Once You Go Gay, You'll Never Turn Away

Someone left a copy of Tuesday's Courier-Journal lying around in the library today, and the headline caught my eye.  KY: BAN ON GAY MARRIAGE IS NOT BIASED.  Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear's lawyer argued in a long brief filed with the US Supreme Court:

"Men and women, whether heterosexual or homosexual, cannot marry persons of the same sex" under Kentucky law, making the law non-discriminatory.

According to another box in the front-page article, Beshear's lawyer, Leigh-Gross Latherow, also argued that "Allowing only opposite-sex marriage promotes birth rates, 'ensuring humanity's continued existence.'"  On this logic it would be reasonable to ban celibate clergy or a religion like Christianity that exalts sexual abstinence, on the ground that such doctrines and practices hinder birth rates and endanger humanity's continued existence.  Does Latherow seriously believe that same-sex marriage will become so popular as to affect population growth?

The reporter, Andrew Wolfson, commented that the "Argument mirrors Virginia's against interracial marriage."  Since that argument failed to convince the Court in 1967, it probably won't be effective now; so why do Brashear and his lawyer think it will?

I'm mildly worried that some advocates of same-sex marriage will attack the argument from another position, using the born-gay view of sexual orientation as "status" to argue that we have to gay-marry because our genes make us, and you can't go against the Will of the Gene. I've pointed out before that the decision in Loving v. Virginia significantly didn't invoke a putative 'racial orientation' that compelled the Lovings to marry each other rather than partners of their own race(s); such an argument seems never to have crossed anyone's mind, despite the widespread racist belief that interracial liaisons violated not just religion but a fundamental biological mechanism that caused blacks to be sexually unattractive to whites.

As with Latherlos' assumption that if same-sex marriage is allowed, it will spread through the population like a radioactive virus and humanity will cease to exist, the white racist belief in the repulsiveness of black people coexisted with its opposite: that the black male especially was primally irresistible to white persons.  Similarly, antigay bigots believe both that homosexuality is naturally disgusting, and mysteriously, fatally attractive: if it's not forbidden and demonized, everyone will go gay.  (Once You Go Gay, You'll Never Turn Away.)  One of the corollaries of the born-gay claim, usually invoked by gay Christians, is that heterosexual copulation is somehow "unnatural" for the congenitally gay, and vice versa -- except for jaded degenerate heteros who dabble in buggery or sapphism out of boredom or mere degraded wickedness.

And of course one of the problems with the idea of sexual orientation as a status is that it has no room for bisexuality.  If gay people should be allowed to be gay, and to marry each other, because we are trapped by our genes and compelled to do what most people would be disgusted to do, then shouldn't bisexuals be compelled to live and marry heterosexually?  The implicit logic is that if you can function heterosexually, you must do so, and homosexuality can only be tolerated if we (pitiful slaves to our gay genes) can get satisfaction no other way. The tantrums thrown by many gay people over the idea that homosexuality is a choice probably connect to the hostility shown by many gay people to bisexuals: either they wickedly refuse to be heterosexual when they could be, or they are closet cases who just pretend not to be 100% gay in order to avoid stigma.  If we allow bisexuals to marry, before you know it, we'll have to let everybody do it, and then civilization will collapse.  Despite both sides' stance of moderation and sweet reasonableness, lurking beneath their placid surfaces are beliefs of sheer gibbering wackery, barely held in check by the suits and mild tones.

And now I face a slight dilemma of my own.  What shall I say to friends in Kentucky who only a week ago were informing their Facebook communities that they would, alas, just have to boycott Indiana because of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act?   How can they expect me to visit a state like theirs, which explicitly and overtly is denying marriage equality to its citizens?  I'd like to think that their smugness will come tumbling down, but I know better than to expect it.  Tremble, O Bluegrass State, before my wrath!

I'm Your Fetish

I'm starting to notice a pattern in Andrew Ti's treatment of racism and dating.  This went up a few days ago on Yo, Is This Racist?

Variations on this question have come up before, but I don't believe that Ti has ever explained "the difference between fetishizing a race and sexual orientation."  Maybe because he's too young to remember when homosexuality was officially classified as a mental illness, the fetishizing of a sex.  Yes, I wrote "a sex," meaning males or females.  "Sexual orientation" is not about gender.  Many people seem to think that the word "sexual" in "sexual orientation" refers to erotic desire or intercourse, but it means which biological sex a person desires erotically.  The misunderstanding leads to such confusion as some people claiming that pedophilia is a "sexual orientation," though children are not a sex.

Recently I watched The Loving Story, a 2011 documentary about Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and a black woman from Virginia who married in Washington DC in 1958, because the District of Columbia permitted the marriage of whites to blacks.  The state of Virginia didn't, and they were ultimately arrested and forced to separate.  Eventually they took legal action, and their case went to the US Supreme Court, which in 1967 overturned all laws against interracial marriage.

As I've pointed out before, Loving v. Virginia was not decided on the understanding that the Lovings had a racial orientation, perhaps genetically determined, which impelled them to seek love in the arms of a partner of another race.  No one seems to have argued that their personal psychology, driven by biology, had anything to do with the case, or the validity of their marriage.  Such arguments routinely feature in current arguments about same-sex marriage, however, postulating that gay people's inborn nature renders us incapable of heterosexual marriage, so we must be allowed to marry homosexually.

I think Ti's underlying assumption is that biological sex is somehow more fundamental than race, so that crossing racial lines is easy and something that anyone might do, but sexual difference is a barrier that can only be overcome if you are radically, biologically different: same-sex love, desire, and eroticism are so repellent that you have to be practically a different species to experience such things without revulsion.

Two things need to be borne in mind here.  First, objections to interracial eroticism have, historically speaking, taken for granted that whites and blacks are virtually different species: that persons of African descent were so different from persons of European descent that the latter would find the caresses of the former intolerably repulsive; and that if they did manage to overcome this repulsion, their intercourse would be barren.  The word mulatto, used to refer to the offspring of white and black parents, means "mule," and implied that such children would be sterile.  Many educated whites believed this, even as they sired children on their black slaves.  Similarly, the belief in natural interracial repulsion was always belied by the many people who showed no such repulsion, and seems to have been more wishful thinking than anything.  The similarity of the rhetoric to antigay propaganda, which posits that sodomy is inherently revolting and that no man could be interested in another man's hairy butt, is hard to miss.  Part of the idea in both cases is probably to demonize those who managed to transgress: miscegenation and sodomy are disgusting, so only a monster could commit either one.

Second, despite all the rhetoric one hears nowadays about "sexual fluidity," many people forget or rule out in advance the possibility that anyone could engage in sex with someone of the "wrong" sex for their "orientation" and enjoy it.  This idea was for a long time a pillar of gay Christian apologetics: when the apostle Paul claimed in Romans 1 that male-to-male desire was against nature, he must have been referring to natural heterosexuals who had homosex against their nature, out of sheer wickedness and perversity, and not to those whose nature forced them to have homosex because they couldn't function with other-sex partners.  But in fact many people are not so rigid, and are able to enjoy sexual relations with persons of either sex under the right circumstances.  I think it's extremely ironic that ostensibly pro-gay people would be in agreement with antigay bigots on this point, that homosex is naturally repugnant to true heterosexuals: they only argue that gay people are biologically different from heterosexuals, and so can enjoy what heterosexuals could not.

I'm not sure I believe that there are many people who have a "racial orientation" towards only one "race."  There might be, but I believe the barriers to interracial romance are mostly cultural, and the number of people who leap those barriers are evidence of that.  I've pointed out before how people like to absolutize relative differences, so that when I dated a few Asian men, for example, many white people chortled, "You sure do like the Asian boys!", even though the non-Asian men I've dated far outnumber the Asians, and I was accused by some Asian men of being a rice queen, which I never bothered to deny.  Both groups assumed that I was, in Andrew Ti's words, fetishizing just one race, without bothering to find out if that was true.

Also ironically, many "politicized Asian gay men" demonized eroticism between Caucasian and Asian men; one, quoted here, claimed to have proven that white men who wanted to date Asian men were closet pedophiles.  It seems not to have occurred to him that he was casting Asian men as children, and that Asian men who wanted to date Asian men would by his logic be just as pedophilic, or at best merely playing Doctor instead of having mature sex.  That such blatantly racist, not to say delusional thinking, had so much currency among "politicized Asian gay men" for a while -- it seems to have faded in the last decade -- didn't speak well for them.  And does anyone else remember Spike Lee's movie Jungle Fever, which postulated that eroticism between blacks and whites can only be exploitative curiosity, simply because he said so?

Still, I don't think it would be illegitimate for anyone to "fetishize just one race."  I think Ti is implying that romantic / erotic desire is properly rational, which I think is obviously absurd.  There is no good reason why I'm attracted to one person rather than another -- to this man rather than that woman, to one man rather than another man.  (I understand that Ayn Rand believed that desire was rational, that two rational people would naturally be drawn to each other, and I think Ti would be appalled to learn that he's echoing her ideas.)  I don't have to have a good reason to be attracted, or not, to a given person, and he doesn't have to have a good reason to be attracted, or not, to me.  On another occasion Ti ranted that "'personal preference' can be racist as fuck," which is probably true, but why would Ti want someone to date a racist who was, moreover, only dating them to try not to be a racist?

I'd like to know how (or if) Ti distinguishes between "fetishizing" desire and acceptable desire.  His furious refusal to explain himself indicates to me that he hasn't thought that far ahead.  I fully agree that people should treat their sexual partners as human beings rather than fetishized objects, but objectification seems to be so widespread as to be virtually the norm, and much of popular culture is built around it.  One gay Asian-American man published an article in 2000, during the heyday of the rice-queen frenzy, in which he said that he'd always dreamed of finding himself a white prince, but he'd seen the light and was now going to date (fetishize?) Asian princes only.  How about dating human beings, instead of living in a Disney animated feature?  (In the same issue of the magazine in which that article appeared, there was another piece exulting that increasing numbers of white American women were dating Asian-American men.  Who was fetishizing whom there?)

Still, my point is that I'd like Ti to explain why he thinks it's okay not to date persons of a given sex, but not okay to reject persons of a given race.  Or vice versa: why "fetishizing" a sex is okay but "fetishizing" a race is not.  His reliance on rhetorical questions indicate that he doesn't have a good reason for the distinction.