Mr. Gay Pride: The Blog

Homosexuality as Brake on Overpopulation. Yesterday and today I had an exchange with a friend that arose from an article about Vice President Biden's saying aloud that gay marriage in the United States is pretty much inevitable. I told my friend:

Gay groups have been too quiet about homosexuality as a brake on overpopulation. Overpopulation, in turn, is the biggest social issue of all, in planetary terms, but NOBODY is talking about it. If the population of the Earth were reduced to 4B, nobody would be talking about "man-made global warming" either, because it would be plain that if there were that (relatively) few people, they could not be changing the climate.

He misinterpreted that and, in slitely insulting terms, responded:

wait, you're not suggesting that being gay is a means to control the population? you can't be that nuts. that would suggest that being gay is a choice and that would set us back as a whole....and climate change will happen with or without us.

I did NOT say that being gay is a choice, and don't know how he leapt to such a conclusion, but did not reply in insulting terms to him. Rather, I said:

People, esp. religious people, sometimes ask why Nature would produce homosexuality, if the object of every living creature is to reproduce. Plainly, however, with a social animal, such as the human species, reproduction is a collective thing, not individual. We're not cats, who mate and then separate, and the mommy cat raises the kittens on her own. In the human species, the nuclear family, extended family, clan, village, and tribe are all involved in securing the future of the species, by making sure that a large proportion of babies born, survive. That means that there must be defense from other animals and other tribes, and help in gathering food, providing warmth, and many other things that give human progeny a better chance to live a full lifetime and, in their turn, reproduce.
+
The higher the ratio of nonreproducing members of the group there are, the more adults there are per child to take care of children, and to man the system of supports necessary to human life. Thus homosexuality is not just an actual brake on overpopulation, when society allows it to be expressed and to control behavior, but it can also be seen as an integral part of a natural order in which childless adults secure the future of the species -- like all those worker bees that cannot reproduce.
+
There's no choice in gay men being gay or in worker bees being sterile. That's just the nature of the creature. But in both cases Nature works best when some members of a species do NOT reproduce. Whether that be seen as "God's plan" or just the way things work out doesn't matter. What matters is doing everything we can to rein in population, and changing laws not just to permit but also to encourage homosexuality and lesbianism, [which] would permit a great many more people to live a gay or lesbian life, without ever having their own biological children. A change in laws that grants gay or lesbian couples the right to adopt "unwanted" children would bring home the natural order: that childless people help take care of children.
+
In speaking to religious people, we can say "Gay people are not acting 'against Nature' or 'against God's law' but fully in accord with God's plan." With nonreligious people, we can simply make the case that the world is hugely overpopulated and letting gay people be gay without interference, or even with encouragement, would contribute, in greater or lesser measure, to reducing the burden of overpopulation on natural systems.
+
No one really knows how much homosexuality there would be if it were actually ENCOURAGED. Plainly there is, in all men, a built-in tolerance for other men's bodies in the tolerance one must have for one's own body. No one could regard himself as sexually desirable if he found himself disgusting. Part of the pleasure every man takes from masturbation is holding a, um, how shall we say?, a 'male organ' in his hand. If we were all built to be able to put our mouth on our 'organ of copulation', there would be at least as much oral sex upon men by men (the man himself) as masturbation. If homosexual activity were actually encouraged, we might find that homosexuals are not 2% (as our worst enemies suggest) or 10% (a figure commonly used by gay organizations), but 25%, 33%, or even higher of all men.

I suspect a lot of men raised to be straight would find a sexually and emotionally intimate relationship with another man far more comfortable, given that men understand men much more easily than they do women. Who knows how many heterosexual marriages end not because the man couldn't get along with a particular woman but because men as such are not suited to the modern conception of marriage as a relationship in which men are expected to spend all their time with not just women in general but also with one woman in particular, when much of the time they'd rather be with their male friends. Traditional marriage, even in the United States, DID minimize the amount of time a man spent with his wife, and men until very recently spent a large proportion of their time with other men, while women spent a large part of their time with other women, and the children. It may be that only the "togetherness" part of the modern, American version of heterosexual marriage produces so many divorces, and if men could spend most of their time with men, and their male children, they would be content to stay married because the annoying things about their wife wouldn't be constantly around them.
+
As to how much homosexuality there would be if men were free of all coercion to be heterosexual, I'd sure like to find out.