What is "being gay?"

Is it a behavior or a trait? A lifestyle or an identity? The world may never know!

Now that I’ve written up the broader aspects of my worldview with a couple of my recent posts, it’s time to get back to delving into more specific and potentially more thorny subjects. I have already written extensively about one of the major wedge issues that tends to come up in the Trad vs Secular conflict, that being abortion. Next up will be The Gay.

The Gay is more difficult to tangle with than abortion I believe. While people often feel strongly about abortion, you can take a hard stand as being fully pro-life and people sort of have to respect that. They may not like that, they may not agree with it, but they can often understand it even from a modern liberationist “let people enjoy things” mindset—you believe abortion is basically killing babies. So clearly that like, violates the NAP.

The Gay is more difficult to take such a direct stance on because it does have this feature. There is no oblivious, innocent party being acted upon with The Gay, at least not in the same sense as an abortion. Everyone involved consents and no one is making you participate. To the extent that people do oppose The Gay these days, it is usually by taking exception to the latter half of that statement—complaining that gay stuff is now being rubbed in our faces and taking over the public square, as with the recent controversy over the opening of the Olympics (thank goodness I never cared to watch those anyways).

Just let people enjoy things, bro.

This is all well and good and of course I agree that gay stuff has overreached and that it was inevitable that it would do so and all of that. But that’s surface level. Reflexive disgust reactions can only get us so far. True opposition to Gayness requires that we go deeper. It requires that we take this thing into the shop and have a look under the hood. We must take it apart and see what really makes it tick. This is how we can know that DEI, for instance, is ontologically Bad and Wrong—because we have examined its root premises about human nature and discovered that they are catastrophically false.

Doing this with The Gay is considerably more difficult because the concept is entirely reliant on self-reporting. If someone identifies as Black with a capital B, I can judge that claim based on their skin color. Likewise, with abortion, there is a very specific physical act involved. Being Gay eludes this level of specificity. You cannot merely look at me and tell whether or not I am gay (well, maybe you can sometimes… but definitely not all of the time). Likewise, there are gay men that have sex with women, and vice versa, men who have sex with men yet do not identify as gay. There are surely some men who identify as gay without having sex at all, probably on the younger side of things (think teenagers/young adults browsing the Internet and getting caught up in Tumblr culture).

Still, if we are going to confront this subject, we have to try. In order to have a clear view of how to handle any particular concept, one must first have a good understanding of what that concept actually is. I have already started by pointing out the concept’s abstract nature. In this way, I find that Gay actually holds some similarities to a religion—identification goes purely by self-reporting, involving a set of assumptions one holds about the way the world works, many of which are implicit and unspoken in the case of Being Gay. One says “I’m gay” in the same way one says “I’m a Christian.”

No one can look at your physical features or even your expressed behaviors and really call you into question on it, unless you perhaps go out of your way to engage in behaviors that are completely antithetical to the belief system you’ve expressed (but even then, perhaps not—again, many so-called Christians are fine with abortion and never go to church, and many gay men have sex with women). This is certainly a type of identity, but it is an identity of a very different type from others with which it is commonly grouped, such as race or sex.

This is where we can begin to question all those unspoken assumptions behind the concept of Gay. Clearly it is not a true descriptive trait in the same way that eye color or hair color is. We know that it definitely has something to do with a preference for men over women, but where does that preference come from? Why does it arise in certain people and not others? As a starting point for this, I went and asked ChatGPT in order to see what the mainstream normie-approved messaging might look like. I found its response to be rather surprising.

I typed in the prompt “Why do gay men prefer men over women?” and received this in response:

“Sexual orientation is a complex and multifaceted aspect of human identity. For gay men, their preference for men over women is rooted in a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. Here are a few considerations:

1. Biological Factors: Research suggests that genetic, hormonal, and neurodevelopmental factors can influence sexual orientation. These biological influences can make individuals more attracted to certain genders.

2. Psychological Factors: Personal experiences, individual differences, and emotional connections also play a role in determining attraction. For gay men, emotional and romantic attraction is directed toward other men.

3. Social and Cultural Factors: Cultural context and societal norms can shape how people understand and express their sexuality, but the core of sexual orientation is generally believed to be inherent rather than a choice.

It's important to understand that sexual orientation is about personal identity and attraction, which can't be easily reduced to a single cause. It’s a deeply ingrained aspect of who people are.”

Um hello, based department? I figured I would basically get a response assuring me that no, ackchyually sweatie, being gay IS a purely physical trait, immutable, unchanging, assigned at birth (just like gender!). Maybe the AI is learning, or maybe the issue simply hasn’t attracted the right type of controversy to yet warrant an algorithm tweak. Anyways, it would seem that even the literal programmed NPC agrees that being gay is not a physical trait and is not immutable in the same way as height or shoe size.

It does know that it is supposed to tell you that “sexual orientation is inherent rather than a choice,” but even that is qualified with “believed to be.” The insertion of this line into an otherwise reasonable answer reveals the incoherency of the normie understanding of this topic. Everything that has happened with “gay rights” has been predicated on the idea that being gay is inherent just like race and sex. The idea is that The Gays must not be judged for their behavior because it is hard-coded into them and society is powerless to change it.

If this were really the case, then the reason that gay men prefer men must be biological factors only. Gayness would be determined purely by genetics and nothing else—change the person’s life experiences in whatever way you want, they’ll still come out wanting to screw dudes in the butt. But that’s not what ChatGPT says. It tells us that sexual orientation can be influenced by psychological and even social and cultural factors. I am actually shocked that it is allowed to say this.

Obviously, the clear implication here is that if social and cultural inputs are changed, you could potentially get a different sexual orientation out of the same individual (the same biological input). This shatters the overly simplistic popular understanding of how Gay works. Sure, GPT tries to tell us that it’s inherent, but it also tells us that it clearly isn’t. Now, the likely rebuttal here will be that even if different psychological/social/cultural factors could change how a person’s sexuality develops during their formative years, once they’ve matured it is largely stuck that way.

And I think that view probably has a large degree of truth to it. I must stop here to point out that ex-gay people do exist. I read that post some years ago and it left quite an impression on me, challenging many of the naïve pre-conceived notions implanted into me by regime narratives. It depicts the influence of these non-biological factors—psychological, social, cultural—far more effectively than I can, because the author lived it and can describe the real experience in graphic detail. It seems to me that the existence of this person, and others like him, poses a serious inconvenience to the narrative of sexuality (including gay sexual orientation in particular) as “inherent” or otherwise immutable.

Let’s put that aside though. I find it plausible enough that: Most gay adult males, having reached maturity with gayness fully internalized as normal in their psyche, cannot have this predilection merely “switched off” at will, or conveniently purged out of their mind through therapeutic techniques. Previously I compared Gay to religion. Here I will compare it to what I feel is perhaps its best analogue—addiction, to substances in particular, though I suppose addiction of a more general sort would do.

When we consider alcoholism, we can immediately identify that alcoholism exists at the exact same intersection of factors that ChatGPT gave us to describe why gay men are Gay:

1. Biological Factors: Obviously, alcoholism runs in families.

2. Psychological Factors: The presence of alcohol in one’s developmental environment, personal experiences with alcohol during formative years, etc., also very obviously have a role to play in determining behavior as an adult.

3. Social and Cultural Factors: Finally, the way that alcohol is treated in broader social norms may heavily influence how someone approaches it.

I can speak to #3 with a particular degree of confidence borne of personal experience. I’ve had plenty of drinks in my day, but I’ve consumed marijuana only very sparingly a long time ago, and never even tried any other illegal drugs. This is not for lack of access, particularly with regards to marijuana. I absolutely have had opportunities to consume a lot of marijuana if I wanted to, and also to try “harder” drugs.

I can say with a large degree of certainty that the illegality of these things caused me to shy away from them. As an older and slightly less stupid person now, I wouldn’t do heroin even if it were legal. But as a young and very stupid person, if I could’ve bought heroin at the gas station just as easily as beer, I very well may have ended up addicted to it (or at least ended up using a good deal of it, as I have alcohol).

This lens shows us that alcoholism and other substance use disorders may have an inherent component to them, but they are far from inherent when considered in totality. Some people might never be alcoholics regardless of their life experiences and social circumstances, others might have a near-certainty of developing a problem with it so long as they have any possible way to get their hands on it. This cannot be predicted very accurately at all, however. I found in cursory research that being the child of an alcoholic predicts that one is about four times more likely to become an alcoholic themselves, compared to someone with non-alcoholic parentage. But “four times more likely” is nowhere near one hundred percent!

I would imagine that it is much the same with Gay. There might be a few people who will always be Gay, or at least have gay propensities, pretty much regardless of other factors. Yet we cannot determine who those people are with any degree of accuracy nor can we know what their true percentage in the population is. The concept is simply too vulnerable to those pesky psychological and socio-cultural factors. This can be easily deduced by comparing rates of Gay between the generations. Here’s one table that I found on this:

These figures make it impossible to deny that socio-cultural factors have an extreme influence on rates of Gayness. I haven’t seen anyone even attempt to explain how this happens if Gay is purely or even just mostly a biological/genetic phenomenon. The typical normie narrative that “well more people feel comfortable coming out of the closet now” would predict big upsurges in Gayness among older people, as the latent Gays among their generations finally feel free to let their freak flag fly. We would thus expect rates of LGBT among different generations to converge towards each other as “Gay Pride” has exploded, but the reality appears to be exactly the opposite.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we would probably observe something similar if the phenomenon of “Gay Pride” were to be reproduced with alcohol or other drugs. If a movement of “Alcoholic Pride” developed, whose activists were so utterly devoted to the cause that it took on a quasi-spiritual quality, and which was able to secure serious legal concessions such as changes to public intoxication laws, do we imagine that this would result in more people being alcoholics, or fewer? Indeed, something like this has happened with marijuana and other substances, although changes in those norms have not taken on the same religious qualities as Gay Pride (yet).

At this point someone is likely to complain that Being Gay isn’t like being an alcoholic because being an alcoholic is bad and being gay isn’t. Let’s briefly evaluate that claim. An easy thought experiment to run in order to determine something’s goodness/badness is to ask the following: Would I want my child to have this? No one would want their child to have alcoholism, if they had any say in the matter. If they run into any situations as parents where they can clearly steer their child away from becoming an alcoholic, they will obviously do so, or so one would hope.

I think that it is the same with Gay. If I ask myself, would I rather my child be an alcoholic or a committed homosexual, I don’t have an easy answer. Alcoholism is terrible, of course. But Gay—committed homosexuality—almost completely rules out any chance at a normal family with natural grandchildren. That’s not something to take lightly! An alcoholic is almost certain to hit a few bumps on this path but it is not impossible for them to walk it. Gay is another story.

As I pointed out in this article, this is precisely why we see many Gays attempting to force themselves into the tradlife in spite of their commitment to homosexuality. The wealth and wonders of the modern world afford them certain opportunities to play-act at it, when in the past (even the very recent past) to do even that much would’ve been utterly impossible. Up until two seconds ago, Being Gay effectively meant being sterile. As you can probably guess, my position is that that is still what it means today, but we’ll save that for another post.

Even if we accept the premise of the modern “gay family,” it remains true that you will certainly never have a normal family. Yes, that is a bad thing. When we are talking about something as fundamental to human society as the family, with all the implications that entails for the well-being of children and such, normal is good. Children deserve normal. As a Gay, it will be either impossible or at least very difficult to deliver that to them.

Of course, I can bring up a lot of other things in life made more complicated by having a case of the Gay. But this one is enough by itself. This is why I wrote an article outlining the ultimate importance of family as a life goal before I wrote this one; because this makes clear that if you are Gay, something has gone wrong. You are now handicapped. Your path to the ideal in life is now much more perilous as a result of your condition. Even if we posit that you could hypothetically end up at the ideal anyways, the path you take to get there is so different that it may as well be another route entirely, one that is much more treacherous to navigate.

This makes it clear that obstinate homosexuality is in fact a mental illness, a disorder, or something along those lines. Again, this parallels perfectly with alcoholism. People don’t often refer to alcoholism as a mental illness per se, I see the term “disease” applied to it more often than any other. The point is always understood, however, that it is a bad thing to have. It’s a problem. It makes your life harder and it’s not something you want to have.

When it comes to Gay, there has been a marked shift in perception away from this understanding and towards a false perception that Gay is Normal. If you were to say what I have just said, you will receive extreme pushback even from many people who might otherwise consider themselves conservative, right-wing, or what have you—typically people who are secular/lolbertarian (or maybe even “vitalist”), but not always.

Yet the truth of the statement should be, in a sane world, self-evident. We all know that sexual organs are not meant to work that way. When you insist on using them that way anyways, your behavior is disordered in the most literal sense. Your actions with those parts have become completely disconnected from their intended purpose. The ramifications that this has for your life cycle as a human being are too vast and innumerable to list here.

The only possible worldview by which one might claim that intractable homosexuality is therefore not disordered would be one in which sex is completely disconnected from reproduction; a worldview in which making the penis feel good is the primary purpose of sexual intercourse, with reproduction relegated to the status of an optional afterthought. We’ve tried to go in that direction as a society and look at the results. If you’re reading this article, you probably agree with me that they haven’t been pretty.

Even the gays themselves don’t really believe in this worldview; as I pointed out previously, why else do so many of them end up wanting to have “children” after all? They eventually come to realize that by eating their cake they can no longer have it, so they make efforts to try and reach for the next best thing. This article has gotten long enough now so I’ll close with my conclusion on a preferred classification for Gay. I have landed upon the word pathology. Here are a couple common definitions of pathology from the Merriam-Webster website:

1.      “the structural and functional deviations from the normal that constitute disease or characterize a particular disease”

2.      “deviation giving rise to social ills”

These two definitions convey the information that intransigent homosexuality is a social disease. Again, note the parallels to alcoholism. It has some qualities of a behavior, a trait, and a lifestyle, but it is not quite any one of them alone. I hesitate to award it the label of “identity” because, if we are to treat sexual preference as an identity, then it is clearly an identity in the same sense that religious belief is. This would imply that it should be treated the same way that other religious beliefs are, and I don’t think the gays themselves would like that very much.

The term “pathology” also makes very clear that this is a negative quality in society. It is something that you want less of, not more of. It is not to be celebrated or applauded; at best, merely tolerated. For the last time, alcohol makes for a solid comparison. Alcohol is out there, it is consumed regularly, and it is not even illegal. But we all of us understand that it is a vice to be held in check, that it is dangerous and that it can destroy lives if not handled with appropriate caution. We certainly don’t expose children to it or encourage them to consume it.

I think the loss of this understanding regarding homosexuality is the root issue with how it is talked about today. Homosexuality is not normal, it is not the same as normal sexual function, and it is not a desirable or even a neutral trait to have in life. This is both why things related to it have gone so far off the rails and also why it feels so impossible to have any serious discussions about it, because of the widespread implicit belief that this phenomenon is not what it actually is. The first step in any proper treatment of the topic is therefore to restore the understanding of it as a social disease, as a pathology.