Pointless way to the Existence of Homosexuality

5 Pointless Ways To Explain The Existence Of Homosexuality
Tue, Jun 23, 2009 by AKA William


A recent Time article, “Why Some Animals (and People) Are Gay,” offers a series of explanations for the existence of homosexuality in nature. The explanations themselves are somewhat pointless because the way the question is framed leads to meaningless answers. The entire article is plagued by what Larry Kramer calls “Doris Goodwin-itis” — an approach to homosexuality that embeds all discussion of within it a framework of contextualized heterosexuality. (Goodwin has argued that Abraham Lincoln was not gay because, although Lincoln slept in a tiny bed with another man for years and wrote him letters proclaiming his love, during Lincoln’s time one man sleeping with another man in a tiny bed for years and proclaiming his love did not mean he was gay, although if that same man were to sleep with a woman in a tiny bed for many years and send her love letters it would mean that he was straight.)
I’m not trying to get all fancy — what I am trying to say is that this Time article presupposes that homosexuality must be explained in terms of heterosexuality, rather than on its own. (In direct contrast to this, I thought Dr. Nathan Bailey’s recent study did a terrific job of trying to understand the unique selective pressures homosexuality places on a species.)
And, on top of this mis-framing, the Time article is, in places, just plain wrong.
Here is a brief summary of the 5 reasons presented:
1. The boys-in-the-locker-room theory. Any guy who played sports in high school knows that homoerotic jokes and towel-snapping are an underlying part of the subculture. Similarly, male bottlenose dolphins use same-sex sexual behavior to maintain and strengthen their social relationships . . . .
2. The emasculation theory. Some male animals might mount other males as a way of denying them access to the ladies.
3. The “oops” theory. Among insects, same-sex sexual behavior is usually a case of mistaken identity.
4. The let’s-see-how-this-thing-works theory. Younger animals (particularly males, and including humans) sometimes engage in same-sex sexual behavior as practice, which may improve their reproductive success when they are ready for a heterosexual relationship later.
5. The two-plus-one theory. Among flour beetles, males routinely force themselves on other males. According to Bailey and Zuk, there’s some evidence that sperm deposited during this male beetle rape is sometimes transferred to a female later on.
Not one of these explains homosexual behavior in ways that couldn’t also be used to explain heterosexual behavior. In fact, saying that a behavior exists in order to increase survivability is meaningless — every behavior exists to increase survivability until that behavior begins to decrease survivability. Saying that homosexuality exists in order increase ultimate survivability is like saying eating exists in order to increase survivability, which is exactly like saying nothing at all.
Now, the article acknowledges a part of this, in a roundabout way, but then veers completely off-course:
What all these theories have in common is that same-sex sexual activity is either an accident or a quirky genetic method of helping males impregnate females. Which raises the evolutionary question of why men and women who are exclusive gay and lesbian exist. One answer is that exclusive gays and lesbians are a relatively new creation: the concept of exclusive homosexuality barely existed before modernity; even a century ago, most same-sex-attracted men and women got married and had kids.
Exclusively gay and lesbian men are not new. Human homosexuality has been going on for as long as there have been people — as any quick Google search or basic knowledge of Greek history proves. Why would the article look to the origins of human sexuality in the Victorian era? I’ll tell you — because that’s where the article was looking for answers the entire time.
Homosexuality is an apparent paradox, but it can’t be a real one because here we are. And here we have been.