Naturally a columnist in the Daily Mail trod on the waiting landmine. But the question ‘How, exactly?’ was hardly without justifications. One was that writing women out of anything had in the preceding years been agreed upon to be a serious faux pas. Yet here were two gay men writing at least one woman – who must have been relevant along the route somewhere – out of the story entirely. Indeed, writing a woman out of perhaps the most important story any person could ever be involved in. The second reason for pause was that the carefully manicured narrative of the Daley–Black baby was lying to a whole generation of young gays. For the fact is that, while it is significantly easier for gay women, two gay men will find it exceptionally difficult to have a biological baby, and even if they do it will only carry the biological imprint of one of the parents – setting up questions and potential tensions of its own not very far down the road. The even plainer part of the lie is that even this situation – in which two gay men produce a child with the DNA of one of them – is not available to most gays. It is available only to very rich gays. Egg and surrogacy procedures do not come cheap. But until the very moderate backlash against the framing of their pregnancy, none of this was going to be on the table. A group called ‘Stop funding Hate’ produced a list of companies which advertised in the Daily Mail and tried by this route to get people to pressurize them to stop advertising in a paper that the campaign group said was ‘increasingly out of touch with the views of mainstream British society’.34 All this for saying ‘wait a moment’ on the claim that two men can just have a baby.
But the ‘not only equal, but slightly better’ attitude lives on in the gay debate as in so many others. In 2014 researchers at the University of Melbourne carried out a study which they said showed that the children of same-sex couples are healthier and happier than children brought up by heterosexual couples. The lead researcher on the project, Dr Simon Crouch, claimed that one cause of this superior happiness was that same-sex couples didn’t fall into traditional ‘gender stereotypes’ and this led to ‘a more harmonious family unit’.35 It’s not such an uncommon claim. In 2010 the BBC broadcast a short film by the Reverend Sharon Ferguson (who was also CEO of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement) in which she claimed that lesbians like her weren’t just as good at being parents as heterosexual couples. According to her, lesbians actually make better parents than heterosexual couples do.36 Similar claims, based on equally dubious statistics that always sound more like propaganda than analysis, crop up with considerable regularity.
For instance in March 2018 researchers from The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law issued their findings after studying 515 couples in Vermont over a 12 year period. According to this research gay male couples were more likely to stay together than lesbian couples or heterosexual couples.37 This was promptly written up in the gay press and elsewhere as ‘Gay Marriages are Less Likely to Break Up than Straight Ones, Study Reveals’.38
It may be thought that gay parenting would fall solely onto the gay side of the gay versus queer divide, but behind some of the coverage is a recognizable echo of one of the ugliest noises that always existed on the fringe of the queer rights movement. This was the claim that equality was not enough, because gays were in some sense ‘better’ than straight people. The radical gay American activist Robert Rafsky was once filmed howling to fellow gay activists about heterosexuals during a protest, ‘We’re more important than they are!’ An attitude which, as Bruce Bawer wrote, ‘is no less ugly than that of heterosexuals who take it for granted that they are more important than homosexuals’.39 But there is confusion about this, as about so many other things.
Among the last two confusions worth selecting is something that may be among the biggest issues of all. It is whether being gay means that you are attracted to members of your own sex, or whether it means that you are part of a grand political project.
Is Gay Political?
Ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, the actor Sir Ian McKellen was interviewed about which way he was planning to vote. The interview’s headline quote was ‘Brexit makes no sense if you’re gay.’ In the piece Sir Ian – who has done an enormous amount to advance fundamental gay rights over the decades – said that, looking at the vote from a gay perspective, ‘there’s only one point, which is to stay. If you’re a gay person, you’re an internationalist.’40 Presumably people who thought they were gay and thought they’d vote ‘leave’ had been doing it wrong all these years. As so often, far worse wars have been fought on the same terrain in America.
The date of 21 July 2016 should have been a great moment for supporters of gay rights in the United States. That day Peter Thiel took to the stage of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and addressed the main hall. A gay man had appeared on a Republican platform before, but not alone and not openly identifying as such. By contrast the co-founder of PayPal, an early investor in Facebook, made a clear and head-on reference to his sexuality as he endorsed Donald Trump as the candidate of the Republican Party for President. During his speech Thiel said, ‘I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.’ All of this was received with huge cheers in the hall. Such a situation would have been unimaginable even a few election cycles before. NBC was among the mainstream media to report all of this in a positive light. ‘Peter Thiel makes history at RNC’ ran the headline.
The gay press was not so positive. America’s foremost gay magazine, Advocate, attacked Thiel in a long and curious piece consisting of an excommunication from the church of gay. The title read: ‘Peter Thiel Shows Us There’s a Difference between Gay Sex and Gay.’ The sub-banner on the 1,300-word piece by Jim Downs (an associate professor of history at Connecticut College) asked ‘When you abandon numerous aspects of queer identity, are you still LGBT?’
While Downs conceded that Thiel is ‘a man who has sex with other men’, he questioned whether he was in any other way actually ‘gay’.‘That question might seem narrow,’ the author admitted. ‘But it is [sic] actually raises a broad and crucial distinction we must make in our notions of sexuality, identity, and community.’ After pooh-poohing those who had hailed Thiel’s speech as any kind of watershed moment – let alone ‘progress’ – Downs pronounced his anathema: ‘Thiel is an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man. Because he does not embrace the struggle of people to embrace their distinctive identity.’
Exhibit A for this gay heresy-finder was that in his speech at the RNC Thiel had dismissed the endless high-profile rows about trans bathroom access, who should use which bathrooms and what facilities should be laid on where. Although Thiel had said that he didn’t agree with ‘every plank in our party’s platform’, he did state that ‘fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline’. As he went on, ‘When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?’ This went down very well in Cleveland. And if opinion polls are anything to go by it is a statement that would go down very well across America. It is demonstrably the case that more people are worried about the economy than are worried about bathroom access. But for Advocate this was a deviation too far.
While reaffirming his own ‘sexual choices’ Thiel was guilty of ‘separating himself from gay identity’. His opinions on the relative ephemerality to the wider culture of transgender bathrooms ‘effectively rejects the conception of LGBT as a cultural identity that requires political struggle to defend’. Thiel was alleged to be part of a movement which since the 1970s had not ‘invested in the creation of a cultural identity to the extent that their forebears did’. The success of gay liberation had apparently stopped them doing this ‘cultural work’. But this was dangerous, as the recent massacre at a gay nightclub had shown in some unconnected way. The author left his readers with the powerful reminder that ‘The gay liberation move
ment has left us a powerful legacy, and protecting that legacy requires understanding the meaning of the term “gay” and not using it simply as a synonym for same-sex desire and intimacy.’41
In fact the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016 had been carried out by a young Muslim who swore allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS). Yet this detail didn’t detain Advocate or the Gay Pride march in New York later the same month. On that occasion the parade led with a huge rainbow banner emblazoned with the words ‘Republican Hate Kills!’, clearly forgetting that Omar Mateen had not been a member of the Republican Party.
It isn’t just that the self-appointed organizers of the ‘gay community’ have a particular view of politics. They also have a specific view of the alleged responsibilities that being gay brings with it. In 2013 the novelist Bret Easton Ellis was reprimanded and banned from the annual media awards dinner by the gay organization GLAAD. He had been found guilty of tweeting views about the asinine nature of gay television characters that GLAAD said ‘the gay community had responded negatively to’.42 This censorious tone – the prim schoolmaster tone – is the same one Pink News unleashed with a straight face in 2018, with its list of ten ‘dos and don’ts’ for straight people on ‘how they should behave in gay bars’.43 In all of these cases the normal instinct is to say ‘Just who the hell do you think you are?’ But after his reprimand for wrong-think Ellis managed to sum up what had become a whole part of the new gay problem. This was, as he said, that we had come to live in ‘The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol.’
The reign of the magical gay elf has indeed been settled for the time being as one of the acceptable ways in which society has made its peace with homosexuality. Gays can now marry like everybody else can pretend that they have children in exactly the same way as everybody else, and in general prove – as Dustin Lance Black and Tom Daley do on their YouTube channel – that gays are unthreatening people who actually spend their lives being cute and making cupcakes. As Ellis wrote, ‘The Sweet and Sexually Unthreatening and Super-Successful Gay is supposed to be destined to transform The Hets into noble gay-loving protectors – as long as the gay in question isn’t messy or sexual or difficult.’44 The former enfant terrible of American fiction had put his finger on something here.
What are the Plausible Causes of ‘Homophobia’?
None of this justifies hatred or violence towards individuals, let alone whole groups of people. But there are plenty of stages between absolute equanimity and ease around people and a desire to violently attack them. The fact is that some heterosexuals are genuinely unnerved by gay people. Perhaps many, most or even all heterosexuals feel something like this, very far away from dislike, but something unnerving. While much of the writing and study of what has come to be known as ‘homophobia’ has focused on the false justifications for it, the plausible reasons for something like it have been ignored. This is more the case with male homosexuality than lesbianism. For all sorts of historical and social reasons, lesbianism has rarely been viewed as a fundamental attack on the social order in the way that male homosexuality has. And that may be because there is something about the nature of male homosexuality that strikes right at the root of one of the most important aspects not of some people’s sexuality – but of everyone’s sexuality.
At the root of nearly all female and male opposite-sex attraction are a whole series of unanswered and probably unanswerable questions. There are mysteries and confusions that occur at the levels of the dating ritual. These have been the staple for nearly all comedy and tragedy from the earliest times right up to the present. But the greatest and most enduring questions reside underneath the courting and dating rituals and often find full expression at the stage of the mating ritual. Women want to know what it is that men are after, what they want and what – if anything – they might be feeling during the act of sex. These questions are a staple of conversation between friends and a source of unbelievable private concern and angst at some stage (sometimes all) of most people’s lives from adolescence onwards.
If there is any one thing in society that gets even close to matching the confusion and angst of women about men, it is of course the list of questions which men have about women. The subject of nearly all dramatic comedy is the inability of men to understand women. What are they thinking? What do they want? Why is it so hard to read their actions? Why does each sex expect the other to be able to decode their words, actions and silences, when no member of the opposite sex has ever been given a decoding manual for the opposite sex?
At the root of the heterosexual male’s set of concerns and questions is the same question that women have about men. What is the act of lovemaking like? What does the other person feel? What do they get out of it? And how do the sexes fit together? The Ancients contemplated these questions of course. They linger in Plato – and are suggested most famously in Aristophanes’ contribution to the Symposium. But none of it is answered. The mystery continues, and most likely always will.
And that is where the presence of especially male homosexuals makes its unnerving entrance. For until the advent of plausible surgery for people who believed that they had been born in the wrong body (of which more later), the most disturbing travellers across the sexes were male homosexuals. Not because of a strongly feminine part of their nature but because they knew something about the secret that women hold in sex. It is a question – and a concern – which has existed for millennia.
Consider the legend of Tiresias as recounted in the Metamorphoses. There Ovid tells the story of Jove and Juno, who one day are idly joking about lovemaking. Jove tells Juno, ‘You women get more pleasure out of love than we men do, I’m sure.’ Juno disagrees and so they resolve to get the opinion of Tiresias: ‘He who knows both sides of love.’ The story of Tiresias is complex. Ovid tells us that Tiresias once came upon a pair of huge snakes mating in a green copse. He attacked them with his staff and was immediately transformed from a man into a woman. After spending seven years as a woman, in the eighth year he came upon the snakes again, and struck them again. ‘If striking you has magic power / To change the striker to the other sex, / I’ll strike you now again,’ he tells them. He does so and returns to being a man.
Jove and Juno summon Tiresias because they want him to declare judgement on the question of whether men or women enjoy lovemaking more. The traveller across the sexes declares that Jove is right: women enjoy lovemaking more. Offended by the claim, Juno condemns Tiresias to be blind, and it is to compensate him for his blindness (for no god can undo the act of another god) that Zeus endows Tiresias with the gift of prophecy – the gift that will later allow Tiresias to predict the fate of Narcissus.45 Gods, snakes and staffs aside, the legend of Tiresias raises – and suggests an answer to – a question of the greatest depth. It is one that gay men also play a part in.
Remarkably few people have taken this question up. One of the few who has done so in recent years is the writer and (not coincidentally) classicist Daniel Mendelsohn in his 1999 work The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity. In that family history-cum-memoir he delves deep into this subject. Asking what it is like when two men have sex he writes:
In a way, it is like the experience of Tiresias; this is the real reason why gay men are uncanny, why the idea of gay men is disruptive and uncomfortable. All straight men who have engaged in the physical act of love know what it is like to penetrate a partner during intercourse, to be inside the other; all women who have had intercourse know what it is like to be penetrated, to have the other be inside oneself. But the gay man, in the very moment that he is either penetrating his partner or being penetrated by him, knows exactly what his partner is feeling and experiencing even as he himself has his own experience of exactly the opposite, the complementary act. Sex be
tween men dissolves otherness into sameness, men into de, in a perfect suspension: there is nothing that either party doesn’t know about the other. If the emotional aim of intercourse is a total knowing of the other, gay sex may be, in its way, perfect, because in it, a total knowledge of the other’s experience is, finally, possible. But since the object of that knowledge is already wholly known to each of the parties, the act is also, in a way, redundant. Perhaps it is for this reason that so many of us keep seeking repetition, as if depth were impossible.
Mendelsohn goes on to describe a poem written by a friend about a young gay man who watches football being played by men whom he silently and jealously desires. The poem finishes with a lustful, imaginative description of the players having sex with their girlfriends and of one man ‘falling through her into his own passion’. Mendelsohn describes his own earlier heterosexual experiences, and whilst admitting that there was nothing unpleasant about them, they were, he says, ‘like participating in a sport for which you’re the wrong physical type’. But he adds:
From those indifferent couplings I do remember this: when men have sex with women, they fall into the woman. She is the thing that they desire, or sometimes fear, but in any event she is the end point, the place where they are going. She is the destination. It is gay men who, during sex, fall through their partners back into themselves, over and over again.
He goes on:
I have had sex with many men. Most of them look a certain way. They are medium in height and tend to prettiness. They will probably have blue eyes. They seem, from the street, or across the room, a bit solemn. When I hold them, it is like falling through a reflection back into my desire, into the thing that defines me, my self.46
The Madness of Crowds Page 6
