On Oct 2, 2005, at 3:59 PM, Russell Chapman wrote:
Warren Ockrassa wrote:
Homosexuality was a word invented by Freud and, as such, did not even
exist as a quantifiable concept until the 1900s.
There are no gay penguins, and I'm pretty goddamned sure there are no
gay humans either. It's just a term used for convenience.
I don't presume to know much about this, and certainly not to
understand the nuances, but isn't the male who chooses male partners
to the exclusion of *any* female partners, different on some level?
Seems to me like homosexual men *are* gay humans. Why do you say there
are none?
I'm becoming, gradually, more convinced that the word "choose" is the
linchpin. I think it's possible for a person to gain proficiency, even
delight, in just about any pursuit, though of course having a "knack"
or predisposition certainly can help. (As an example, no one is
innately an English speaker. English is acquired, like virtually all
complex behavior, *after* birth; only the seeds of possibility — some
coding for some kind of language, irrespective of nationality — exist
beforehand.)
I'm thinking particularly of same-gender intercourse as practiced in
single-gender environments. It happens all the time, but I think it
would be a stretch to say the participants are gay. Introduce the other
gender and you'll find more biologically conventional behaviors taking
over.
And even where the other gender is available, as with ancient Greece,
same-sex intercourse might still be common. After all, there is zero
risk of pregnancy, which can be a good thing in many cases; and in
human societies — which for millennia have placed special emphasis on
mixed-gender relations — same-sex contact might be seen as a
permissible, casual form of pleasant interaction, not burdened by
concerns regarding adultery, marriage and so on.
Also, there are several species on this planet besides our own in which
same-gender sex play occurs very regularly. The participants are also
capable of mixed-gender relations and pursue them happily. That is,
there are no gay bonobos or bottlenosed porpoises, yet in both species
same-sex play is frequent.
You don't see the dolphins wearing rainbow jewelry, though, or bonobos
agonizing for hours over which ear to have pierced. Is this because
there's something so fundamentally different about humans that we're
more like birds — forced by biology to mate-bond for life, and
incapable of working outside a deeply-ingrained organic mechanism — or
are we instead thinking ourselves into sexual corners?
Sex, of course, is an organic thing, something deep in the flesh. It
really only gets complicated when consciousness jumps in and chooses
arousal points — for instance the American obsession with breasts that
does not exist in every society. That's clearly something inculcated
rather than innate.
I'm pretty strongly inclined to favor the opinion that gender
orientation is similarly imbued rather than hardwired. There are plenty
of gay people, I think, who would take grave offense at that, which
seems odd to me. Choice or not, it shouldn't matter to anyone else
who's doing what with whom as long as no one's getting hurt.
Alberto raised a good point too. I don't believe in polarization for
gender orientation; I don't see any solid evidence to suggest that it's
binary. A continuum is what it's regarded as by … well, by anyone with
a background in psychology, for instance. Since there's no either/or to
the concept, orientation becomes a matter of degree rather than a
simple and absolutely-defined choice.
And it really does seem to me that experience, practice and willingness
to be flexible can substantially alter the range of attraction options;
that is, if one chose to, one could eventually become fairly
comfortable with and skilled at relations outside one's dominant
orientation. To take an extreme example, consider normalization of
sexual abuse by victims who are repeatedly misused. If something so
outre can become almost acceptable in a person's mind, how much more
likely is it that conventional, mutually consensual and pleasant
interactions, even outside a person's "normal" orientation, are
possible?
I don't know of any gay men physically incapable of sexual relations
with women; but there are many who are clear on what they *prefer*.
That is not at all the same as being *born* a given way.
--
Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books
<http://books.nightwares.com/>
Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror"
<http://books.nightwares.com/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf>
<http://books.nightwares.com/ockrassa/Storms_on_a_Flat_Placid_Sea.pdf>
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