When Obergefell came down, there was this enforced sense of "the end of history" having now wrapped its arms around gay marriage too. That anyone still clinging to the narrative of male/female marriage primacy was soon going extinct.
But I think the further we get from Obergefell, the less likely this seems. While the broader culture may accept these new gay norms, there will always be a healthier subculture which is willing to say "no, despite your feelings, or whatever the cause, this is not the normal way to live your life."
Yes, I think it is possible that the peak of "gay acceptance" is already behind us, just as it seems possible that we experienced "peak woke" during 2020 with the phenomenon unlikely to reach such heights again. The MSM have already noted a decline in support for LGBT among young people, which is consistent with increasing political polarization among younger demographics. Young woke people are *really* woke, but likewise, young right-wingers are *really* based. The brief over-arching consensus on something like "gay marriage" may have already broken down among these cohorts.
This gives all the more reason for us to seriously question where this emerging practice of "gay families," in which gay men have "children" via adoption or surrogacy, is really going. How are these "families" going to handle it if people decide that this was actually a bad idea after all? It seems to me that they can't allow themselves to even ask that question once the deed is done, because to admit that it might've been a bad idea would be to admit to a monstrous crime, similar to the way in which trans activists cannot afford to admit that transing the kids might have been wrong. That means it's very important to consider the issue deeply and make sure you get it right before taking the plunge, but it seems like no one is really interested in doing that, which is very worrying.
The only "crime" would be in having denied maternal love to the child, as argued by Peachy Keenan. Of course some (male) gay couples might have involved moms grandmoms and aunts to try to diminish this and some might even have involved the biological mother. If not they would have to try and find the mother and see if she wanted a relationship with the child.
I find it remarkable that you're willing to brush that aside so casually. Any intentional harm done to children is generally seen as inexcusable, with good reason. Putting quotation marks around it and acting dismissive of it is not a sufficient justification for doing it.
Far from brushing it aside I have actually written about it and reproduced the arguments about it for new audiences, while asking questions about it that I thought were not being considered. One thing I think the critics of the gay men using surrogacy don't realize is that I don't think many of them have ever thought being motherless is harmful to the child. I think most of them think they can in some way transcend gender and be mothers who happen to be male. So I think the moral test is whether they alter their actions (e.g. by having a child in some way where the mother is involved) once someone expands their imagination by getting them to think about the issue. I genuinely don't think they have thought that their child is going to have or feel some lack.
Some adoptees today, without any Gay in the family, regard their being adopted as a “monstrous crime”, especially if interracial. Does it help anyone’s lives in that situation to imagine a fantasy alternative reality of their existence?
At least with adoptees you could pretend (against evidence, usually) that they were snatched from the birth parents unjustly. In the case of surrogacy, the child would literally not exist if not for the one biological Gay parent.
>Some adoptees today, without any Gay in the family, regard their being adopted as a “monstrous crime”, especially if interracial. Does it help anyone’s lives in that situation to imagine a fantasy alternative reality of their existence?<
It doesn't do anyone any good to dwell on it after the fact, but it definitely means there is a moral imperative to avoid that outcome whenever possible.
>At least with adoptees you could pretend (against evidence, usually) that they were snatched from the birth parents unjustly. In the case of surrogacy, the child would literally not exist if not for the one biological Gay parent.<
It should be trivially obvious that it is not acceptable to bring life forth and then tell the child to accept mistreatment by their parents (for instance, being given away by their mother to strangers in exchange for money) because they must be grateful to the parents that they exist at all.
This healthier subculture seems like a contradiction to me. As long as people are using their genitals only for fun and not making babies, it does not really matter with what gender of partner they do. So either they have to criticize childless heteros the same as gays, or not criticize either. In both cases no point to single out gays.
well okay, that is at least consistent / principled
not a good way to win elections tho :)
btw there is a fantastic tug of war - liberals try to convert the kids of the conservatives at college, often succeeding, hence not a good way to win eleections
I wonder when will conservatives notice it and make their own colleges. currently they are trying to take existing ones over which is not going to go well. would make more sense to found new ones.
I understand the reasons that you settle on the term "pathology," and ultimately definitions are more important than terms, but for my taste, it's too medically flavored, though I do acknowledge other uses. On my own part, having encountered many and known several homosexuals by this point, it's clear to me that it's just a sexual deviation, like any other. But that term has acquired connotations that people mobilize themselves against, just like other plausible candidates. Paraphilia (a "fetish")? Too dismissive and diagnostic. "Hangup" or "kink?" Simultaneously too denigrating and overly accepting. Perversion (a faculty turned against its own end)? Too condemnatory.
The things that ChatGPT recited to you about the causes of homosexuality apply equally to phenomena like foot fetishes, the various flavors of bondage / domination / sadism / masochism / humiliation / submission / ick, some forms of transsexualism, pedophilia, etc. For any such deviation, there are different degrees of deviance. Some people merely occasionally engage in deviant fantasizing, others are obsessed with it. Some are only interested in partial and occasional realization of their deviant proclivities, others are devoted exclusively to them. Some people have experienced deviant sexual interests since before puberty; others acquired them only afterwards, typically after having been exposed to pornography featuring the deviation, or having engaged in it directly.
Some of these deviations are intrinsically and solely harmful and must be proscribed: think of pedophilia and sexualized cannibalism. This is much less obvious with other deviations: think of a guy with a mild, secret interest in feet, or a woman who sometimes likes having her hair pulled, etc. Should these be pursued and punished? Likely not. Should they be publicly celebrated and normalized, so that someone who builds his public persona around his latex fetish is considered not to be a creepy degenerate? No doubt there are "baby play" enthusiasts who would love to come out of the proverbial closet without being judged.
This is why ideological homosexuals had to imagine "sexual preference" as some kind of natural category. It's much more dignified to be an oppressed minority than to be a creepy degenerate.
I agree that while the basic behavior of male-on-male sex is just a form of sexual deviancy, the phenomenon I refer to as Gay has acquired an aspect of political ideology to it. Most notably, Gay ideology is borne out of modern notions regarding "love" and romance. Remember the popular phrase "love is love." Modern gays feel entitled to "marry" because, in their worldview, marriage and sex are about "love," not about children, family, social stability, or anything else like that. The ideology treats marriage as a vessel for one's ego rather than a proper social institution with actual rules and norms aimed towards a specific pro-social outcome.
I don't oppose the use of the concept addiction to try to understand homosexuality.
I'm just not sure how that differentiates it from heterosexual lust either.
When I was a preteen and my parents explained reproduction to me, including sex and sexual attraction, I asked my mom "So is it sort of like you go crazy, temporarily?" I stand by my question.
It can apply perfectly well to heterosexual lust--this is why behaviors which involve out-of-control heterosexual lust, such as pornography addiction or frequenting of prostitutes, are so heavily stigmatized. The difference is that heterosexual lust has a legitimate purpose besides simply making the penis feel good. Homosexuality does not.
“Born this way” was the logic before oberfegell, but once being gay was high status lots of people wanted to be it. Straight white people can’t pretend to be black, but they could adopt any of these new weird letters they were throwing into the end of LGB etc. so now it’s a confused mix of “born this way” and a choice.
I think the logic of the “born this way” movement was that if something is super ingrained, as it must be for at least some gays, then massive social pressure has huge costs with little upside, at least for those people.
Of course I don’t think legal gay marriage and creating another civil rights category was the answer to that, but I can get the logic. Our civic religion since the 1960s tells us that’s what we’re suppose to do in these cases.
Anyway, I think the underlying driver of The Gay is that straights just act more gay these days. I don’t mean that they are taking it up the butt, but they are delaying and foregoing marriage and children and engaging in sexual relationships that if not as extreme as gays certainly mimic them on a smaller scale. The women of Sex in the City always have gay friends they want advice from.
For men I think The Gay might have peaked. For women I don’t know they are being pulled in two directions. One direction is that they are single and childless which makes them more friendly to The Gay, but on the other this trans stuff is utterly insane and affects women more then men.
You missed the single biggest cause of gayness: being sodomized as a boy by an adult gay man. The majority of gay men were sodomized as boys, a horrific criminal act.
Gayness and homo-pedophilia are to a very large degree the same thing. Homo-pedophilia is how gayness reproduces itself, causing immense suffering.
I would say that homosexuals have a right to live their lives in peace. But they have no 'right' to try to bully the rest of humanity into falling into line with the bogus notion that there is no such thing as normal sexuality. If tv viewers find (as in almost all UK and European murder mystery tv dramas) that every episode must tick the 'gay couple included' script tick-box, they are entitled to feel irritated by this. If their town is annually invaded by a flag waving 'Pride' jamboree, they are entitled to feel irritated by that too. And if all this is something they dislike, it does not mean they have a 'phobia' about it. I wrote about this in greater length in this TakiMag piece 'Straight Talking': https://www.takimag.com/article/straight-talk/
There's a considerable drop in testosterone for this current generation of young men and boys. Alex Jones was kinda right about the freaking frogs being gay. But there's also more social stigma against boys specially white so a lot of them adopt deviant behaviour to be back in the woke totem pole as " queer". We know non binary is the new straight for women who hang around the alt scene and yound incels tend to troon out and become prison gay as well
There are also studies showing that the water the frogs are in is full of estrogen and para-estrogens. I think from both birth control pills and plastics.
Yes. The idea is that amphibians are the canary in the coalmine for estrogen mimic pollution, because they stew in the water 24/7 instead of just drinking some of it. Whatever estrogen mimics in water does to animals, it will hit them harder and first.
This was good, but I was hoping for more on gay as identity vs behavior. There's something weird about the way gay is codified as an emblem of identity. Hardly any other behavior is like this. I think cracking this would help figure out how to eventually get gay back into the closet, at least partially. If gay doesn't stop being an identity and go back to being a behavior that is nothing to brag about or be "proud" of, I think eventually there will be a cultural backlash that will include a lot of street violence. After that, it will definitely be back in the closet and there will probably be a era of renewed persecution.
Originally the post was going to go more in that direction but I have a nasty habit of writing far too much once I get started, so now it'll probably be a separate post at a later date. This is why I mentioned elsewhere into the comments looking into the fact that many gay men do have sex with women, because it blows up the narrative that "gay is not a choice" and clarifies that it does indeed belong more in the category of behavior than identity.
Great article. I had the same ideas on categorizing what gayness truly is, but I could never put it into anything concrete. I settled on calling it something halfway between a fetish and a belief lol, and that being gay is "giving up on girls". That being that those that are gay gave up on going after girls, prob lack of confidence or opportunity, and settled on the next best thing.
Again, good article, and it's nice to know I'm not just crazy
I don't think that is the case for all gay men not by a long shot. There are definitely some gay guys out there who could pull women if they wanted to. But this is probably a factor for some of them sure. I think it's also a big factor in a lot of guys who terminally online incels going trans.
"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."
Does this mean you also oppose the use of condoms among straight couples? Condoms are also clearly an invention that decouple sex from the reason that sex evolved.
Do you likewise oppose post-menopausal women having sex? What about sex during pregnancy? Or even just sex from women who have been told the devastating news that they are infertile? Is any act of sex that cannot lead to conception bad?
If that is the only type of sex you engage in, such that your sexual relationship is carried out with zero intention to procreate at any point, then yes. I think that's bad and you shouldn't do it. Nature obviously didn't design us so that every sexual encounter produces a child, but sexual relationships should be generally aimed at children first with hedonistic pleasure as a secondary side benefit.
I believe you completely skip over one very, very important aspect of sex - bonding. I am past my child bearing years, (five children), but let me assure you, my husband and I still have a robust and healthy sex life which at our age is part of the glue that keeps us affectionate and adoring towards each other. Do not dismiss that in the rigid paradigm of
I think you're somewhat presenting a false dichotomy here - that sex can only be for procreation or pure hedonism.
Sex can (and should!) be an expression of love. Love feels to me like a motivation for sex that is less nihilistic than pure hedonism, but more inclusive than making it solely a baby-making procedure.
Hmm. I think "making babies is more important than hedonism" is a very different proposition to "making babies is more important than love." Indeed, I would argue that love ought to be a *prerequisite* for babies, that it is a very bad idea for adults who do not love each other to have kids together. I do think it changes the argument in a big way.
I agree, but the point remains that you fall in love so that you can have babies and a family. That's the point of the phenomenon. The point is not to make the penis feel good. You can do that with your hand.
In this sense making babies is more important than love, because the primary purpose of the latter is to enable and support the former. It's the same way in which my body as a whole is more important than just my hands or my feet.
As someone (a gay man) who had a baby with someone (a straight woman) just because we both wanted to have a baby, I could tell you that I suspect one often has a certain kind of love for anyone who is a parent of your child. Even if originally it was somewhat "transactional" or "opportunistic."
In theory, you could use brith control in a way that didn't reduce your fertility. Or at least didn't reduce it to a point that was destructive. Rising child survival rates basically imply that some kind of fertility control would be necessary, but it's gone too far. We aren't talking about couples with three or four kids deciding enough is enough. We are talking about terminally childless or near childless people engaging in what is essentially masterbation throughout their fertility window.
Gay men, lesbians, and straight people perform many of the came sexual acts: fellatio, cunnilingus, masturbation of the partner. Heterosexuals even have anal sex in some cases. A certain percentage of gay men (I once saw a figure of 25% do not like or have anal sex); and of course many gay men only have anal sex as wither a "top" or a "bottom" but not both.
I’ve heard some elder gays also lamenting the loss of the “Gay subculture” and even as a straight, rightward-bound man, I feel that loss too. Even within my memory at 33, I remember gay culture being more of a counterculture, with sexual deviancy, risk of AIDS, and lack of mainstream acceptance being part of its DNA. Gay wasn’t for everyone, it was insular, and it came with a sort of understanding that you were never going to have that trad, kids and a picket fence kind of lifestyle. Some gays (I’m thinking of Armond White, Glenn Greenwald and Katie Herzog but I’m sure there are many more) have commented on this, and even as an outsider I have to agree. There ought to be a traditional, wholesome, family-oriented “norm,” which can then be rebelled against or deserted by the weirdos and deviants if they wish. I do think gay culture has had some valuable contributions to American culture, but as Gay is aggressively pushed as the norm, it’s lost its mystique.
As you might imagine, I find it hard to say anything positive about "gay culture," but I will definitely agree that it would be much more tolerable as a separate counter-culture instead of as a domineering ideology seeking to usurp what is considered normal in the first place. If you want to be a degenerate but you're doing it away from me where my children never have to interact with it, maybe I can live with that. If you want to make it the new mainstream cultural standard, well, now I have little choice but to push back.
I don't know how many gay men there are like me; I suspect it's more than we know, but still a minority. At 50 years old, I've changed my mind almost completely on almost everything, and a big one is homosexuality. I now strongly suspect I'm gay because of child abuse, and I suspect deranged home life is behind most, but not all, gayness in men.
Personally, I can't see how it's possible for any person to change their subjectively experienced erotic desires. Put another way, I am single and celibate by choice after a youth of typical destructive gay promiscuity. I have decided to be single and celibate, but my subjective attraction to men remains. I suspect this is the case for most ex-gays, too, but I cannot know.
Does this make me "still gay?" Does it make me "ex gay?" Something else? I don't know.
At the point in my life where I can see the end---I'm closer to death than birth---I now know what I won't have, and it is a heavy loss. The lack of family and children is a loss. The way I, along with so many young libertine men toss it off as "well, I didn't want that anyway," was just youthful sour grapes.
Thank you for writing on this. I wanted you to know that there are some of us who agree, even though our culture works to silence us (both straights and gays) and call us mad or evil.
"Gay New York and Queer London are history books about queer men of the early twentieth century. Both books extensively document a peculiar pattern. Working-class communities distinguished a group of men known as “fairies,” “flamers,” “queens,” and several other names. Fairies had effeminate mannerisms and styles of speech, dressed stylishly,1 wore makeup, often used women’s names, and of course were exclusively attracted to men. Any observer can identify this subculture as gay men.
But “normal” men had sex with fairies. While it is impossible to know exactly how many normal men had sex with fairies, the historical evidence is unambiguous that it was quite common. And working-class men saw sex with fairies no differently than sex with female prostitutes. As long as the man took the male part (receiving oral sex and anally penetrating the fairy), he was considered entirely ordinary, masculine, and not “gay.” "
This is the Roman Model of Sexuality. If you are penetrating, you are manly and masculine and not gay and all that, does not matter whether you penetrate women or men.
So in your view if someone was going to be childless anyway, being gay would be fine. Or if they divorced after their children were adults, having the second spouse be the same sex would be fine (a not unknown pattern).
I wouldn't say it's fine, but it's definitely better than trying to legitimize the concept of a "gay family" in which children are raised by "two dads."
Assuming they're married and all the rest of it, then no, in the sense that it does not involve being raised by "two dads." You could say it's "gay" in the sense that both the parents identify as gay, I suppose. Personally I would contend that the label "gay" is insufficient to describe this arrangement, as you would basically never imagine this when someone says "I'm gay," you'd have to qualify it somehow or explain it to them. It's close enough to non-existent that as of now there is no concise term for it AFAIK. If you say you're "gay parents" people will assume this means two men or two women using adoption/surrogacy.
Yes and I expect to write another post at some point taking that angle further. I looked around for some discussions along the lines of "can gay men have sex with women/do gay men have sex with women" and, as I expected, found that many answers and posts were quite candid in revealing that yes, many gay men have sex with women at some point. Posters stating that they categorically never even tried to have heterosexual relations were in the minority. This obviously throws a wrench into the narrative that "gay is not a choice," but these were things being said in a very apolitical context. I imagine the stories would change quickly if a political frame were to be activated.
I'm gay (or at my age post-gay) and I've had crushes on women and even sexual activity with one (as it so happens someone who was a lesbian). If a gay person finds themselves having romantic feelings or falling in love with someone of the opposite sex, there is absolutely no social barrier or cost to exploring that, exactly the opposite of the case if a heterosexual gets a crush on a person of the same sex. So that many gay men once had sex with a woman is unsurprising. I have a gay friend from DC who had repeated sex with a woman in Pennsylvania just to have a child, which they co-parent. He moved to Pennsylvania and took his boyfriend with him. All 3 adults plus the child all live in the same section of town.
Right, what the comparisons of homosexuality to a foot or latex fetish are missing is the enormous body of evidence showing that most gay men have a feminized phenotype and that most gay women have a masculinized phenotype. The scope of the behavioral difference is broader than bedroom activities.
Even in societies where there isn’t such a well-developed “religious ecstasy” of the cringe “civil rights” movements - I’m thinking of Thai ladyboys or Indian crossdressing beggars - gay people form a kind of semi-separate social caste; it takes more repression than a liberal society can mobilize to turn them into family men.
I don’t even know if it is most but it is certainly disproportionately many. In college I had a crush on a brilliant (married, heterosexual) professor who was affiliated with the neoconservative movement. He made an offhand remark to me about how so many gay men were short. I was 18 or 19 and had never thought about this. But I do think if you did a”bell curve” of body types for hay men and straight men you would find the gay graph to not be a bell curve, but to include many men just a little shorter than average and another clump of tall (but skinny or not athletic) men. As well ad different distributions in body fat (including facial fat), eye size, and many other physical differences from straight me.
When Obergefell came down, there was this enforced sense of "the end of history" having now wrapped its arms around gay marriage too. That anyone still clinging to the narrative of male/female marriage primacy was soon going extinct.
But I think the further we get from Obergefell, the less likely this seems. While the broader culture may accept these new gay norms, there will always be a healthier subculture which is willing to say "no, despite your feelings, or whatever the cause, this is not the normal way to live your life."
Yes, I think it is possible that the peak of "gay acceptance" is already behind us, just as it seems possible that we experienced "peak woke" during 2020 with the phenomenon unlikely to reach such heights again. The MSM have already noted a decline in support for LGBT among young people, which is consistent with increasing political polarization among younger demographics. Young woke people are *really* woke, but likewise, young right-wingers are *really* based. The brief over-arching consensus on something like "gay marriage" may have already broken down among these cohorts.
This gives all the more reason for us to seriously question where this emerging practice of "gay families," in which gay men have "children" via adoption or surrogacy, is really going. How are these "families" going to handle it if people decide that this was actually a bad idea after all? It seems to me that they can't allow themselves to even ask that question once the deed is done, because to admit that it might've been a bad idea would be to admit to a monstrous crime, similar to the way in which trans activists cannot afford to admit that transing the kids might have been wrong. That means it's very important to consider the issue deeply and make sure you get it right before taking the plunge, but it seems like no one is really interested in doing that, which is very worrying.
Agreed, too wrapped up in the melodrama of rights and oppression, but we'll be paying the toll for years.
The only "crime" would be in having denied maternal love to the child, as argued by Peachy Keenan. Of course some (male) gay couples might have involved moms grandmoms and aunts to try to diminish this and some might even have involved the biological mother. If not they would have to try and find the mother and see if she wanted a relationship with the child.
I find it remarkable that you're willing to brush that aside so casually. Any intentional harm done to children is generally seen as inexcusable, with good reason. Putting quotation marks around it and acting dismissive of it is not a sufficient justification for doing it.
Far from brushing it aside I have actually written about it and reproduced the arguments about it for new audiences, while asking questions about it that I thought were not being considered. One thing I think the critics of the gay men using surrogacy don't realize is that I don't think many of them have ever thought being motherless is harmful to the child. I think most of them think they can in some way transcend gender and be mothers who happen to be male. So I think the moral test is whether they alter their actions (e.g. by having a child in some way where the mother is involved) once someone expands their imagination by getting them to think about the issue. I genuinely don't think they have thought that their child is going to have or feel some lack.
It is a terrible moral crime. It's a foundational wound.
God damn do I hope this is the case.
Some adoptees today, without any Gay in the family, regard their being adopted as a “monstrous crime”, especially if interracial. Does it help anyone’s lives in that situation to imagine a fantasy alternative reality of their existence?
At least with adoptees you could pretend (against evidence, usually) that they were snatched from the birth parents unjustly. In the case of surrogacy, the child would literally not exist if not for the one biological Gay parent.
>Some adoptees today, without any Gay in the family, regard their being adopted as a “monstrous crime”, especially if interracial. Does it help anyone’s lives in that situation to imagine a fantasy alternative reality of their existence?<
It doesn't do anyone any good to dwell on it after the fact, but it definitely means there is a moral imperative to avoid that outcome whenever possible.
>At least with adoptees you could pretend (against evidence, usually) that they were snatched from the birth parents unjustly. In the case of surrogacy, the child would literally not exist if not for the one biological Gay parent.<
It should be trivially obvious that it is not acceptable to bring life forth and then tell the child to accept mistreatment by their parents (for instance, being given away by their mother to strangers in exchange for money) because they must be grateful to the parents that they exist at all.
This healthier subculture seems like a contradiction to me. As long as people are using their genitals only for fun and not making babies, it does not really matter with what gender of partner they do. So either they have to criticize childless heteros the same as gays, or not criticize either. In both cases no point to single out gays.
The healthy sub culture also says to childless, hedonistic heteros essentially the same thing.
well okay, that is at least consistent / principled
not a good way to win elections tho :)
btw there is a fantastic tug of war - liberals try to convert the kids of the conservatives at college, often succeeding, hence not a good way to win eleections
I wonder when will conservatives notice it and make their own colleges. currently they are trying to take existing ones over which is not going to go well. would make more sense to found new ones.
I'm with you 100% on making our own colleges and providing alternatives for education, certification and employment.
I understand the reasons that you settle on the term "pathology," and ultimately definitions are more important than terms, but for my taste, it's too medically flavored, though I do acknowledge other uses. On my own part, having encountered many and known several homosexuals by this point, it's clear to me that it's just a sexual deviation, like any other. But that term has acquired connotations that people mobilize themselves against, just like other plausible candidates. Paraphilia (a "fetish")? Too dismissive and diagnostic. "Hangup" or "kink?" Simultaneously too denigrating and overly accepting. Perversion (a faculty turned against its own end)? Too condemnatory.
The things that ChatGPT recited to you about the causes of homosexuality apply equally to phenomena like foot fetishes, the various flavors of bondage / domination / sadism / masochism / humiliation / submission / ick, some forms of transsexualism, pedophilia, etc. For any such deviation, there are different degrees of deviance. Some people merely occasionally engage in deviant fantasizing, others are obsessed with it. Some are only interested in partial and occasional realization of their deviant proclivities, others are devoted exclusively to them. Some people have experienced deviant sexual interests since before puberty; others acquired them only afterwards, typically after having been exposed to pornography featuring the deviation, or having engaged in it directly.
Some of these deviations are intrinsically and solely harmful and must be proscribed: think of pedophilia and sexualized cannibalism. This is much less obvious with other deviations: think of a guy with a mild, secret interest in feet, or a woman who sometimes likes having her hair pulled, etc. Should these be pursued and punished? Likely not. Should they be publicly celebrated and normalized, so that someone who builds his public persona around his latex fetish is considered not to be a creepy degenerate? No doubt there are "baby play" enthusiasts who would love to come out of the proverbial closet without being judged.
This is why ideological homosexuals had to imagine "sexual preference" as some kind of natural category. It's much more dignified to be an oppressed minority than to be a creepy degenerate.
I agree that while the basic behavior of male-on-male sex is just a form of sexual deviancy, the phenomenon I refer to as Gay has acquired an aspect of political ideology to it. Most notably, Gay ideology is borne out of modern notions regarding "love" and romance. Remember the popular phrase "love is love." Modern gays feel entitled to "marry" because, in their worldview, marriage and sex are about "love," not about children, family, social stability, or anything else like that. The ideology treats marriage as a vessel for one's ego rather than a proper social institution with actual rules and norms aimed towards a specific pro-social outcome.
I don't oppose the use of the concept addiction to try to understand homosexuality.
I'm just not sure how that differentiates it from heterosexual lust either.
When I was a preteen and my parents explained reproduction to me, including sex and sexual attraction, I asked my mom "So is it sort of like you go crazy, temporarily?" I stand by my question.
It can apply perfectly well to heterosexual lust--this is why behaviors which involve out-of-control heterosexual lust, such as pornography addiction or frequenting of prostitutes, are so heavily stigmatized. The difference is that heterosexual lust has a legitimate purpose besides simply making the penis feel good. Homosexuality does not.
Heterosexual lust has a telos.
Like the male nipple.
“Born this way” was the logic before oberfegell, but once being gay was high status lots of people wanted to be it. Straight white people can’t pretend to be black, but they could adopt any of these new weird letters they were throwing into the end of LGB etc. so now it’s a confused mix of “born this way” and a choice.
I think the logic of the “born this way” movement was that if something is super ingrained, as it must be for at least some gays, then massive social pressure has huge costs with little upside, at least for those people.
Of course I don’t think legal gay marriage and creating another civil rights category was the answer to that, but I can get the logic. Our civic religion since the 1960s tells us that’s what we’re suppose to do in these cases.
Anyway, I think the underlying driver of The Gay is that straights just act more gay these days. I don’t mean that they are taking it up the butt, but they are delaying and foregoing marriage and children and engaging in sexual relationships that if not as extreme as gays certainly mimic them on a smaller scale. The women of Sex in the City always have gay friends they want advice from.
For men I think The Gay might have peaked. For women I don’t know they are being pulled in two directions. One direction is that they are single and childless which makes them more friendly to The Gay, but on the other this trans stuff is utterly insane and affects women more then men.
You are right: https://brucemajors.substack.com/p/intersects-and-the-city
You missed the single biggest cause of gayness: being sodomized as a boy by an adult gay man. The majority of gay men were sodomized as boys, a horrific criminal act.
Gayness and homo-pedophilia are to a very large degree the same thing. Homo-pedophilia is how gayness reproduces itself, causing immense suffering.
https://patrick.net/post/1343652/2022-02-13-the-gay-flag-is-also-the-symbol-of
I appreciate the link to the ex-gay man's story. That was powerful and I hadn't heard the like before.
I would say that homosexuals have a right to live their lives in peace. But they have no 'right' to try to bully the rest of humanity into falling into line with the bogus notion that there is no such thing as normal sexuality. If tv viewers find (as in almost all UK and European murder mystery tv dramas) that every episode must tick the 'gay couple included' script tick-box, they are entitled to feel irritated by this. If their town is annually invaded by a flag waving 'Pride' jamboree, they are entitled to feel irritated by that too. And if all this is something they dislike, it does not mean they have a 'phobia' about it. I wrote about this in greater length in this TakiMag piece 'Straight Talking': https://www.takimag.com/article/straight-talk/
There's a considerable drop in testosterone for this current generation of young men and boys. Alex Jones was kinda right about the freaking frogs being gay. But there's also more social stigma against boys specially white so a lot of them adopt deviant behaviour to be back in the woke totem pole as " queer". We know non binary is the new straight for women who hang around the alt scene and yound incels tend to troon out and become prison gay as well
There are also studies showing that the water the frogs are in is full of estrogen and para-estrogens. I think from both birth control pills and plastics.
Yes. The idea is that amphibians are the canary in the coalmine for estrogen mimic pollution, because they stew in the water 24/7 instead of just drinking some of it. Whatever estrogen mimics in water does to animals, it will hit them harder and first.
This was good, but I was hoping for more on gay as identity vs behavior. There's something weird about the way gay is codified as an emblem of identity. Hardly any other behavior is like this. I think cracking this would help figure out how to eventually get gay back into the closet, at least partially. If gay doesn't stop being an identity and go back to being a behavior that is nothing to brag about or be "proud" of, I think eventually there will be a cultural backlash that will include a lot of street violence. After that, it will definitely be back in the closet and there will probably be a era of renewed persecution.
Originally the post was going to go more in that direction but I have a nasty habit of writing far too much once I get started, so now it'll probably be a separate post at a later date. This is why I mentioned elsewhere into the comments looking into the fact that many gay men do have sex with women, because it blows up the narrative that "gay is not a choice" and clarifies that it does indeed belong more in the category of behavior than identity.
Great article. I had the same ideas on categorizing what gayness truly is, but I could never put it into anything concrete. I settled on calling it something halfway between a fetish and a belief lol, and that being gay is "giving up on girls". That being that those that are gay gave up on going after girls, prob lack of confidence or opportunity, and settled on the next best thing.
Again, good article, and it's nice to know I'm not just crazy
I don't think that is the case for all gay men not by a long shot. There are definitely some gay guys out there who could pull women if they wanted to. But this is probably a factor for some of them sure. I think it's also a big factor in a lot of guys who terminally online incels going trans.
"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."
Does this mean you also oppose the use of condoms among straight couples? Condoms are also clearly an invention that decouple sex from the reason that sex evolved.
Do you likewise oppose post-menopausal women having sex? What about sex during pregnancy? Or even just sex from women who have been told the devastating news that they are infertile? Is any act of sex that cannot lead to conception bad?
If that is the only type of sex you engage in, such that your sexual relationship is carried out with zero intention to procreate at any point, then yes. I think that's bad and you shouldn't do it. Nature obviously didn't design us so that every sexual encounter produces a child, but sexual relationships should be generally aimed at children first with hedonistic pleasure as a secondary side benefit.
I believe you completely skip over one very, very important aspect of sex - bonding. I am past my child bearing years, (five children), but let me assure you, my husband and I still have a robust and healthy sex life which at our age is part of the glue that keeps us affectionate and adoring towards each other. Do not dismiss that in the rigid paradigm of
"only 2 ways to look at sex".
I think you're somewhat presenting a false dichotomy here - that sex can only be for procreation or pure hedonism.
Sex can (and should!) be an expression of love. Love feels to me like a motivation for sex that is less nihilistic than pure hedonism, but more inclusive than making it solely a baby-making procedure.
Sure, lump that in with hedonism if you want. Doesn't change anything imo.
Hmm. I think "making babies is more important than hedonism" is a very different proposition to "making babies is more important than love." Indeed, I would argue that love ought to be a *prerequisite* for babies, that it is a very bad idea for adults who do not love each other to have kids together. I do think it changes the argument in a big way.
I agree, but the point remains that you fall in love so that you can have babies and a family. That's the point of the phenomenon. The point is not to make the penis feel good. You can do that with your hand.
In this sense making babies is more important than love, because the primary purpose of the latter is to enable and support the former. It's the same way in which my body as a whole is more important than just my hands or my feet.
As someone (a gay man) who had a baby with someone (a straight woman) just because we both wanted to have a baby, I could tell you that I suspect one often has a certain kind of love for anyone who is a parent of your child. Even if originally it was somewhat "transactional" or "opportunistic."
In theory, you could use brith control in a way that didn't reduce your fertility. Or at least didn't reduce it to a point that was destructive. Rising child survival rates basically imply that some kind of fertility control would be necessary, but it's gone too far. We aren't talking about couples with three or four kids deciding enough is enough. We are talking about terminally childless or near childless people engaging in what is essentially masterbation throughout their fertility window.
Gay men, lesbians, and straight people perform many of the came sexual acts: fellatio, cunnilingus, masturbation of the partner. Heterosexuals even have anal sex in some cases. A certain percentage of gay men (I once saw a figure of 25% do not like or have anal sex); and of course many gay men only have anal sex as wither a "top" or a "bottom" but not both.
I’ve heard some elder gays also lamenting the loss of the “Gay subculture” and even as a straight, rightward-bound man, I feel that loss too. Even within my memory at 33, I remember gay culture being more of a counterculture, with sexual deviancy, risk of AIDS, and lack of mainstream acceptance being part of its DNA. Gay wasn’t for everyone, it was insular, and it came with a sort of understanding that you were never going to have that trad, kids and a picket fence kind of lifestyle. Some gays (I’m thinking of Armond White, Glenn Greenwald and Katie Herzog but I’m sure there are many more) have commented on this, and even as an outsider I have to agree. There ought to be a traditional, wholesome, family-oriented “norm,” which can then be rebelled against or deserted by the weirdos and deviants if they wish. I do think gay culture has had some valuable contributions to American culture, but as Gay is aggressively pushed as the norm, it’s lost its mystique.
As you might imagine, I find it hard to say anything positive about "gay culture," but I will definitely agree that it would be much more tolerable as a separate counter-culture instead of as a domineering ideology seeking to usurp what is considered normal in the first place. If you want to be a degenerate but you're doing it away from me where my children never have to interact with it, maybe I can live with that. If you want to make it the new mainstream cultural standard, well, now I have little choice but to push back.
I don't know how many gay men there are like me; I suspect it's more than we know, but still a minority. At 50 years old, I've changed my mind almost completely on almost everything, and a big one is homosexuality. I now strongly suspect I'm gay because of child abuse, and I suspect deranged home life is behind most, but not all, gayness in men.
Personally, I can't see how it's possible for any person to change their subjectively experienced erotic desires. Put another way, I am single and celibate by choice after a youth of typical destructive gay promiscuity. I have decided to be single and celibate, but my subjective attraction to men remains. I suspect this is the case for most ex-gays, too, but I cannot know.
Does this make me "still gay?" Does it make me "ex gay?" Something else? I don't know.
At the point in my life where I can see the end---I'm closer to death than birth---I now know what I won't have, and it is a heavy loss. The lack of family and children is a loss. The way I, along with so many young libertine men toss it off as "well, I didn't want that anyway," was just youthful sour grapes.
Thank you for writing on this. I wanted you to know that there are some of us who agree, even though our culture works to silence us (both straights and gays) and call us mad or evil.
Dear PO
"gay" and "straight" are not useful models. https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/what-percentage-of-people-are-bi
"Gay New York and Queer London are history books about queer men of the early twentieth century. Both books extensively document a peculiar pattern. Working-class communities distinguished a group of men known as “fairies,” “flamers,” “queens,” and several other names. Fairies had effeminate mannerisms and styles of speech, dressed stylishly,1 wore makeup, often used women’s names, and of course were exclusively attracted to men. Any observer can identify this subculture as gay men.
But “normal” men had sex with fairies. While it is impossible to know exactly how many normal men had sex with fairies, the historical evidence is unambiguous that it was quite common. And working-class men saw sex with fairies no differently than sex with female prostitutes. As long as the man took the male part (receiving oral sex and anally penetrating the fairy), he was considered entirely ordinary, masculine, and not “gay.” "
This is the Roman Model of Sexuality. If you are penetrating, you are manly and masculine and not gay and all that, does not matter whether you penetrate women or men.
So in your view if someone was going to be childless anyway, being gay would be fine. Or if they divorced after their children were adults, having the second spouse be the same sex would be fine (a not unknown pattern).
I wouldn't say it's fine, but it's definitely better than trying to legitimize the concept of a "gay family" in which children are raised by "two dads."
So if a lesbian and a gay man have a child and raise it together, is it a gay family?
Assuming they're married and all the rest of it, then no, in the sense that it does not involve being raised by "two dads." You could say it's "gay" in the sense that both the parents identify as gay, I suppose. Personally I would contend that the label "gay" is insufficient to describe this arrangement, as you would basically never imagine this when someone says "I'm gay," you'd have to qualify it somehow or explain it to them. It's close enough to non-existent that as of now there is no concise term for it AFAIK. If you say you're "gay parents" people will assume this means two men or two women using adoption/surrogacy.
Yes and I expect to write another post at some point taking that angle further. I looked around for some discussions along the lines of "can gay men have sex with women/do gay men have sex with women" and, as I expected, found that many answers and posts were quite candid in revealing that yes, many gay men have sex with women at some point. Posters stating that they categorically never even tried to have heterosexual relations were in the minority. This obviously throws a wrench into the narrative that "gay is not a choice," but these were things being said in a very apolitical context. I imagine the stories would change quickly if a political frame were to be activated.
I'm gay (or at my age post-gay) and I've had crushes on women and even sexual activity with one (as it so happens someone who was a lesbian). If a gay person finds themselves having romantic feelings or falling in love with someone of the opposite sex, there is absolutely no social barrier or cost to exploring that, exactly the opposite of the case if a heterosexual gets a crush on a person of the same sex. So that many gay men once had sex with a woman is unsurprising. I have a gay friend from DC who had repeated sex with a woman in Pennsylvania just to have a child, which they co-parent. He moved to Pennsylvania and took his boyfriend with him. All 3 adults plus the child all live in the same section of town.
Of course there are now studies identifying brain structures of gay men that are intermediate between those of heterosexual women and heterosexual men https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/study-says-brains-of-gay/
Right, what the comparisons of homosexuality to a foot or latex fetish are missing is the enormous body of evidence showing that most gay men have a feminized phenotype and that most gay women have a masculinized phenotype. The scope of the behavioral difference is broader than bedroom activities.
Even in societies where there isn’t such a well-developed “religious ecstasy” of the cringe “civil rights” movements - I’m thinking of Thai ladyboys or Indian crossdressing beggars - gay people form a kind of semi-separate social caste; it takes more repression than a liberal society can mobilize to turn them into family men.
I don’t even know if it is most but it is certainly disproportionately many. In college I had a crush on a brilliant (married, heterosexual) professor who was affiliated with the neoconservative movement. He made an offhand remark to me about how so many gay men were short. I was 18 or 19 and had never thought about this. But I do think if you did a”bell curve” of body types for hay men and straight men you would find the gay graph to not be a bell curve, but to include many men just a little shorter than average and another clump of tall (but skinny or not athletic) men. As well ad different distributions in body fat (including facial fat), eye size, and many other physical differences from straight me.