman for herself. That men love men and women love women thus benefits even those who think it wrong that such love be consummated. Homophobia in its logical conclusion is anthropophobia, and in truth few homophobes really desire a world without homosexual relationships, but only that such relationships never have a genital dimension.

Homosexuality is not morally neutral; it is not an irrelevancy like skin color or stature; it is not an eccentricity, harmless or not, to be tolerated; it is not an affliction that exceptional individuals can compensate for or overcome. It is a positive good, an adaptive trait, a desirable and necessary attribute of humanity.

To portray homosexuality as less than it is—whether to solicit liberal charity or to avoid controversy—is to lie. Homosexuality is not a relative moral good—merely okay for those who practice it in the context of their relationships and communities. It is absolutely right and necessary for all human kind.

The human genetic adaptation to homosexuality, as a necessary part of human sexuality, is fact. Human beings do not aspire to animal polity, why ought they aspire to animal sexualness? There is no honest answer to that question, for even those who claim to admire the animal model do not really think human communities ought to be composed of rutting stags and bitches in heat. They merely propose the animal example because it appears to the simpleminded, people who see the stallion and the mare, the dog and the bitch, or cock and the hen and who think they have comprehended the last word about sex.

To be sure, for all the inevitability of human homosexuality in general, we cannot, we may never be able to say why one individual's homosexuality is more erotically express than is another's. That homoeroticism appears statistically distributed is not a reason, but indicates that the reasons are many and interrelated. Factors, perhaps some containing an aspect of the truth, have been proposed in the past, have enjoyed periods of fashionability, and faded into obscurity. And this may happen again from time to time.

A persistent difficulty is the confusion of homoerotic capacity, which from example of other cultures can be estimated as just short of universal, and homoerotic experience, which is widespread even in repressive societies, and homoerotic preference, which cannot be observed objectively. The difficulties of the concept of preference are immense. To some extent every consensual homoerotic act must be preferential else it would not be consented to.

In prison or in other extreme situations, one who consented to a homosexual act had always the alternatives of celibacy or solitary masturbation. Outside of prison, in ordinary society, the excuse that one had homosexual relations because heterosexual connections were unavailable seldom can be supported by the facts. A man, if he would prefer any partner of the opposite sex, could almost always find one; what woman could not find a male partner, if only she would set her standards low enough? And whatever can be meant by ascribing a sexual preference to the celibate?

In any event, "preference" is much abused in certain schools of gay apology, for it sometimes seems to mean what on wishes to do, but other times it seems to mean what one cannot help doing. Surely there is no preference where there is no real choice, so evidently only bisexuals have sexual preference and absolute homosexuals (like absolute heterosexuals) have no sexual preference. This is not an arcane point in the philosophical debate of free will, but is only the attempt to escape blame on the part of those who lack the gumption to challenge the presumption that homoeroticism is blameworthy.

While we hold rape to be a crime, as we do, we must believe that people are capable of regulating their own erotic behaviors. If people make choices at all, then what is called homoerotic preference is a matter of choice. Perhaps it is not a matter of one choice made in an instant, but it may be the sum of many small elections over time. Perhaps, some chose a path, not knowing quite where it led. And perhaps when they arrive at a city they may say in all truth: "I never chose to come here." But they chose the path.

What is the great objection to defending homoeroticism as a matter of choice? What liberty is worth having without the right to chose one's most intimate associates? If have the right to such a choice, then no one may inquire of us wherefore we choose as we do. If the right to the choice exists, then it really does not matter whether the choice is ever made.

If this is preaching to the converted, then why have we lately cede so much ground? Why is there guilty silence when the subject of gay promiscuity is raised? Promiscuity, after all, is a threat to no one; the danger comes of the distinctly nongay notion that the only real sexual acts involve the penetration of an orifice by a naked penis and ejaculation. In city upon city, behind padlocked doors, there are cobwebs and dust in now chilly orgy rooms—rooms once filled with warmth and camaraderie.

For every act now supposed to pose a theoretical or demonstrable risk, ten perfectly safe acts are condemned. The distinction between what is impractical in present circumstances and that which is ethically wrong is not so fine nor are dull wits so common but that much of the faltering in the advocacy of gay sexuality must be attributed to bad faith.

It is bad faith that wants the personal ads in a pull-out section, so a gay magazine can be sanitized with the snap of a staple. It is bad faith to appeal to the state to remove all sources of temptation. It bad faith to portray one's own good luck as virtue. But of course, bad faith is nothing new.

In most communities, to this day, the only advocates of the rights of gay youth, the only people involved with gay youth at all, are pedophiles. Everyone one else appears to be too frightened of a charge of pedophilia. It is bad faith to seek to adopt nongay children and to aspire to the respectable, heterosexual status of parent while having done little or nothing to provide for the protection, education, and guidance of gay children.

It is bad faith to deny the drag queen. It is bad faith for women to pretend there is no such thing as a promiscuous lesbian, or for that matter that every lesbian act is a blow against the patriarchy, but that male homosexuality is just what those nasty boys do. It is bad faith to be the sort of gay Republican who supports deregulation of the board room but who never speaks out for deregulation of the bedroom. It is bad faith that puts any issue or cause ahead of what is good for gay people. It is bad faith, year after year, to accept lip service and empty gestures in place of real political progress. It is bad faith to live a closeted existence on the grounds that you are sparing someone else's feeling—if it would kill someone to know that you are gay, then it is time for him or her to die.

Gay is good.

It bears repeating and it bears explaining, again and again, until we have more evidence of gay people acting as if they believed it.

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Millennia ago, when Polaris was not the north star, sages conducted their apprentices on tours of the celestial sphere, when hallowed crones embraced as they celebrated maids menarcheal fetes and shepherds lay with shepherds and sailor comforted sailor under the starry deep sky. The sage's bright triangle still dominates the summer sky: Deneb to Vega to Altair. At least the star's are there. Only the mind sees the triangle. In the scattered bucket of bright stars overhead, the human eye perceives cosmos: order.

Deep questions come easily under a deep sky: of what is and what is not; to ponder with a finger probing the heavens whether gods created man, or men, gods; would after all the stars shine the same were we not here to witness them; and do the stars look back. In proportions of the elements of which we are made, we are more the stuff of the stars than the stuff of the Earth. And we are gay.

A scientist stands in front of his phallic rocket and tells us that one day such a ship may carry human seed beyond the moon, away from the sun, to who-knows-what orbs in the circuits about who-know-which stars. Perhaps so. And if so, whithersoever goes humankind, there too go we.

What then is certain on starry summer nights, under the ageless fire of Deneb, Vega, and Altair? That when the master puts aside his astrolabe, the stars will shine in his disciple's eyes; that the goddess invaginates a young woman's dreams; that ewes and rams are of one sort and shepherds of another; that the stars are the guideposts on the wide, dark sea. Ever, still, and time yet to come, man must love man and woman must love woman.

And so far and so long as the eye that perceives order in the scattered stars is human, the cosmos is gay.

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