Wow
Do all homosexual persons harbour deep with in a desire or wish that they were straight? This may seem an obvious question and answer but I mean really deep.......
It's not so much a question of wishing they were straight, but a translation whereby "straight" equals "normal." And after a couple decades living on the fringe of every culture you know, it can start to wear on you.
Which is really strange, incidentally, when you look at the way men and women get along, at least in the United States. Happiness, apparently, is a warm bed. And a cold heart.
Those homosexuals who do actually wish to be straight are, I think, the clearest indication of what a genetic or biological predisposition toward homosexuality looks like. Some of these folks will, much like a 13 year-old girl has successfully argued, feel victimized by biology. I tend to think the socialized or "acquired" homosexuals, those whose sexuality is environmentally spawned or reinforced--e.g. reaction to sexual trauma--generally don't wish to be straight except, such as in the example given, the desire for it all to go away, and for everything to be statistically "normal." (This is a misnomer; fully 1/4 of women in the US will be raped in their lifetimes; the majority of that will occur in childhood or youth;
normal, in the end, is reduced to plurality at best, if not an outright fraud.)
To draw a dangerous comparison, it's a problem of defining the goal. Statistically- or apparently-deviated individuals have not cornered the market on clarity; I know nobody who would assert they have. But watch how people deal with, for instance, the depressed. Nobody I know who deals with such difficulties actually wants to be
normal. "Normalcy" is largely what pushed them over the edge, unless it's a running chemical or structural issue. "Normal" sucks. The normal don't like being normal, why should the deviant aspire to be? In the end, the goals ought to be
functionality and
sustainability. The mistake I've made, for instance, all through my life, was the twenty-five years of aspiring to normalcy. I chased "normalcy" for so long, made
so many bad decisions in my quest for the normal that I am, in fact, the wreck that comes before you all here. I don't mind thinking harder than the people around me, but at the same time I wish it
could go toward something more immediately useful than castles in the sky. But normal?
(Expletive) normal!
And I've watched in my friends who wrestled with their sexuality a battle between the
competing desires for normalcy on the one hand, and happiness on the other.
And yes, they
are competing desires.
So a lot of what passes for "wishing they were straight" is actually an incorrectly-stated pursuit for functionality and security; "normalcy," the comfort of being like 90% of your neighbors, is an amazingly heavy weight of comfort.
I don't actually believe that a tremendous number of homosexuals wish they were straight. And of those that do, I'm of the opinion that it's generally not a wish to be straight
per se, but rather a desire to not be considered--or consider themselves--superficially abnormal and set apart by a mere label.
I always smile when I hear a homophobe include some aspect of the "wealth" of gay men in a discussion of homosexuality, because the wealth spoke to a limited number of possibilities, most interesting being the propositions that sexual repression in society causes the men to channel more of their efforts into their work, or that ... hey, two gay men are wealthy? You mean they're not out blowing their lives on drink and drugs and wild sex? You mean they're living in a happy, apparently-monogamous relationship and behaving ...
gasp! ... like people are allegedly supposed to behave when they are happy and secure? Or, at the very least, they're getting along as well as their "normal" neighbors? Very few of these men, for instance, will wish they were straight.
Another dangerous notion, but functional: Think of how hard it is to get information about drugs. I don't mean for you and me, but when we get right down to it, the whole drug war is predicated on an extremely limited number of sources, and most of them incomplete, inappropriate, or ill-conceived. It's really hard to get good data when the participants in the surveys are confessing to crimes. Point: As a nefarious idea--e.g. "drugs" normalizes within a society, the tone of discussion changes. The last six years have seen marijuana normalize somewhat, for instance. After one of the Clinton-era's own anti-drug experts compared marijuana's addictiveness to caffeine (still a slight exaggeration), the whole discussion changed. Everybody knew the stoners at work because they were looking at the coffee-freaks and laughing that stoner laugh. And in the middle of that, when NIDA finally announced that they had identified withdrawal symptoms from THC, every stoner in the country said, "Well? Duh!" And it's true. It's like caffeine withdrawal. Only it takes about a day to set in at least, and not forty minutes. And the stoners didn't tell NIDA to piss off because (A) we knew it was true, and (B) the discussion had finally reached a point where rational discourse is remotely possible. People might think stoners are lazy and inattentive, but
watching and
thinking are two things they're notorious for. Nobody denounced the study. Nobody called it false. Nobody called it political. The issue went away and we can now include that minor point in the honest discussion.
Any nefarious idea goes through this. In fact, I just this morning had my boundaries redrawn; my opinion of the most ridiculous sexual gratification changed. It's no longer a tie between exhibitionist adult babies and vinyl-doms. (What? Enjoy yourselves, but I do chuckle when I see it in public. I won't be chuckling anymore ... the ABs and the doms have just been normalized by ... oh, never mind.)
Homosexuality has traditionally been considered a nefarious idea. Wait, wait, wait. Let's get this straight. Gay men everwhere owe heterosexual men and homosexual women a debt of gratitude. For as long as humanity has reviled sodomy between men, and as long as there has been a debate about heterosexual sodomy, female homosexual intercourse has generally been worshipped. It's only a severe minority of people who actually have a problem with it. So in miles and miles and miles (to Infinity and Beyond!) of lesbian porno films and mountains (Olympus Mons!) of sapphic snapshots we find a partial normalization of "homosexuality."
But it's getting to the point where gay men
can discuss their relationships with their parents. Anyone ever seen
Jeffrey? The "mod parents" were wallpaper-crawlingly ... odd in a particular scene. Or how about John Waters recounting how his mother, upon learning that his film was called
Pecker, and making the natural presumption since he's an oversexed, flamboyant gay man, said, "You know, dear, the other night on the television, they called it a
johnson!"
These are pioneers.
It was Christmas day, 2001, standing on the fourth green at a par 3 course near my mother's house, that my mom starts talking about grandchildren. And she says to me, "And even if you or your brother are gay, I would hope you could settle down and maybe adopt one."
I just looked at her, jaw open. I didn't tell her, "I'll let you know when I figure it out." I decided leaving it an open question would be a bad idea. Few things surprise me in the world, but that . . . .
The discussion about homosexuality is changing. The idea of men having sex with one another is not so pointedly reviled. While fewer heterosexual men will want to watch gay men having sex, there is less fear among the herd. Whether resignation or actual progress, I think it will be an interesting day when mothers discuss their children's partners in any context.