It's not about sex (update)

Apparently, many of our opponents think that we stop being gay if we are not actively having sex.  And they also think we are all about sex.  So something as gentle as holding hands is "flaunting it".

Writing in the HuffPo, Marissa Higgins takes them down,

Being gay isn't just about what happens in the bedroom. It isn't just about sexual positions. It isn't just about consummating passion or fulfilling a fantasy. It's about love. It's about understanding. It's about emotional connections. It's about all the good -- and bad -- parts of a relationship that all couples experience. 

 She tells a sad, familiar story  (familar, that is, for any LGBT couple that has dared to show the slightest personal affection in public):

Last summer my wife and I went to a baseball game. We sat next to each other and held hands. A man in the row in front of us walked down the aisle to his seat with a tray of sodas and hot dogs. I watched him pass a family with children, the parents giving each other a peck on the lips as he approached, as well as a middle-aged couple with their arms around each other's shoulders and a teenage girl who had her head on her boyfriend's shoulder. He didn't have a visible reaction to them, other than apologizing for walking by. 

He turned toward us as he bent to put his soda in his cup holder. ... We made eye contact, and... I watched his eyes flicker to my hand in my wife's and remain there for several seconds without blinking. They traveled up and down our bodies, unapologetic and unblinking. His eyes returned to mine, and they were wide. There was a flash of color in his cheeks. His lips ticked. I blinked. He furrowed his brow and dropped his eyes. He turned and sat quickly. He fussed with his tray and napkins erratically. His female companion asked if he was all right, and he scowled. As he passed his companion a hot dog, he said, "I just don't know why they have to hold hands." She turned slowly over her shoulder and glared at us. 

The couples he walked by in his aisle were innocent. They showed gentle, sweet affection between them. Their behavior was not inappropriate for a Thursday-night baseball game. What was different about my wife and me? We were two women. We were not in a porn film he'd found online. We were not giggling and drunk at a bar. We were not topless on a poster board. We were a normal couple at a baseball game. But in his eyes we were sexualized.

Wow  Yes.  we have been there--the insolent raking with the eyes. Then the expression of disgust.

 She goes on to argue that this is particularly related to being two women. The onset of "lesbian chic", and the packaging of two women to appeal to straight men is part of this.   "Lesbian pornography" is aimed directly at straight men.  They cannot see two women together without thinking of sex.

I think there is also a very visceral response against two men, also because the immediate thought isn't "how sweet they are" but a thought of what they might do in bed.  Certain straight men are incredibly hung up on the mechanics of gay sex (taken down here by John Corvino).

But it is certainly true that the argument against marriage is heavily, heavily an argument about sex.  And it misses all the rest of it: love, relationship, commitment, fidelity.  I'm gay all the time, not just when I'm in bed with my beautiful wife.

Higgins finishes,

The immediate conflation of the gay community with sex is dangerous. It puts us on a primitive level beneath our heterosexual peers. It highlights the importance of our sex and negates the importance of us as people -- whole, complex people with personalities, opinions and feelings that go beyond our sexual urges and practices. The focus on the "sex" in "sexuality" threatens to make us caricatures of the people we really are.

I talked about this at length in an essay I wrote two years ago.  I commend it to your attention;  Talking about Sex

Conservative Iowa Republican converts to marriage supporter

The Advocate reports on a conservative Christian Republican woman in Iowa who has become pro-equality. 

All that changed three years ago when her son met and married a young woman whose mother was in a long-term lesbian relationship. Potts met her future in-laws shortly before the wedding and left the meeting embarrassed about the stereotypes she had carried to the encounter. 

“I was just freaking out: ‘This just can’t happen,’” she recalls thinking before their first conversation. “And then it dawned on me, this wasn’t worth losing my son over. And then once I started hanging around with them, I’m like, ‘This is insane.’” 

A Charismatic Christian who now attends church sporadically, Potts attributes much of her former bias to her faith experience. Her conversations with other Christians focused almost exclusively on sexual activity and dehumanized gay people. 

“I just thought it was all about sex,” she said. “That’s what everything was based on: sex, sex, sex, sex. You were expecting that they were constantly going to be hanging on each other and making out. I’d never thought of anyone as people. It was just all based on sex.”
....
Potts wrote about her evolution last month in an op-ed for the Iowa Gazette. The piece, “Stand Together,” offered a stinging assessment of the Iowa caucuses that took place in January.

“I heard a lot of rhetoric about gay and lesbian Americans that didn’t fit with what I know to be true and what many Republicans believe,” she wrote. “As an evangelical Christian Republican, I know many people who hold conservative values like equality and freedom, but those voices were lost this year. However, I believe in my heart that things are changing. If it weren’t for the loud voices of a few in our party, I do believe more Republicans would stand up in support of marriage equality.”

In an interview with The Advocate, Potts said that many Republicans in Iowa support marriage equality but fear they could be “ostracized” if they speak up. She said that one husband of a party insider told her that he was glad she wrote the op-ed because it reflected his own feelings. 

“The party here is being led by strong right-wing people right now,” she said. “A lot of them would like for it just to be church. They’ve very antigay, and with the abortion issue, too, they’re extremely loud spoken about it.”

Will we ever change the fringe?  I don't think so.  But this story tells us we can reach those who can hear, and it's why we need to keep coming out, and be who we are!

The normalization, and moralization, of Teh Gay

A couple of different commentators have responded to the DADT repeal by thinking of what this may change about society's general views of homosexuality and sexual morality.

First, Gabriel Arana, in The American Prospect, sees this as a normalization of the gay identity.

The true fight has been about what it means to say, "I am gay" -- whether the affirmation is cause for social -- and in the military, literal -- ostracism and exclusion or whether it's a neutral means of describing yourself.

....To religious conservatives, allowing gay people to say who they are is a dire threat to society and the military. … Allowing service members to know their gay colleagues is so threatening to religious conservatives because, as studies have shown, actually knowing a gay person is the best predictor of how one views homosexuality. Once service members can utter the words "I am gay" without an official state sanction, the culture-war battle has largely been won.

Sounds nice, kinda like the HRC representative who was quoted as saying

"If you can fight and die for your country, there's absolutely no reason why you can't be granted the full set of rights" that others have, including the ability to marry a same-sex partner….Americans will deduce that on their own. We won't have to say a thing."

(Keep thinking those happy thoughts, which are yet another example of the disconnect of the HRC from reality. But I digress).

I think it's too simplistic to assume that the awareness of LGB people in the military will make the entire LGBT community somehow validated. It's not all going to get better instantly. It'll help, sure, but it's not enough just to normalize Teh Gay. We are arguing to MORALIZE Teh Gay.

Writing in Slate, Will Saletan tackles this, beginning with confronting the slippery slope argument. We have to "de-sex" who we are, to distinguish this battle from a general loosening of sexual morality.

Shouldn't someone who risked their life for this county be able to marry someone of the same sex, or more than one person, or a biological relative? Or at least share a life with the person(s) he or she loves without a fear that their own government will be against them? Is bravery and valor negated if a man loves another man, or his long lost sister?

Laugh or snort if you want to, but it's a serious question. If DADT repealers are correct that sex is a matter of personal liberty and it doesn't matter "who you love," why shouldn't that defense cover polyamory and sibling couples? Switzerland is proposing to drop its incest law on exactly this basis. …

You can argue that homosexuality is quite different. But to make that case, you have to go beyond privacy and consent. You have to draw moral distinctions. Homosexuality isn't just a matter of who you love. It's a matter of who you are. And it's compatible with traditional sexual values.

The conservative assumption about homosexuality, freely vented in the DADT debate, is that it's a "behavior" and "lifestyle." But nobody who's gay experiences it that way. You don't choose to be gay. You just are gay. …

If homosexuality is an orientation rather than a preference or choice—if it's a matter of who you are, not who you love—then it's detachable from other kinds of sexual deviance. In fact, it isn't deviant. A gay person can be just as faithful and monogamous as a straight person. And military rules of sexual propriety can apply just the same….

If the fall of DADT is ultimately interpreted this way—as a rethinking of homosexuality, not of sexual morals generally—it won't satisfy libertines or libertarians. But culturally, it might prove easier to digest. Is homosexuality about who you love or who you are? That debate, unresolved by the fight over DADT, will rage on.

I agree with Saletan. I don't think that the LGBT community should be reduced to a sex act. The conservatives constantly attack us with participating in a "if it feels good, do it" hypersexualized culture. But that's not what I'm fighting for. I'm actually quite conservative on issues of sexual morality, which is why the fight for MARRIAGE matters.

(A further take-down of the "slippery slope" argument is here, which distinguishes the potential harm and societal benefits of each. Worth a read.)

What do you think?

Talking about sex

The main, if not the only, argument against GLBT equality made by the Right is that they don't like how we have sex. It's a little disturbing how much they think about it, though, with an obsessive fascination in physical mechanics that is positively prurient.

And this extends to the point where the Right reduce every GLBT relationship to something that is only sexual. In fact, they tr to say we aren't gay, if we aren't actually having sex. They would never, ever accept their own marriages being reduced to who does what in bed, as though sexual activity is the only definition of the relationship or orientation. But just as prejudice leads to the dehumanization of minorities into The Other, so does it here. It dehumanizes GLBT people to the level of rutting animals. And by erroneously implying that the only purpose of marriage (and sex) is reproduction, the Right contributes to this.

In many animal species , the desire for intercourse is absolutely linked to the fertility of the female. An unspayed female dog is safe on the street from males unless she's in heat, for example. Sex there is decidedly driven by the "biological imperative" and nothing else.

By contrast, sex in primates is not procreative. Which is not to say it doesn't have a procreative function, but its function is not limited to making babies. Just think of the bonobo chimpanzees, who use sexual stimulation as, if you'll forgive the term, a social lubricant and means of communication. Hetero, homo, it's all the same to them. If it feels good, do it. It's the opposite extreme from the dogs.

Human biology too is clearly geared for sexual acts to be uncoupled from reproduction: you can't tell easily when a human female is fertile, and moreover fertility is not seasonal, but year-round. Sex is undeniably fun and pleasuarable, encouraging us to engage in it regardless of its procreative possibilities, which we do, enthusiastically. So sex for us also has many parts beyond simple biological baby-making. It's what we choose to do with those parts that is the challenge, that elevates us above the bonobo--and the dog.

I'm unabashedly old-fashioned in this regard. I believe that that sex should be an ultimate expression of joyful union. That's what turns sex into making love. The meaning of physical expression in the context of an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual relationship is pretty darned amazing, and I think should be encouraged and supported.

So for this reason, denying marriage and partnership rights to GLBT couples is actively promoting an animalistic view of sexual expression. Other commentators have also argued that there is a deeply conservative argument for marriage equality, in part to demand sexual accountability and morality of everyone. No one gets a "free pass", the expectation for faithful monogamy and restricting sex to the context of an actual relationship should be universal. Many GLBT relationships have achieved this degree of commitment, much as the Right ignores us. Indeed, I would argue that maintaining our relationships despite the lies and excoriation they heap upon us shows our strength. Many straight relationships might find it challenging to endure what we have (and still we rise!)

In their obsession with denying that GLBT have actual relationships, as opposed to simply having sex, the Right ignores the actual problem: the "animalization" of sex that occurs throughout our society, particularly in the young. Not just gay kids, but many,many straight kids. And I think we have a social problem that has nothing to do with orientation, but a lot to do with undervaluing relationships as the proper context for sexual expression. Admittedly many people are less conservative than I, and perfectly happy in a friends-with-benefits world, but even "friends-with-benefits" has a relational context and can embody some amount of mutual respect.

Yet too many kids are way beyond that, engaging in the casual pick-up, the swapping partners, and other practices. Rather than recognizing sex as a healthy expression that should occur within a real binary relationship, they engage in meaningless physical stimulation: a bonobo-view of sex, akin to scratching an itch. I find this deeply depressing, and deeply degrading particularly to young women. The sad thing is that they will not necessarily realize this unless and until they experience sex in the context of a significant relationship, when their regret at cheapening their bodies with casual and meaningless encounters may be immense.

So the Right is too blinded by their bias and hatred for GLBT people to tackle the actual problem, which is a society and culture that elevates sex over relationships regardless of orientation. And they blame us for this, we who are married, partnered, unioned, and committed to long term and meaningful relationships, rather than blame their own inconsistency. The problem isn't GLBT people "cheapening" marriage--if anything our marriages strengthen the important links between sex and relationship. We actually share common goals.

Recognition that sexual expression is not limited to procreation and that fertility can be controlled challenges us to demonstrate the appropriate context and meaning of sexual relations. I'm not promoting abstinence-only education--far from it. But I'm arguing that part of comprehensive sex education should take a page off the abstinence folk, and put sex back in context of relationship. It's time we stop obsessing over who does what how in bed with their committed partner, and obsess instead over making healthy sexual decisions, regardless of gender and orientation. Otherwise we contribute to an ever- cheapening popular culture that would reduce all of us to the level of the bonobos.