On the public policy level, we have seen a
remarkable change in the area of “gay rights”.
What used to be posed in terms of the right to be left alone in one’s
private life has migrated to a perception of sexual orientation as
characterizing a separate “people” (or as Chandler Burr noted in a book title,
“a separate creation”), who must be treated as equal, somewhat as what has
happened with race.
At the same time, at the personal level, many of the
same issues remain. I’ll be explaining
more in succeeding chapters how this developed for me once I had to assume
eldercare responsibility for my mother.
But we look around and see unprecedented concern about bullying among
our young people. Is this new or getting
worse, or are we no just no longer “too sinful to notice” (as a commentator in
Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty once noted)?
I want to note here my own sense of personal loss at
the tragic story of violinist Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide in
September 2010 after his roommate spied on him in an intimate encounter and
Rutgers University apparently didn’t do much about it. He might have been a tremendous musical
talent. His roommate situation was in
many ways very different from mine a half century before at William and
Mary. What he had said in private notes
has not been disclosed, and I won’t get into complicated speculation, other
than that he might have seen the world as too evil a place. I would add, the idea that “It gets better” (so promoted by
celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres) seems incomplete, because such a phrase
implies that some of the bullying is inevitable. That’s not good. Bullying happens because people believe that
they have to fend for themselves in “social combat” and that the larger legal
(and economic and political) “system” doesn’t work for them and therefore
doesn’t “apply”.
I also want to emphasize, in these days, that the
political correctness of “equality” blinds everybody to “the lives of real
people”, that in the past (during my coming of age), efforts to witch-hunt
gays, presumably to send an indirect message about the expectations of social
conformity to the power structure, really took place. Yes, at one time people were entrapped, and
bars were raided, as late as 1980 in Dallas.
(And, by the way, despite the old stereotypes about public sex – only
one person in my whole life ever approached me in such a setting, and that was
way back in 1972 at a hotel hosting a high level chess tournament.) The political environment during the AIDS
epidemic for a while threatened to bring all this back. The two-decade (almost) battle over the
military ban brought this to a head. All
these concepts (privacy, social and unit cohesion, due process, even equality)
came together in the barracks. It’s
taken the Boy Scouts of America a long time to catch up (even with the lifting
of DADT – and remember the Supreme Court’s allowance of them as a private
organization in 2000). Changing popular
opinion and the need for public support is finally turning them around. It’s also important to note that the BSA
issue shows that a collective sense of religious morality, created when
stricter denominations gain influence beyond their membership, can raise
questions as to how far religion can go and still be treated “preferentially”
by tax policy and even rules for public accommodations.
The whole concept of “equality” seems a bit of an
intellectual artifice. In nature, no two
organisms can be exactly “equal”, but they most “complement” one another for
all to survive. That explains how
biological communities “evolve”. And
perhaps physics explains reproduction.
Conscious life seems like a way for nature to oppose entropy; and
reproduction is the process to recover from the decay with aging that entropy
says must happen.
And depending on “immutability” has always seemed
unsatisfactory to me – partly because it isn’t completely true, and because it
leads to bad comparisons on other issues (like a tendency toward chemical
dependency or obesity, which is partly inherited, but which requires behavioral
control).
Remember, that for most of history, gay rights has
indeed been more about respecting the right to
“private choices” than about “equality”, and the appropriate question to
ask those who attempt to damage the lives of homosexual people (or people who
seem to exhibit homosexual inclinations and probable conduct), is “Why do you interfere with others? What’s in it for you?” Or, “Why does my own
personal life affect you so much?”
It’s simple, and yet it’s hard. Yes, parents often want an indefinite
lineage, and for those without other economic or expressive opportunities,
that’s one thing they may think they have a “right” to count on. A family can be “killed” just as a person can.
(That sort of thinking may help explain the draconian anti-gay laws under
consideration now in Uganda.) But there’s obviously more. People tend to believe they need to prevail
in social competition; and stomping on those “beneath” them, despite the obvious
moral contradictions that this entails, may be almost instinctive social
behavior. (That’s how one gay Midwestern
prosecutor explains it to me.) Once in
some sort of political or social control, and particularly when there are
external enemies or various demographic or environmental problems threatening
long term sustainability and stability, leadership (religious or not) seeks
rationalizations for its situation. One
such rationalization is that those who are in some way challenged “adaptively”
and dependent on the infrastructure above them should not oppose the “hands
that feed them” but should remain subservient or obedient, lest they put
everyone in jeopardy (particularly of enemies in a “class warfare” sense). Such individuals can point to the distraction
that those like me can pose to those who try to raise families, both by
economic competition but also by “kibitzing” and projecting personal value
systems (“upward affiliation”) which might prove tempting to others or
“contagious”, or which might actually make other people of lesser means feel
even less worthy in the grand scheme of things.
Such ideas seem to house their own internal moral contradictions, to be
sure. Particularly, they seem to project
a belief that sexual pleasure from sadomasochistic or “alternating current”
psychological mechanisms (where abasement or shame becomes a source of
pleasure) is naturally tempting to people as
a “path of least resistance” for those who have trouble adjusting. They
may have a stronger point when they argue that ordered freedom, as a whole,
depends on individuals in local families and communities all doing their part,
even at an intimate level, not always chosen.
Marriage in this view becomes more a result than a source of “moral
values”. This sort of thinking is most
vehement in more closed religious communities, which seek to make others comply
with their views to maintain a grip now only on power but also on
“meaning”.
It’s important to contemplate what “religious
morality” (especially Vatican) means by “no sexuality except in marriage”
(heterosexual, that is, and it refers to fantasy as much as acts). It obviously plays out differently for gay
people than straight. But the old-fashioned “simple rule” really was intended
to get people to save themselves for procreation and raising another generation
for the benefit of the family or tribe, not just for preventing unwanted
babies.
Likewise, the whole thrust of the “right to life”
and anti-abortion movement is much more than just an abstract respect for human
life. It has to do with getting people to become actively involved in
protecting the vulnerable. It
ultimately has to do with loving “people as people” (to quote my dad) and as
part of family, as a given. But it, in the area of opposition to stem
cell research and therapy, have overreached its own purposes.
Indeed, it has become striking to me how much my own
psychological makeup expressed a love of “abstract” virtue (and beauty) for its own sake – a belief (rather like that
from Oscar Wilde) that beauty is its own justification rather than the result
of an organic, earthy process involving people meeting their own real needs
with complementarity, extending to raising the next generation. I inherited this mindset from the
conservative culture that raised me, and curiously fed it into my values of
what I could find exciting in other people.
I tended to view others through strictly moral terms (as I thought I had
been viewed), without regard to circumstance or possible disability. A corollary is that I (still now) resent having the needs of others
forced on me as motives that should pre-empt what I have already come or even
“chosen” to feel. I didn’t feel “pleasure” in meeting the needs of someone
who could never become “perfect” – and at the time, feeling this way seemed
like my own prerogative. I don’t like to
admit it, but I can see even in myself how fundamentalism, and the need to see
others comply to a set of beliefs so that I can comply too, could grow even in
my own psyche. It’s scary. (You don’t want a value system where
something is right just because “everybody
does it”.) Like a fundamentalist, I needed the “freedom” to explore my
own belief system, claiming that it was harmless fantasy or a private
choice—yet the motives could eventually have serious public consequences. I can see how I could have felt had I grown
up and somehow “made it” under radical Islam or some other strict,
fundamentalist religious system.
People tend to make a great deal of the “narrowness”
of others in the ability of others to feel and sustain interest. Indeed, some of the notes at NIH explicitly
noted my indifference to “girls”, but indifference can become an issue in the
same-sex world, too. Sometimes, when
I’m at a disco and watching someone who looks “interesting”, someone who is
“not” interesting according to my own internal value system will try to divert
me. Everyone has a right to say “no”,
right? If you can get rejected, you can
certainly reject. (To allow anything
else would be to accept sexual harassment, maybe.) That certainly sounds like the normal idea
that comports with “personal responsibility”.
But the idea that people remain so narrow in their “choices” sounds like
one that can spread; “body fascism” could encourage real fascism again. So I can understand why some people make
openness to love in some way that involves some psychological complementarity
(the Rosenfels polarities) as well as “affiliation” (the “he can do better than
that” problem) and openness to risk and unpredictable responsibility (even
having children) an important religious and perhaps moral precept. But in the grand scheme if things, mere
biological difference in gender seems to mean less all the time.