Gayness

My dad and I just watched Bill Maher, which as usual made me feel bad for paying so little attention to current history, aka politics, and brought up the question of what is important. Or my usual question, whether the humanities, particularly the paper on the Magic Mountain I'm working on, are worth pursuing, or relevant for the world's people (just as people keep slogging philosophy as high flown windbag stuff whereas I think that philosophy aims to be wholly applicable and its inquiries underly all "practical" activity on a personal and group level, even something like pouring your cereal in the morning, but that can be stretching it a little bit, it defines the terms under which we live, a complex task). About that, this article by Stanley Fish caught my attention in my New York Times email.. that I pretty much hardly read. It seems that all disciplines, such as economics, (the way we as personal or political entities survive is making money after all) are trumpeting their importance to the daily life of the people, because why study or glory in irrelevance, right? To be a contrarian? Kind of like how art has needed to prove itself through theory or reject proving itself, embracing aestheticism for its own sake and not caring if it's being called extraneous. I've got to put in that what I think is the lingo of postmodernism, namely that past forms are irrelevant in encompassing or communicating with today's world adopts both that of modernism and ultimately that of Enlightenment progress that is considered retardataire. Someone might correct me and say that it doesn't place a value judgment on progress, claiming all value judgments to be false (which would render the words all and false empty of meaning), but I would say that it is claiming itself to be the most useful, or in its opinion, the best language or "discourse" to describe a reality it sees as losing rigid borders. Despite trying to sever time, this idea calls now our "postmodern era" as opposed to maybe "The Gilded Age" and "The Enlightenment?" Should I reserve a chapter of a textbook for "The Postmodern Era?" That made history irrelevant and yet circumscribed itself in terms of time?

Anyway, my dad and I started arguing about homosexuality after the show. My dad, the liberal thinks that gayness is the result of a defective gene and calls my bisexual friends "confused." He blames the fact that a girl I know went gay in Mount Holyoke on her flakiness, the fact that she's in a women's college, and her parent's divorce on her "confusion" despite the fact that she's had two longterm relationships with women with whom she's been in love. I'm in a college with 70% girls, I'm flaky, I'm not exactly falling in love and going out with women for a long period of time. If she is completely straight, why does she have sex with women? Does she love them only intellectually? Or is the divorce to blame for her being attracted to women? I wonder how the defective gene accounts for someone being partially gay, the Kinsey scale, or maybe having a fleeting attraction to the same sex disturbs one's straightness totally and means we're confused? What if we act on it and have sex with the person, oy! The simple classification of attraction as subject to a defective gene ignores the complex emotional underpinnings that psychology burlesqued somewhat (hey, I might be attracted to a woman because I'm attracted to my mother so that doesn't mean I actually like women, right?), though it is often quoted that it was the first to give lip service to irrational, unconscious roots of choices, thoughts, and desires.


The idea behind the defective gene is that gayness is unnatural or out of accord with the "way things are." This has to do with natural law outside of human experience. Applying DNA to homosexuality puts it within the rules of science, which gathers empirical knowledge, or observations of the outside world, in order to register what it feels to be natural patterns that rule over the human, so to speak. I always think of the if a tree falls in the forest analogy, that natural law claims that the very fact that a tree on Earth exists and falls outside of a human's hearing range means that there is a setup or "environment" outside of human experience. It will fall regardless of a human's being able to hear it or not and from there, a scientist can observe whether it does this all the time and think in terms of the tree, a thing untouched by a human.
Scientists observe that overwhelmingly in animal species a male copulates with a female and usually produces an offspring or procreates. The notion of evolution ascribes notions of rational self-interest (survival) to the decision, behavior, and change over time of animals. They draw the conclusion that the primary motive for sexual activity in animals is the perpetuation of the species, which does not occur during sex acts with the same sex. Bonobos are cited as an exception where homosexual activity and oral sex happens presumably for pleasure and purposes related to societal structure. It would seem to people with a rudimentary knowledge of animal science that homosexual activity deviates from the rational self interest of species survival and procreation. Bonobos are one of the few examples of sex possibly for pleasure in nature so "recreation" or connection doesn't seem to hold up as a viable motive. Something that adds credibility to sex practices is the amount of time it's been practiced, i.e. "everyone has been fucking to procreate since day 1" (or in the case of Christians, after day 7). My mom, for example, thinks that there was less homosexuality in Russia because it was repressed. Professors of Queer History have, of course, making it their business to reveal the accounts repressed by hegemonic narratives (I'm not sure of the terminology). In effect, they are contended with the "unnaturalness" verdict or the lack of credibility by pointing out homosexuality as an "age-old" practice.

I used to roll my eyes at Queer History or theory classes (though mining desperately for gay subtext annoys me, you have to really suspend disbelief in some examples). I think that the idea of "incorporating it into 'normal' history" is fallacious because who the hell knows where to limit "normal" history? The textbooks I learned from in high school that taught me about political and social movements? That is one way to interpret and understand viable historical events that is often dubbed political or social history.

Anyway, of course there is the orthodoxy of the Bible as a finished text. In supporting Creation over evolution, Christians are claiming the truth of the text without proving why. There is often a humorous tendency to allegorize and interpret the 7 days as "god time," so it must be like seven thousand years. I might be called thick or even a fundamentalist were I to interpret the Bible so literally, though. I think disagreeing with the very concept of "evolution" is harebrained. Evolution, the processes of change and adaptation are, of course, observable historically and socially, Christians recognize that. Or rather in their belief of linear, apocalyptic history, they know that gradual change does happen. Whether or not they believe in rational, natural adaptation in animals beyond what is god-given is a different story. God created the animals, how many animals? Were there not new animals that surfaced relatively recently? What about the fossil evidence of what appear to be the ancestors of modern fish, for example? What is the explanation for the coelacanth or thylacine? Or the extinct animal?
God's imagination is boundless, of course. It's funny how the Old Testament anthropomorphizes God as speaking, for example, and then denies it in order to attest to his complexity. How much do Christians analyze the behavior of animals? What natural motives do they attribute it to?

My dad's idea of confusion inherent in being bisexual means that there is a strict polarity between gay and not gay and actual sex seems the determinant of your orientation. So at various levels of emotional attraction to another person, the minute they border on the sexual, for whatever reason, some outside factor has got you confused. But the very fact that you are even a little attracted to someone of the same sex means that you are not purely straight! How does one account for the deviation? I don't know what confusing thing in my life is powerful enough to convince me to be sexually attracted to someone I'm not supposed to like. Is it taboo? Sure there is something about having sex with various people I shouldn't want to have sex with like the older, ugly, obese, physically maimed or sick that turns me on not just because of the taboo. People have a somewhat crude, narrow definition of lust. It does not have to be directed at its root to a person, their body parts, or the sex act. Sexual feeling or being turned on can arise out of various emotional, even abstract places. Sometimes I find the reduction of everything to a sex act a turn off and an insult to the emotional experience of sensuality. You can lust for a place or country. Longing is also sensual or sexual. Longing also doesn't have to be wrapped up in typical sex organs. Particularly for the girl this isn't the case, I think. Platonic love is somewhat of a simplified, umbrella term for various kinds of sensuality in this time period that devotes so much attention to sex. Taboo, for example, is connected to lust and outside the gamut of having an object in mind. The emotional dimension of human sexuality encompasses much more than people.

It bothers me that there is such a lack of acceptance in families, still, for gay kids that come out. My mom once told me that she would be disappointed if I ended up gay. I think the scientific notion of procreation as a natural, rational interest in species is viable, though it does not negate other motives for sex acts. I admit I'm still attached to the idea of an opposite sex nuclear family with its simplified solutions for procreation. Also I think that in various American environments, gay families deal with a large amount of hardships and discrimination though this is incredibly trivial if understood as a reason not to start one. I have another prejudice that gay people stay single for long periods of time and it is not taken for granted in the gay community to end up in a stable, nuclear family with children as it is in the straight community partially due to the barriers to legal marriage and societal pressures. In the documentary I watched about Rosie O'Donnell's cruise for gay families, one girl says, "The hardest thing is to have to constantly defend your family." I have a last prejudice, which is mostly against adoption or opting not to have children, I think that particularly for women, raising children is not just a "biological clock" or hormonal thing, but an emotional requirement after a while. It is a choice that can round out and enrich their lives, though definitely a course of action easier to take with a father involved. It makes me sad when girls I know say they won't have children. Seems like after one learns how to take care of oneself and has done it for a while, one feels the need to extend the care outward and unselfishly care for someone else, the bond of unconditional love a mother has for her biological child is the easiest way to achieve that.