Looking over that 1984 Heritage item with the Kristol homosexuality / free speech quote, I also saw this, from Midge Decter:
[Question:] What explains the sudden prevalence of overt homosexuality?
[Decter’s Answer:] One reason for so much homosexuality is the terror that angry, truculent girls and women have introduced into the relations between the sexes. I see young boys absolutely terrified of girls. Now I suppose that boys were always afraid of girls and girls afraid of boys, but what we have now is something quite beyond that. So in my view, homosexuality is a means of escaping from girls, from women. Another contributory factor is that, like divorce, homosexuality is being made light of. It is now common wisdom what any way you do it is equal to any other way you do it, so why not? Still another factor — and no doubt I could get slaughtered for saying this — is that homosexuality provides a handy escape from manhood, which is to say, fatherhood. It is inevitable, when you have women attempting to escape from womanhood, that you will have men attempting to escape from manhood. I couldn’t say with any assurance that I know which came first, this sudden seizure of women running away from being women, or of men running away from being men. But they are certainly interconnected.
Seems almost quaint, the things that some people believed back then (and, who knows, perhaps still do). Seriously, are women that mean — and men comparatively so kind and sweet — that men become homosexual (or even that bisexuals end up leaning more towards homosexuality) to escape from women? Maybe I’ve just been more fortunate in the women I know than Midge Decter has.
As to escape from fatherhood, can that really be so? I suspect that most men who don’t want kids would rather have a vasectomy than changing teams. (I set aside the obvious point that many gay men are trying very hard to become fathers, either by adoption or otherwise, since I don’t know how representative they are.) Yes, I realize there are mechanisms one can hypothesize even despite this: Men know that even if they get vasectomies, most women that they meet won’t want long-term relationships unless there’s some chance of children; so instead of just seeking out those women who don’t want children, the men end up seeking out other men. But really, just how plausible is that?
The greater acceptance of homosexuality is a much more plausible explanation for the greater incidence of overt homosexuality, and perhaps even for the greater actual incidence of homosexuality (though we don’t know for certain whether there had been such an increase, since we can’t know just how much homosexuality there actually was in the past). There are doubtless some people whose sexual practices are subject to substantial influence by society; bisexuals, for instance, are one example. Greater tolerance would likely mean greater experimentation and greater willingness to eventually choose homosexual relationships as one’s primary behavior (or as one of one’s behaviors). But the other explanations just strike me as extraordinarily far-fetched, to the point of casting doubt on the explainer’s understanding of the phenomenon more generally.
Finally, some have argued that some bisexual men may opt for homosexual sex more than for heterosexual sex if homosexual sex is simply easier to get; and, as I’ve mentioned before, there is reason to think that casual homosexual sex is easier to get. I think this is a plausible theory — though “plausible” doesn’t necessarily mean “correct,” and I just don’t know anything about the data on this. But if this is right, and if we marry it with the assumption that people’s practices are as malleable as Decter suggests, then one would think that women’s greater willingness to engage in premarital sex, and in casual sex more broadly (and there is evidence that women do have many more sexual partners on average now than they did in the mid-1900s, though of course there’s always the possibility that they’re just more willing to admit it) would decrease the incidence of homosexuality. “Save men from homosexuality, girls — sleep around more!” I’d like that as a slogan for the anti-gay movement.
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