Heterosexuality in the Free Market
I'm reminded of a 1961 British film called Victim. Or rather I'm reminded of a line Pauline Kael wrote when she reviewed it. The film was about a married barrister (Dirk Bogarde) who is blackmailed because he had a homosexual affair. It was an early step in popular culture's being sympathetic to gay people, though it also had lines like "nature played me a dirty trick!"
When Kael reviewed the film, she said, "it's a cleverly conceived moralistic thriller…various characters are able to point out the viciousness of the English laws, which, by making homosexuality a crime, make homosexuals the victims of 90% of the blackmail cases."
However, others were less comfortable with the film's mostly sympathetic stance. Kael went on: "A number of the reviewers were uneasy about the thesis that consenting adults should be free from legal prosecution for their sex habits; they felt that if homosexuality were not a crime it would spread. (The assumption seems to be that heterosexuality couldn't hold its own on the free market.)"
It's that last line – about not holding its own on the free market – that I always remembered and found funny in her review.
Can heterosexuality hold its own on the free market? Yes, it can! Because you don't CHOOSE to be heterosexual, do you? If you're a heterosexual man, you don't look at a woman and go, hmmm I think I will choose to be attracted to her. Here I go, it's starting. Here I go… there!
Why do people think gay sexual preference is a choice, and heterosexual sexual preference is an innate instinct? It's very stupid, and lacking in empathy and common sense, to think one is a choice, and the other an instinct. Stop it! Would you?
[Chris Durang, "Bush and the Ugly Face of Tolerance", Huffington Post, 6 June 2006.]
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on Wednesday, 7 June 2006 at 02.20
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Sure enough, that's the crux of it. For true heterosexuals and true homosexuals alike, it's not a choice.
Why is there a difference? Well, if you look at all of nature, variety and diversity are the rule, not the exception. As sure there's hot, there's cold. You have drab little dust-colored birds and you have peacocks. You have verdant forests and barren wastelands. And so on. That's all I can make of it.
I think some confusion or misperception arises from a couple of interesting things. One is that there are bisexuals and people who go through a period of uncertainty about their sexual orientation. Neither is truly homosexual, because true homosexuals have romantic longings for, and form romantic relationships exclusively with, those of the same gender. Romance, not sex acts, is what distinguishes sexual orientation.
The other thing is that it's been known for a very long time — about as long as there has been soldiers, sailors and prisoners — that some virile young heterosexual men isolated from female company for long periods will engage in homosexual activities. No, they don't fall in love and want to spend the rest of their lives together; far from it. It's more a case of, if you can't be with the type you love, "love" the type your with. And when they return to mixed company, they're more than glad to resume relationships with the opposite sex.
Homophobia arises from ignorance. Ignorance can be overcome with facts and reason. Unfortunately, too often, the ignorant find in religion justification for insisting they have divine backing for disliking things or people they dislike. Tragically, faith has the power to nullify logic, science, observable facts, life experience and all those potentially inconvenient things that might actually prompt people to learn and grow and change.
That's what I make of it all, anyway.