John Corvino

Tag: sex

  • Gay Sex Isn’t Weird. Sex Is.

    First published at 365gay.com on January 16, 2009

    Why are our opponents so obsessed with butt sex?

    I’ve personally pondered this question more times than is probably healthy. It occurred to me a few weeks ago when a poster on a conservative blog complained that gays “expect us to approve of butt sex and call it marriage.”

    Really?

    Then last week I was reading an essay by the philosopher Michael Levin. After denying that homosexuality is immoral, he goes on to describe it as “disgusting, nauseating, closely connected with fecal matter. One need not show that anal intercourse is immoral to be warranted in wanting to be as far away from it as possible.”

    I think I would have liked “immoral” better.

    Then, yesterday, I received an e-mail from a 15-year-old living in a small UK village. He’s thinking about coming out to his “mum and dad,” so he asked them what they thought about homosexuality. They told him, in no uncertain terms, that it was “wrong, unnatural, and disgusting.” He continued,

    “But one major point they kept pointing out was… ummm… well they said it was gross how a man would stick his… yeah up another guys… ummm… yeah. And they said it’s where they sorta… yeah I ain’t going into much detail….But what I really want to know is how would you respond to someone who thinks like that?”

    You mean, aside from telling them that they could probably use a big fat one up the bum themselves?

    That’s not what I actually replied.

    Instead I wrote, in part,

    “In the abstract, of course it’s weird (and from some perspectives, gross) to think of a man sticking his penis up another man’s bum. But isn’t all sex weird in the abstract? Sticking a penis in a vagina, which bleeds once a month? Sucking on a penis, something both straight women and gay men do? Pressing your mouth—which you use for eating—against another person’s mouth, and touching tongues, and exchanging saliva (i.e. kissing)? Weird! Gross! (In the abstract, anyway.)”

    Sex makes no sex in the abstract. But then you have urges, and you eventually act on them, and what once seemed weird and gross becomes…wow.

    Our opponents recognize this in their own lives, but they can’t envision it elsewhere. It’s a profound failure of moral imagination—which is essential for empathy, which is at the foundation of the Golden Rule.

    How can one “love thy neighbor as thyself” without any real effort to understand thy neighbor?

    Our opponents contemplate our lives, our love, our longing, and what do they see? “Butt sex.” Such obtuseness is depressing.

    Of course, not all gays engage in “butt sex”—some of us never do—and not only gays engage in “butt sex.”

    Of course, most of what we do in bed is exactly the same as most of what they do in bed: cuddling and touching and caressing and kissing and sucking and rubbing and so on. (Not to mention sleeping, which when shared regularly can be beautifully intimate as well.)

    What we do is the same not just in terms of formal acts. It’s the same in terms of being weird, and silly, and messy, and sublime.

    Yes, Virginia, we make funny faces when we come, too.

    It’s always easier to criticize the weirdness in others than to confront the weirdness in the mirror. (Perhaps that’s why mirrors in the bedroom are thought to be kinky.)

    Our opponents take anxiety about sex—a natural and virtually universal human phenomenon—and wield it as a weapon against us. Shame on them.

    As for the marriage-equality fight, what do you say to someone who thinks that we expect her “to approve of butt sex and call it marriage”?

    Thankfully, another poster responded to that one more effectively than I ever could.

    The respondent described herself as a lifelong Christian, daughter of a conservative minister, and “personally against gay marriage but passionate about gay civil rights.” (This description will strike some as paradoxical, but bravo to her for understanding the difference between personal beliefs and public policy.)

    She then warmly depicts a gay couple she knows who have adopted two special-needs children. The children, she writes, “RADIATE happiness at each other, their parents, and the people around them. Somehow ‘butt sex’ doesn’t seem to neatly contain all the emotions, commitment, and wondrous devotion that their parents’ relationship has provided them with.”

    She concludes by chiding her fellow Christian, “Please think carefully before you speak.”

    Amen to that.

  • Bad Science I: Horny, but Not Human

    First published at 365gay.com on January 7, 2008

    When an article about “fruit flies” popped up on a gay website, at first I thought it was about straight women who gravitate toward gay men. (The other, uglier term for such women is “fag hag.”)

    Alas, the article was referring to actual insects, the annoying little ones that remind you to throw away overripe bananas. Apparently, some researchers at Penn State University have discovered that by getting groups of male flies “drunk” with alcohol fumes, they can induce homosexual behavior. (Just like frat boys.) They observed this behavior in a small transparent chamber, which they called—I am not making this up—a “Flypub.”

    According to newscientist.com,

    “The first time they were exposed to alcohol, groups of male flies became noticeably intoxicated but kept themselves to themselves. But with repeated doses of alcohol on successive days, homosexual courtship became common. From the third day onwards, the flies were forming ‘courtship chains’ of amorous males.”

    Yes. And by the fourth day, they were redecorating the Flypub in sleek mid-century modern furniture. By the fifth day, they were serving Cosmopolitans and debating the relative fabulousness of Martha Stewart’s new Wedgwood line at Macy’s. And so on.

    The article continues,

    “[Lead researcher Kyung-An Han] argues that the drunken flies provide a good model to explore how alcohol affects human sexual behavior. While the ability of alcohol to loosen human inhibitions is well known, it is difficult for scientists to study.”

    Of course it is. Imagine the grant application:

    “Describe the proposed methodology.”

    “Um, well, I’m going to get a bunch of college students drunk and naked, then record their behavior.”

    Sounds like a shoo-in for funding, no?

    It’s not that I doubt the merits of such research. Granted, I’m far more interested in figuring out how to keep fruit flies out of my kitchen than how to make them horny. Still, I appreciate the value of scientific inquiry—all else being equal, the more we know about the world, the better.

    My problem arises when people start using these studies to draw conclusions about human romantic behavior. While Han has warned against being too quick with such inferences, other researchers and commentators have not been so cautious.

    For example, when Austrian researchers in 2005 genetically manipulated a female fruit fly to induce homosexual behavior, Dr. Michael Weiss, chairman of the department of biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University, told the International Herald Tribune, “Hopefully this will take the discussion about [human] sexual preferences out of the realm of morality and put it in the realm of science.”

    I hope it does no such thing. For two reasons: first, because human sexuality is far richer and more complex than fruit-fly mounting behavior. (Fruit flies don’t pout if you don’t call the next day—or so I’m told.)

    Second, and more generally, because science and morality tell us different things. Science tells us something about why we behave as we do. It does not tell us how we SHOULD behave, which is the domain of morality. Science cannot replace morality or vice-versa.

    To put the point another way: while scientific study can reveal the biological origin of our feelings and behaviors, it can’t tell us what we should do with them. Should we embrace them? Tolerate them? Change them? Those are moral questions, and simply observing fruit flies—or humans, for that matter—is insufficient to answering them.

    But can’t these studies prove that homosexual attraction is “natural”? Not in any useful sense. Specifically, not in any sense that would distinguish good feelings and behaviors from bad ones. Discovering the biological origin of a trait is different from discovering its value.

    Beyond conflating morality with science, popular commentators on these studies have an unfortunate tendency toward oversimplification.

    Consider last year’s fruit-fly study at the University of Illinois, which the gay newsmagazine The Advocate announced with the headline, “Study finds gay gene in fruit flies.”

    Except that it didn’t. What the study found was a genetic mutation in fruit flies that rendered them essentially bisexual. Scientists could then switch the flies’ behavior between heterosexuality and homosexuality through the use of synapse-altering drugs.

    In other words, the study neither found a “gay gene” in fruit flies nor answered any questions about how hardwired or malleable human sexual orientation might be.

    Meanwhile, one fruit fly who participated in the Penn State study released the following statement: “Dude, I was so drunk that day—I don’t know what happened!”

  • Compassion for Craig?

    First published on September 4, 2007, at 365gay.com

    Jim West, Jim McGreevey, Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Bob Allen, David Vitter. Now Larry Craig.

    Public figures’ getting caught with their pants down is nothing new. What is new is a high-tech culture that makes exposure likely, rapid, and widespread. Larry Craig pleaded guilty to “disorderly conduct” in Minnesota in the hopes that no one would notice in his home state of Idaho. A quarter-century ago, when Craig started his congressional career, that strategy might actually have worked.

    For those who haven’t been following the news: Craig is a U.S. Senator who was arrested in June for soliciting sex in a Minneapolis airport men’s room. He also happens to be a staunch opponent of gay rights, with a zero voting scorecard from the Human Rights Campaign.

    People love sex scandals, and they especially love a sex scandal that brings a moralistic finger-wagger to his knees (ahem). Perhaps that’s why the above list —taken from recent memory, and by no means exhaustive—includes only one Democrat. Liberals enjoy sex as much as anyone, and they surely have their skeletons. But when someone soliciting forbidden sex is known for railing against sexual sin, it makes for a juicier story.

    What is striking about the Craig saga is this: despite his over thirty years of public service, virtually no one rallied to his defense. Conservatives view him as a deviant. (Mitt Romney, whose Idaho presidential campaign Craig had chaired, referred to Craig’s behavior as “disgusting” before the senator even had an opportunity to release a statement.) Liberals view him as a hypocrite. Absolutely no one views him as credible. (His claim that he touched the arresting officer’s foot because he has a “wide stance” rang especially hollow.)

    Various sides in the culture wars will try to make an example of Craig. Gay-rights opponents will spin the story as further evidence of homosexuality’s sordid nature, not to mention its vicious power. After all, if seemingly God-fearing men like Ted Haggard and Larry Craig can succumb to such behavior, who among us is safe?

    Gay-rights advocates, by contrast, will spin it as evidence of the dangers of the closet. After all, openly gay people generally neither want nor need to troll restrooms for clandestine encounters.

    The opponents are right to point out that sex is powerful, in a way that can make smart people do dumb, sometimes disastrous things. They’re wrong to think that this point is any more applicable to homosexuality than to heterosexuality (note Vitter’s name in the list above).

    True, straight people don’t typically seek sex in public restrooms. But that’s partly because (1) public restrooms are mostly segregated by sex and (2) “quickie” sex is anatomically less convenient for women—which still hasn’t prevented some from joining the “mile high club” in cramped airplane lavatories.

    The bigger reason is (3) straight people don’t feel the desperate need to conceal their erotic interests in the way closeted gay people do.

    And that’s where gay-rights advocates make a decisive point: the culture of the closet is unhealthy for everyone involved. Lying about one’s sex life makes it easier to lie about other things; it also precludes the counsel of friends in an area where such counsel is desperately needed. (See previous point about sex being powerful.)

    Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank put it well in a Newsweek interview regarding the Mark Foley scandal: “Being in the closet doesn’t make you do dumb things, doesn’t justify you doing dumb things, it just makes them likelier.” Frank should know: he was once embroiled in a scandal of his own involving a gay prostitute living in his Washington apartment during the 1980’s, when Frank was still closeted.

    I’ll concede one point to gay-rights opponents: the fact that Larry Craig sought sex with men doesn’t prove he was wrong to condemn gay marriage, oppose workplace protections for gays, or support the military ban. He was wrong about those things independently of his sex life. In any case, our lives don’t always reflect our best judgment.

    But the fact that Larry Craig sought sex with men does mean that he ought to have mustered more compassion for gays than his public stance suggested. (It’s one area where his stance was decidedly narrow.)

    It’s easy to call Craig a deviant, a liar, and a hypocrite. It’s hard to feel compassion for someone who showed little of it to those who deal openly with challenges he knew privately. But compassion is still a virtue. Craig may not deserve it, but right now, he desperately needs it.

  • Sadness, Not Smirks, for Haggard

    First published in Between the Lines on November 16, 2006

    A few weeks ago I was in Ripon, Wisconsin, for a same-sex marriage debate with Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family, when the Ted Haggard story broke. Haggard, then president of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of the massive New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was being accused by former Denver prostitute Ted Jones of having regular drug-fueled gay trysts with Jones over a period of several years.

    “So, do you think there’s anything to this?” I asked Stanton, who told me that Haggard was not only his pastor but also a friend.

    “No way,” he replied. (At the time no tapes had yet been released, and Haggard was denying the story.) “It’s just incongruous. John, it would be like finding out that you secretly have a wife and family in the suburbs. No.”

    (Betty, if you’re reading this, be sure to get Timmy a haircut before his little-league game this weekend, and give Mary Jane a kiss from Daddy.)

    Kidding aside, my reaction to the story’s unfolding was marked more by sadness than schadenfreude. I could see the shock on my friend and opponent Glenn Stanton’s face the next day, as further revelations made it increasingly clear that Haggard was pretty much guilty as charged. I was sad for Haggard, sad for his family, and sad for all the people he had mislead.

    But he deserved his downfall, didn’t he? Certainly. Here was a leader in a movement that actively fights gay rights. Haggard openly proclaimed that the Bible tells us everything we need to know about homosexuality — namely, that it’s just plain wrong. And as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, he helped to spread this view far and wide–apparently carrying on an affair with a male prostitute all the while.

    So I wasn’t surprised that many relished his fall from grace. A few days after returning from my trip I ran into a friend who, upon my mentioning Haggard’s name, gleefully started dancing and singing “Another one bites the dust…” Schadenfreude–taking pleasure at the misfortune of others–is a natural human tendency, especially when those others are royal hypocrites. And it’s not just schadenfreude, it’s relief: one less person will be out there spreading lies about gays (though others will doubtless take his place).

    Haggard is Exhibit N in a recent line of examples of the dangers of the closet. Some of them are Republicans, some Democrats; some are religious leaders, some not. While their stories differ in detail, they all highlight a major pitfall of trying to fight one’s gayness, rather than embracing it openly.

    I am of course not saying that when heterosexually married people act on homosexual desires, it automatically proves that they ought to have been doing so all along. Whether they ought to have been doing so depends, crucially, their own predominant sexual orientation, as well as on the moral status of homosexual conduct.

    Nor am I saying, “If you don’t let us be gay, then we will become lying, cheating, predatory assholes.” I am saying that a world that doesn’t provide healthy avenues for gay people to pursue intimacy should not be terribly surprised when some turn to unhealthy ones. Barney Frank put it well in a Newsweek interview regarding the Mark Foley scandal: “Being in the closet doesn’t make you do dumb things, doesn’t justify you doing dumb things, it just makes them likelier.”

    Of course, there are non-closeted people who (like Haggard and former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey) commit adultery or (like Foley) chase after sixteen-year-old employees. But it doesn’t follow that the closet is not a contributing factor, any more than non-smokers with cancer disprove that smoking increases cancer risk. It’s common sense, really: double lives are a recipe for danger. There are other recipes, to be sure, but this one’s pretty reliable.

    Partly this is because the closet demands, not just a lie, but an entire pattern of lies, which in turn make deception easier in other areas of life. Partly it’s because this pattern is emotionally and spiritually draining. And partly it’s because deception poisons relationships, cutting one off from the friends who could otherwise monitor one’s behavior, offering support, guidance, and an occasional good smack upside the head when needed.

    Haggard’s much-needed smack did not come from his friends: it came from a public scandal. In response, he plans to begin a lengthy process of “spiritual restoration,” which begins with owning up to one’s sins. And that saddens me too–not because I’m against his (or anyone’s) acknowledging fault, but because there’s good reason to believe that Haggard and his advisers will miss the key ones. Homosexuality is not a sin. Making the world needlessly more difficult for gay and lesbian people surely is.

  • The Pedophilia Smear

    First published in Between the Lines on October 19, 2006

    The recent scandal involving Rep. Mark Foley sending sexually explicit text messages to sixteen- and seventeen-year-old former congressional pages has resurrected the ugly stereotype of gays as pedophiles. I am no longer surprised when I hear this sort of garbage from the Family Research Council or Paul Cameron. But when the Wall Street Journal links the two by criticizing those “who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys,” it makes me nervous—not to mention angry. (Congressional Democrats have been no better, playing the “child predator” card for all it’s worth.)

    First, a little bit of perspective on the scandal driving this. The young men whom Foley courted were sixteen and seventeen—not adults, but not children either. The age of consent in Washington, D.C. (and many other places) is sixteen. Issues of potential harassment aside, had Foley had sex with these young men in Washington, it would have been perfectly legal.

    Yet as far as we know, he did not have sex with them: he e-mailed and text-messaged them. Foley may be a jerk, a hypocrite, a creep—even a harasser—but there’s no evidence that he qualifies as a child molester.

    Research shows that gay men are no more likely than straight men to molest children. Moreover, mental health professionals are virtually unanimous in recognizing that most males who molest boys are not “gay” by any reasonable definition of that term: they have no interest in other adult males and often have successful relationships with adult females. This fact should not be surprising, because a young boy is at least as different qua sexual object from an adult male as an adult female is. In other words, it’s one thing to be attracted to adults of the same sex, it’s quite another to be attracted to children of either sex. Lumping these categories together not along maligns innocent people; it distracts us from the real threats to children. (For a useful analysis of the research in this area, see this article by Mark Pietrzyk.)

    But it gets worse. For the pedophilia myth is yet another case of right-wingers arguing from what is not true to what does not follow. Suppose, purely for the sake of argument, there were a higher incidence of child molestation among homosexual males than heterosexual males. Should gay men no longer be permitted to be teachers? Pediatricians? Day care providers?

    Be careful how you answer. Because one thing the research does clearly show is that men are far more likely to be child molesters than women. So if you think gay men should be restricted from these positions under the hypothetical (and false) assumption that they are more likely to be child molesters than straight men, you should conclude—in the actual, non-hypothetical world—that straight men should be thus restricted, and that all such jobs should go to lesbians and straight females. We know for a fact that men pose a higher risk of child molestation and other crimes than women do.

    Yet somehow, when it comes to straight men, we are able to distinguish between those behaving well and those behaving badly. This double standard was quite apparent as the Foley scandal broke. Around the same time, admitted heterosexual Charles Carl Roberts walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and fatally shot five female students. It turns out that Roberts told his wife that he had previously molested young girls. Yet no one took this story as tarnishing heterosexuality. No one concluded, “Aha! Can’t trust straights.” That would be a foolish inference.

    Just as foolish as making inferences about all gays from the case of Mark Foley—who, it is worth repeating, did not even have sex with the pages (as far as we know), much less kill anyone.

    The point is that some gays, just like some straights, behave badly. This is not news. Nor is it a reason to draw blanket inferences about gays.

    Some years ago I was invited to Nevada to debate a Mormon minister on same-sex marriage. One of his central arguments—I am not making this up—was that we should not support same-sex marriage because research shows that gays are more likely to engage in domestic violence than straights. I had never heard of the studies he cited, so it was difficult to challenge him directly on his sources. Instead, I asked, “So, because some asshole beats his husband, I’m supposed to stop loving mine? And everyone else should stop supporting me in my loving, non-abusive relationship? Is that what you’re arguing?”

    He never had an answer to that.

  • Foley’s Folly: A Lesson

    First published in Between the Lines, October 5, 2006

    It is early yet to talk about “the moral of the story” with respect to Mark Foley. Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, resigned last week after it was revealed that he had been sending sexually explicit e-mails and instant messages to underage congressional pages. Here’s a sample (the spelling is left uncorrected):

    Foley: what you wearing
    Teen: normal clothes
    Teen: tshirt and shorts
    Foley: um so a big buldge….
    Foley: love to slip them off of you
    Teen: haha
    Foley: and [grab] the one eyed snake….
    Teen: not tonight…dont get to excited
    Foley: well your hard
    Teen: that is true
    Foley: and a little horny
    Teen: and also tru
    Foley: get a ruler and measure it for me

    The FBI is investigating, and criminal charges appear likely. Though initial reports involved relatively tame e-mails to a sixteen-year-old former page, the IM’s (such as the one cited above) appear to involve a different youth about whom little has been reported. The age-of-consent is 16 in D.C., but it’s 18 in Florida, unless the accused is under 24 (Foley is 52).

    Foley was long rumored to be gay. Nonetheless, he was a popular Republican congressman who prior to the scandal was considered a shoo-in for re-election. He was also the co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, an outspoken foe of sexual predators on the Internet, and a vocal supporter of President Clinton’s impeachment.

    Hypocrite? Almost certainly. Child molester? Probably not. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are not quite children (they’re not quite adults, either), and there is no evidence yet that Foley actually made or attempted to make physical contact with the objects of his Internet dalliance. Still, as the congressman surely knew, Florida law makes it a third-degree felony to transmit “material harmful to minors by electronic device” and defines such material to include descriptions of “nudity, sexual conduct, or sexual excitement.”

    There’s also the issue of sexual harassment and abuse of power. Even former pages have strong incentive to stay in the good graces of the congressmen who employed them. While the youth in the above exchange does not seem (judging from the text) to be terribly troubled by the banter, at least one other complained that Foley’s advances were “sick sick sick sick sick…”

    Without a doubt, Foley did some stupid, inappropriate, and unethical things. Granted, sexual desire causes many of us to do stupid (though not necessarily inappropriate or unethical) things from time to time. Granted, the case would garner a somewhat (though not completely) different reaction if Foley were female–and particularly, if he were an attractive female. If Foley looked like Demi Moore, the pages would be telling one another “Dude, yeah!!!” instead of “sick sick sick sick sick.”

    But the “gay angle” on this contains an important lesson, one that is unfortunately likely to be either distorted or missed entirely amidst the partisan political drama. It is that gay people, like everyone else, need healthy outlets for sexual expression. When those are blocked–because of political ambition or a repressive church or a right wing bent on ignoring basic science–cases like Foley’s (or former Spokane mayor Jim West’s or former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey’s) become more likely, as do far greater tragedies like the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal.

    This is not to deny that Foley is responsible for his actions. There is no contradiction in holding a person fully responsible for wrongdoing and holding others responsible for enhancing the conditions that make such wrongdoing likely.

    The right wing is doing just that by refusing to face some simple facts: There are gay people in the world. Gay people need love and affection like everyone else. When people repress that need in themselves or others, it tends to assert itself in unfortunate and sometimes tragic ways.

    Like most people, I want to shake Mark Foley and yell: What the hell were you thinking? But I also want to add the following: It didn’t have to be this way. There are young men of legal age who are not your subordinates who would have been happy to remove their shorts for you. And there would have been nothing wrong with that person. An open, honest, consensual sex life is not only possible for gay men; it’s healthy. The alternatives can be disastrous.

    Yes, it is early to talk about the moral of the story. But there are lessons to be learned, and we ignore them at our peril.

  • The Pope’s Impotent Argument

    First published in Between the Lines, May 18, 2006.

    Last week Pope Benedict spoke out against gay marriage and civil unions. “Only the rock of total and irrevocable love between a man and a woman is capable of being the foundation of building a society that becomes a home for all mankind,” the pope declared, speaking at a conference on marriage and the family on May 11. He added that marriage was between a man and a woman “who are open to the transmission of life and thus cooperate with God in the generation of new human beings.”

    The Catholic Church’s opposition to homosexuality has never been mainly about the bible. This fact is to its credit: taken literally and as a whole, the bible is an unreliable moral guide; taken critically, it fails to provide good grounds for a blanket condemnation of homosexuality.

    Instead, the Church’s main arguments against homosexuality have been rooted in “natural law,” and specifically the premise that sex must be open to procreation. Thus, all deliberately non-procreative sex is sin.

    Consider for a moment the implications of this premise. Contraception is an obvious no-no, given the Church’s position. So is masturbation. These facts are enough to make hypocrites of many Catholics who condemn homosexuality “because the Church says it’s wrong.”

    Also, forbidden, though far less often discussed, is orgasmic non-coital sex between married heterosexual partners, such as oral sex, masturbation of one’s spouse, or anal sex. (Such acts are permitted as foreplay, but never on their own.) Official Catholic doctrine permits no exceptions here. Imagine the case of a man injured in such a way that he can no longer pursue coital sex, but still enjoys performing oral sex on his wife for the intimacy it achieves between them. It would seem permissible (perhaps even selfless and admirable) for him to engage in such sex, but the Church says no.

    Thus far, at least the Church is consistent in its views. (Stubborn, perhaps–even foolish–but consistent.) But there’s one implication of the “openness to procreation” premise that the Church refuses to acknowledge. If sex must be open to procreation, then it should be wrong for sterile (or postmenopausal) heterosexual married partners to have sex. Imagine a woman whose ovaries and uterus have been removed for medical reasons. Clearly, her sexual acts will never be “open to the transmission of life” in any morally meaningful way. But the Church declines to condemn such acts.

    Why the apparent inconsistency? Catholic natural law theorists answer that such acts can still be of “the reproductive kind.” But it is difficult to make sense of this claim, except as a lame attempt to deny unpalatable conclusions that clearly follow from the Church’s position. If a sexual act cannot result in procreation and the couple knows it, then how is the act “of the reproductive kind”? Political scientist Andrew Koppelman expresses the problem well. In his book The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law, he writes:

    “A sterile person’s genitals are no more suitable for generation than an unloaded gun is suitable for shooting….Contingencies of deception and fright aside, all objects that are not loaded guns are morally equivalent in this context: it is not more wrong, and certainly not closer to homicide, to point a gun known to be unloaded at someone and pull the trigger than it is to point one’s finger and say ‘bang!’ And if the two acts have the same moral character in this context, why is the same not equally true of, on the one hand, vaginal intercourse between a heterosexual couple who know they cannot reproduce, and on the other, oral or anal sex between any couple? Just as, in the case of the gun, neither act is more homicidal than the other, so in the sexual cases, neither act is more reproductive than the other” (pp. 87-88).

    I once presented this argument before a university audience, and one conservative Catholic student told me that I was ignoring the possibility of miracles. I told him that if he’s going to invoke miracles, then why can’t I get pregnant? He responded–I’m not making this up–“But that’s impossible!” Apparently, God’s miraculous power is limited by conservative comfort-levels.

    Italy is clearly on the brink of recognizing same-sex unions. Anticipating this, the pope declared that “it has become urgent to avoid confusion between [marriage] and other types of unions which are based on a love that is weak.” If only the pope could see the weakness of his own stance.

  • Open Relationships and Double Standards

    First published in Between the Lines on February 9, 2006

    As I embark upon a week’s worth of same-sex marriage debates with Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family, I am bracing myself for his arguments. (There’s a useful summary of his position here.)

    In every debate we’ve had, Stanton has brought up Jonathan Yarbrough and Cody Rogahn, the first same-sex couple in Provincetown, Massachusetts to receive a marriageapplication. Yarbrough and Rogahn have an open relationship. “I think it’s possible to love more than one person and have more than one partner,” Yarbrough told a reporter on the eve of their wedding. “In our case…we have an open marriage.”

    This admission is bound to generate an “Aha!” from any same-sex marriage opponent within earshot. “See—we told you so!” they sneer.

    Told us what?, I wonder. That some gay people have open relationships? Well, duh.

    Glenn’s argument seems to be that:

    1. Yarbrough and Rogahn are representative of same-sex couples in general, and

    2. Allowing such couples to marry will erode respect for monogamy, thereby wreaking havoc on society. Therefore

    3. Society should reject same-sex marriage.

    Whenever I hear this argument, I think of the first “open” couple I knew—or, to be more precise, the first one of which I was aware. One member was a fellow graduate student; the other, a professor at a different school. At the time I knew them (we’ve since fallen out of touch) they had been together over 15 years.

    Their names? Katie and George.

    Yes, the first “open” couple I knew was heterosexual—and married. Aha, yourself.

    Katie and George were fully legally married, despite always intending to have an open relationship. They were just as legally married as Mr. and Mrs. Stanton, with all the rights, duties, and privileges appertaining.

    Interestingly, conservatives never point to people like Katie and George as evidence that heterosexuals should no longer be allowed to marry. Doing so would commit the fallacy of hasty generalization (among others).

    By similar logic, we could point to Britney Spears’s 55-hour (pre-Federline) marriage to Jason Allen Alexander and then conclude that celebrities should no longer be allowed to marry (not a bad idea, actually).

    Stanton’s elaboration of his argument is revealing. “If we allow Jonathan Yarbrough and Cody Rogahn to marry,” he asks audiences, “what will that say to other married couples? What will it say to the heterosexual couple living next door? The husband might think, ‘Hey, that’s not a bad idea. I should keep my options open.’ How will that affect their marriage?”

    Memo to Glenn Stanton: there are already heterosexual couples living next door to Jonathan Yarbrough and Cody Rogahn. (Or so I assume: the couple lives in Glenwood, Minnesota; population 3000—not exactly a gay mecca.) Yet their neighbors are not clamoring to have open relationships any more than they are clamoring to have gay sex.

    Nor are Katie and George’s neighbors. Nor, for that matter, are Britney Spears’s neighbors (which is not to equate her stunt with Katie and George’s unconventional but enduring union). The moral of the story? Grownups can think for themselves.

    What are conservatives so afraid of? Some homosexual couples, like some heterosexual couples, are what our parents used to call “swingers.” Marriage might or might not change that, but it certainly won’t entail that every other married couple will follow in their footsteps.

    Nobody knows exactly how monogamous gays are compared to straights. More to the point, nobody knows how monogamous gays would be in a society that granted them marriage rights. (If you exclude people from major social institutions like marriage, you shouldn’t be surprised if they are less likely to conform to social norms.)

    What we do know is that there’s a serious double standard involved in allowing people like Katie and George to marry but forbidding people like Jonathan and Cody to do so (except in Massachusetts). You don’t have to approve of everything a couple does in order to respect their right to marry.

    But the most striking thing about Stanton’s position is not its logical gaps, or even its warped view of gay life. The most striking thing is its dim view of heterosexuals, as gullible copycats who can’t make simple moral distinctions. The good people of Glenwood deserve better.

  • In Defense of Pleasure

    First published September 15, 2005, in Between the Lines.

    One of the delights of being a philosophy professor is that I occasionally come across charming texts in the history of ethics. Here’s Mary Warnock in her 1960 classic Ethics Since 1900:

    Many people…feel strongly that some kinds of behavior, though utterly harmless to other people, should nevertheless be avoided for their own sakes, and that this is a moral matter. They may feel, for instance, that to indulge in some kinds of pleasurable activities, such as reading novels in the mornings, is wrong…because they feel that to indulge in them would be to start some kind of downward trend, some degeneration which is their duty to avoid.

    Reading novels in the morning?

    Perhaps reading novels in the morning is the 1960 equivalent of watching reruns of “The Surreal Life.” But I’m sure that even Mrs. Warnock (as the dust-jacket blurb quaintly calls her) could think of better examples of pleasurable activities that, though harmless to others, supposedly lead to degeneration.

    I came across Warnock’s text shortly after returning from Last Splash, an annual gay party in Austin, Texas. Last Splash, which takes place on Lake Travis at Hippie Hollow, Texas’s only clothing-optional public park, has recently evolved into a long weekend of circuit-party events in addition to the activities at the lake. There’s nudity. There’s alcohol and other drugs. There’s flirting and kissing and groping and all kinds of so-called “naughty” behavior. In short, it’s the kind of event that makes Pat Robertson’s skin crawl.

    And I love it.

    Let me backpedal for just a second before proceeding full speed ahead (with a column that’s bound to be quoted out of context anyway). There are aspects of Splash weekend that I find deeply troubling—for example, the growing use of crystal meth and other hard drugs—and I strongly oppose them. You should too. But these activities need not be—and for the majority of us, are not—what the weekend is all about.

    What the weekend IS about varies from person to person, but the common thread is pleasure—and in particular, physical pleasure. Why read novels in the morning when you can swim naked in the refreshing waters of Hippie Hollow, or sunbathe on the rocky shoreline, or kiss a beautiful stranger on a crowded dance floor? (Or take him back to your room, where you can do more than just kiss?)

    Some readers will be surprised to find me—“the Gay Moralist”—seeming to advocate hedonism. Isn’t that precisely the sort of self-indulgent posture that our critics love falsely to charge us with?

    Yes, it is. Which is why I aim frequently to prove that gays are as responsible, altruistic, and moral as anyone else. But let’s not make the mistake of thinking that, because we are not interested only in pleasure (as hedonists are), it follows that we aren’t interested in pleasure at all.

    That fallacy—call it the “prude’s fallacy”—is by no means new. Hedonists and their opponents have been around at least since Plato. I for one think the hedonists are wrong: there are goods besides pleasure. But from the fact that pleasure isn’t the only good, it does not follow that pleasure isn’t good at all, as the prude falsely believes.

    To deny pleasure’s value is just silly. And to deny that sex is sometimes mostly about pleasure—and nonetheless valuable for that fact—is even sillier. Straight people know this, and are generally quite comfortable with it, the right-wing’s protestations notwithstanding.

    It is easy to understand why gay-rights advocates feel defensive on this point. Responding to myths about our being obsessed with sex, we sometimes appear to disclaim any interest in it at all. Eager to show that we understand its deep, serious, transformational aspects, we downplay its raw, playful, recreational side. Fighting for marriage rights, we sweep “casual sex” under the carpet. And these defense mechanisms are a shame, for they obscure the simple joy of physical intimacy.

    This is not to say that the pleasures of sex are purely physical (far from it) or that sex is the only or the most important kind of physical pleasure. Gourmet food, fine wine, a vigorous massage, lavender-scented candles, a beautiful sunset…pick your favorite(s). They all have a place in a well-rounded life.

    Nor do I deny that pleasure can be taken too far, can get in the way of other goods, can be dangerous when out of balance. That’s true of most good things, although pleasure is especially tempting in this regard. Still, part of encouraging people to “play safe” is encouraging them to “play.” All of us need to do that sometimes.

    And so when I see thousands of people descend upon Austin to celebrate themselves and their bodies and their affection (even lust) for one another, I haven’t the least inclination to wag my finger. Perhaps I would if I thought that there was nothing more to their lives than this—but that too would be a fallacy. It’s possible to read novels on vacation and still hit the philosophy books with full force later on.

  • Luther Vandross’s Glass Closet

    First published July 7, 2005, in Between the Lines.

    Luther Vandross was the avatar of romance. Other people’s.

    The famed R&B singer, who died last week at 54, zealously declined to discuss his personal life, telling reporters that it was “none of your damn business.” Indeed, when his biographer Craig Seymour tried repeatedly to broach the subject of his sexuality, the singer told him, “You’re trying to zero in on something that you are never ever gonna get….Look at you, just circling the airport. You ain’t never gonna land.”

    Well, I’m just going to come out and say it. Vandross was gay.

    Not that I’ve ever slept with him, or even know him personally. But his gayness was as much an open secret as Liberace’s or Peter Allen’s. And like those two similarly flamboyant and energetic performers, he was a master of hiding in plain sight, neither confirming nor denying what anyone with even moderately well-tuned gaydar knew anyway.

    So Seymour’s biography, Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross, dances around the question it can’t quite ignore. As reviewer J.S. Hall described the book:

    Any motions of love and/or romance are followed by the observation that Vandross has never revealed any of his beloveds’ names or gender. And while they are not traits exclusive to gay men, Vandross’s near-total immersion into his work, his fluctuating weight, his penchant for perfectionism (and his bitchiness when things don’t live up to his expectations), his love of flashy stage clothes and the color pink, his flare for interior design and his ownership and display of a homoerotic David Hockney painting, all strongly suggest someone who’s focused far too much time, energy and effort into submerging an aspect of himself that he doesn’t wish to deal with.

    Or at least, that he didn’t wish to deal with publicly and directly. Instead, Vandross dropped hints, as when he retained the masculine pronouns in his 1994 recording of Roberta Flack’s hit “Killing Me Softly”: “I felt all flushed with fever, embarrassed by the crowd. I felt he’d found my letters and read each one out loud.”

    Such subtlety — some would say “evasiveness” — was consistent with Vandross’s general approach: “I’m more into poetry and metaphor, and I would much rather imply something rather than to blatantly state it,” he once told a reporter. “You blatantly state stuff sometimes when you can’t think of a poetic way to say it.”

    True enough. But you also use poetry and metaphor sometimes when you’re afraid or embarrassed to state things plainly. One can now only wonder at the full explanation for Vandross’s legendary non-answers.

    Perhaps one cannot blame the obituary-writers for being as elusive as Vandross on the subject of his sexuality. Most do not mention it at all, and the few that mention it do so only obliquely. The following, from the AP story, is typical: “The lifelong bachelor never had any children, but doted on his nieces and nephews. The entertainer said his busy lifestyle made marriage difficult; besides, it wasn’t what he wanted.”

    Well, duh — unless “marriage” is read to include same-sex marriage. But most readers won’t make that connection, and Vandross would presumably be just fine with that.

    Some readers will no doubt think I’m being inappropriate. Perhaps you agree with Vandross that it’s none of our damn business, and perhaps it isn’t. But you can’t fault me for pointing out that a celebrity who made a career out of singing about romance adopted a rigorous “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding his own. Even if his sexuality is none of our damn business, the irony of his public posture certainly is.

    Or perhaps you’ll insist that coming out is a personal choice. Of course it is. But it doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t encourage people to make that choice, or that if they don’t we must be complicit in whatever public posture they assume, including those that treat gayness as a dirty little secret.

    And this, ultimately, is what bothers me about hide-in-plain-sight gays: their implication that same-sex love is something unmentionable. As the philosopher Richard Mohr puts it:

    People need to let the gayness of individuals come up where it is relevant, rather than going along with the shaming social convention of the closet, the demand that every gay person is bound to keep every other gay person’s secret secret. For the closet is the site where anti-gay loathing and gay self-loathing mutually reinforce each other. Even people who are out of the closet demean themselves when they maintain other people’s closets. For the closet’s secret is a dirty little secret that degrades all people.

    Luther Vandross was often rightly praised for the honesty of his music. If only he had taken that honesty one step further.