As Gay Becomes Bourgeois

David Brooks saw such ironic progressive victories coming. In his book "Bobos in Paradise," he wrote that everything "transgressive" gets "digested by the mainstream bourgeois order, and all the cultural weapons that once were used to undermine middle-class morality ... are drained of their subversive content."

Two decades ago, the gay left wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian "free love" and avant-garde values. In this, they were simply picking up the torch from the straight left of the 1960s and 1970s, who had sought to throw off the sexual hang-ups of their parents' generation along with their gray flannel suits.

As a sexual lifestyle experiment, they failed pretty miserably, the greatest proof being that the affluent and educated children (and grandchildren) of the baby boomers have re-embraced the bourgeois notion of marriage as an essential part of a successful life. Sadly, it's the lower middle class that increasingly sees marriage as an out-of-reach luxury. The irony is that such bourgeois values -- monogamy, hard work, etc. -- are the best guarantors of success and happiness.

Of course, the lunacy of the bohemian free-love shtick should have been obvious from the get-go. For instance, when Michael Lerner, a member of the anti-Vietnam War "Seattle Seven," did marry, in 1971, the couple exchanged rings made from the fuselage of a U.S. aircraft downed over Vietnam and cut into a cake inscribed in icing with a Weatherman catchphrase, "Smash Monogamy."

Today Lerner is a (divorced and remarried) somewhat preposterous, prosperous progressive rabbi who officiates at all kinds of marriages -- gay and straight -- and, like pretty much the entire left, loves the idea of open gays becoming cogs in the military-industrial complex.

The gay experiment with open bohemianism was arguably shorter. Of course, AIDS played an obvious and tragic role in focusing attention on the downside of promiscuity. But even so, the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning.

Nowhere is this more evident -- and perhaps exaggerated -- than in popular culture. Watch ABC's "Modern Family." The sitcom is supposed to be "subversive" in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia. And you can see why both liberal proponents and conservative opponents of gay marriage see it that way. But imagine you hate the institution of marriage and then watch "Modern Family's" hardworking bourgeois gay couple through those eyes. What's being subverted? Traditional marriage, or some bohemian identity politics fantasy of homosexuality?

By the way, according to a recent study, "Modern Family" is the No. 1 sitcom among Republicans (and the third show overall behind Glenn Beck and "The Amazing Race") but not even in the top 15 among Democrats, who prefer darker shows like Showtime's "Dexter," about a serial killer trying to balance work and family between murders.

Or look at the decision to let gays openly serve in the military through the eyes of a principled hater of all things military. From that perspective, gays have just been co-opted by The Man. Meanwhile, the folks who used "don't ask, don't tell" as an excuse to keep the military from recruiting on campuses just saw their argument go up in flames.

Personally, I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both). I do not think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some of the arguments persuasive. But I also find it cruel and absurd to tell gays that living the free-love lifestyle is abominable while at the same time telling them that their committed relationships are illegitimate too.

Many of my conservative friends -- who oppose both civil unions and gay marriage and object to rampant promiscuity --often act as if there's some grand alternative lifestyle for gays. But there isn't. And given that open homosexuality is simply a fact of life, the rise of the HoBos -- the homosexual bourgeoisie -- strikes me as good news.

I am becoming more an more convinced that homosexuality is actually a disease caused by a virus. Before you laugh, PLEASE read this, written by Gregory Cochran, a physicist at the University of Utah. Here is an excerpt:

"So if a disease is common (> a tenth of one percent), hits in early life, has been around a long time (so we know it's not caused by some new industrial chemical or whatever), and it's not restricted to people from the malaria zone - it's probably caused by some bug.

But what about homosexuality? Well, from this biological perspective, it's surely a disease. Disinterest in the opposite sex reduces reproduction quite a bit - around 80% in American conditions. Does it hit in early life? Sure. Has it been around a long time? Certainly. Do you find it in non-African populations, people who never lived with malaria? Yes.

So it's a bug.

Now that we know that human male homosexuality looks like a disease caused by some infectious organism, the next question is how that could happen - how could some virus change sexual interest?

I don't think that anyone can be sure of the exact mechanism at this point. I think we can be fairly confident that it is caused by an infectious organism, from the information we have and general evolutionary considerations, but infectious organisms can cause harm in many different ways. Malaria colonizes and uses up red blood cells, diphtheria and cholera manufacture toxins, HIV slowly knocks out a key subpopulation of the immune system, leaving you defenseless against many other pathogens, while certain papillomavirus strains deregulates cell division and thus cause cervical cancer. And those are just samples: there are many pathogenic mechanisms involved in infectious disease, some not well understood.

What do we know? We have a lot of indications that there has been some change in the brain. After, all that's the most logical location for the cause of a change in behavior. Simon LeVay and others see differences in hypothalamic nuclei (similar to those seen in sheep). There are associated changes - the lisp, increased neuroticism and depression, etc. Somehow the cause is affecting the brain.

Just as important are all the things we don't see. We don't see IQ depression, we don't see epilepsy, we don't see convulsions, and we don't see aphasia. Clearly there is no gross trauma - somehow, the brain has been damaged, but in a very limited and focused way. A key function has been messed up, which gravely impacts reproductive fitness, but homosexual men can still hold down jobs, including very complex jobs. The overwhelming majority of mental functions are perfectly intact, or at most subtly changed. The damaged neural subsystem could be male-specific.

Do we know of diseases in which there are very specific targets - in which certain cell types are damaged or destroyed while neighboring cells are left intact? Sure. In some cases, a pathogen targets a particular cell type and has little effect on anything else. Human parvovirus (also known as fifth disease) hits erythroid precursor cells (the cells that manufacture red cells) and temporarily inhibits red cell production. In type-I diabetes, it seems likely that Coxsackie virus infections (in people with a genetic predisposition, in which HLA type plays a major role) trigger an autoimmune disease that gradually (over a year or so) destroys the islet cells which produce insulin. Other cells are not much affected.

We know of a similar, very specific damage pattern in the brain - Narcolepsy.

In Narcolepsy, most of the neurons that produce hypocretins (neurotransmitters) have somehow disappeared. There are only 30,000 of these neurons in the first place, all in a small hypothalamic nucleus. This loss leaves one pathologically sleepy, subject to cataplexy and in some cases hypnagogic hallucinations. Narcolepsy hits about 1 in 2000 people: identical twin concordance is around 25%. Almost all narcoleptics have a particular HLA type, one shared by about a third of the general population. Narcolepsy (almost always) is not present at birth but manifests in early adulthood.

Narcoleptics are pathologically sleepy, but most mental functions are unaffected.

There is at present a strong suspicion that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease, possibly triggered by a viral infection. The HLA association points in this direction, but as yet the exact cause of the destruction of the neurons that make hypocretin is unknown. Narcolepsy does, however, show that there exists some mechanism that can destroy a particular hypothalamic neuron subpopulation without causing general brain trauma.

...Preferential homosexuality, sexual interest in males, rather than females, is very rare. The only two species known to exhibit this behavior, at the-few-percent level, are men and sheep. It may be worth noting that men and sheep have often been found in close association.

Another point worth mentioning is that the prevalence of homosexuality probably varies a lot. It seems to be considerably more common in young men who grew up in urban areas than in rural areas, something like a factor of three, which is also true of Schizophrenia. This is a much bigger effect than the birth order stuff. If you look out in the real sticks, say among the Kalahari Bushmen, there doesn't seem to be any at all. Typically, hunter-gatherers have trouble believing that homosexuality actually exists.

All this is speculative, of course: but the idea that male homosexuality is caused by a pathogen makes good evolutionary sense, unlike every other explanation ever proposed. This particular form of pathogen explanation of homosexuality, inspired by the recent breakthroughs in narcolepsy research, is consistent with the low identical twin concordance for homosexuality, with geographical variation in its incidence, with some observations of volume changes in a particular hypothalamic nucleus in homosexual men, and most importantly, with the dog that didn't bark - the fact that homosexual men do not suffer from general brain damage, do not show symptoms like IQ depression...."

Hank

Every action other than those performed by the autonomic nervous system is voluntary, for one thing. A person may not be able to control thoughts or desires (although with practice, one can at the very least not entertain them, and get a grip, and so on*) but every human who is not psychotic or nearly so, can certainly control actions such as sex, eating, walking, speech, etc.

For another, the only reason we’re all having this discussion is because of governmental promotion - primarily non-legislative - of the homsoexual agenda on everyone else. So we’re so far beyond the point of neutrality, in the public and legal sphere, that the question is moot. Basically, for most or at least many people, even acting on their beliefs and understanding that homosexual acts are wrong, destructive, unhealthy, immoral and unnatural is tantamount to civil disobedience.

The real question is - where to do people go from here? I mean people who don’t want to support the homo-agenda.

*And an interesting point is that when desires and thoughts are acted upon, they gain strength in the mind; and when ignored or told “no, we’re going to do that today”, they become less troublesome or insistent. The mind is controllable, at least to a goodly extent. We are not meant to be, as humans, slaves to every desire that pops up. That makes us very different from animals. If this were not true, no one could ever control any desire, such as the desire to smoke. For instance, I used to smoke both cigarettes and marijuana - and stopped, with very little trouble, although I realize the difficulty varies a lot. Now, you couldn’t pay me to smoke anything. The “uncontrollable” desire is now gone.)

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