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By Mickey Wheatley
Well, congratulations to all of you reading this. We made it into the
twenty first century. We're not dead yet. No, but considering the fifteen
billion or so years of the universe's existence and the handful of
billions the earth has been around, fifty years for a movement for gay
consciousness and political rights seems pretty ephemeral.
As the old goes extinct, and new times are born, let's open up and have some fun musing about our place in the scheme of things. Let's expand beyond talking about what we want, and start asking who we are. With a hat off to gay parents, I humbly submit the following fable of the homosexual agenda. Once upon a time, my ancestors, driven by who knows what elemental forces for billions of years, for countless generations, slinked, slimed and crawled through ooze, muck and mire, reproducing. So much mucous. So much heterosexual sex leading to procreation. What does it mean that after billions of years of reproduction to bear me, that I will not reproduce, that billions of years of evolution leading to me also ends with me? While some gays procreate, and many heterosexuals don't, generally, we have not participated in that most basically heterosexual of projects, the creation of progeny. As a zealous homosexual, upon my death, my genes will become extinct. To paraphase the song about the Woodstock Music Festival, "I've been a long time coming. I'm gonna be a long time gone." Does that make me really special, insignificant, an abomination of nature, or what?
Thus, any parent of a known homosexual must face the existentialist fear of genetic extinction not otherwise ordinarily faced. My family has been fortunate that, despite two faggot sons, it produced a heterosexual daughter who has borne two children, my father secure in his death that a part of him does indeed remain, to date, immortal. Most cultures resolve this dilemma by having no homosexuals, only suppressed homosexuality. Thus do those inclined to homosexual acts engage in such activity as an aberrant periphery to their otherwise heterosexually-oriented lives, lives lived in a lie for the sake of heterosexual security. But in America and now much of the west, we have rejected this traditional model in support of our personal liberation, at our families' expense. Is this personal liberation, clearly painful for our families, purely selfish, as many would have us believe, or does our celebration of our genetic extinction actually serve some greater purpose? Why, if humanity loves the extinct (witness the wild success of Jurassic Park), is the homosexual's personal extinction not also celebrated? Why is the T Rex adored, and the homosexual reviled? Its because it is not our extinction that is at issue. Rather, it is the fear that we homosexuals are causing the extinction of them, the heterosexuals. Parents have children in order for those children to have children. If children neglect having children, then the parental project loses much of its meaning. The fundamentalism of heterosexuality, i.e., the idea that heterosexuality is the only legitimate pair arrangement because it alone provides for the continuation of the species, even spiritual immortality through the production of progeny, is threatened to the core by open homosexuals. To heterosexuals, our failure to reproduce is a betrayal of our parents because we cast doubt on their fairy tale of heterosexuality as the fundamental force for human cultural and spiritual aspirations. Once upon a time there was Adam and Eve, and they begat, and they begat and so on. 
To them, we are committing patricide. And while I love dinosaurs because I can relate to their plight, to how queer they are, heterosexuals celebrate the extinction of the dinosaurs precisely because their own continued existence is proof of their superiority in the Nature of Things. Our declared homosexuality makes them feel that they are dinosaurs, becoming extinct not immortal, for we are their barren progeny, their creation, and the stopping point of those countless generations of genetic lineage. The heterosexual project to procreate has fueled a wildly unsustainable population of six billion. This century will see, what, a couple of billion more? At this rate, heterosexuals are immortalizing themselves into an extinct race. And in America, the homosexuals are looking for approval and heterosexual-style security by aping these heterosexual preoccupations. Now we hold up as a model the homosexual nuclear family, with child rearing as its central occupation. Or, put another way, we are rejecting the radical notions of the last fifty years about our liberation, and choosing instead a modified version of the traditional solution– again viewing practicing homosexuality is aberrant to the primary function of child rearing. Oh sure, two men married is not the same as living a heterosexual lie, but it is the same idea of sublimating our personal lives, our identities, for the sake of "future generations." Thus do we ask the heterosexuals to ignore our sex, and to let us share in their fairy tale. But the heteros are clear that a homosexual pair bond's mating cannot lead to reproduction, and thus are we continually excluded from their fable about the Nature of Things. Was our gay project, so twentieth century in its arrogance that we were above nature, that we were existentially free, was it merely naive and transitory, or did it contain some germ of human liberation that can flower in the future? Have we started something enduring, or was our liberation project as quaint and retro as lava lamps. Will they say of us, laughing uproariously, "Oh, that was soooo twentieth century." This homosexual, ever childless, believes that his fifteen billion year evolutionary dead end has meaning, that the liberation project of the twentieth century should not be abandoned to traditional notions of the supremacy of nature.
Gay liberation, the highest fruit of human
liberation, the furthest removed from the yoke of nature, and that we
started in the twentieth century, must be expanded in this new one. At
this crucial juncture, rather than retreat to heterosexual fairy tales, we
must expand our dialogue beyond mere civil rights, to a discussion of the
special gifts that as homosexuals we bring to emerging human liberation,
in other words, tell our own tales.
And so as fifteen billion years of striving toward the creation of life ends with me, sometime in the twenty first century, if I am not here to reproduce, what, if anything, does fifteen billion years of evolutionary effort require of me? I believe that in celebrating our evolutionary dead end, our extinction, our liberation from nature, we ironically encourage the celebration of life. Life for the living, not the dead, not the unborn. To put it tritely, when the butterfly emerges, when the rose blooms, their fragility, indeed their imminent death, makes us feel more alive. Freed from the burdens of immortality, of fundamentalism, we celebrate the preciousness, the sheer beauty, the absurdity of our brief time here. In our fear of death, unmitigated by progeny, we create ritual, make art, and explore alternative social structures. We become the messengers of civilization, of progress, of humanity, of God. As sacred as and like Mary, we are virgins in the miracle of giving birth, birth to new ideas, ideas that transcend the tyranny of the normal. We can uniquely speak to that part of humanity that goes beyond our animal nature, our reproductive function. We are humanity's beauticians. We don't reproduce, we transform. We bring men and women together from across their great divide, and we show human animals the face of God. We are the mediators, the teachers, the artists, the story tellers. And for these special gifts, we are perennially driven toward annihilation, as are all iconoclasts. For the dark but necessary fundamentalism, like cancer, always brutally assaults all that is other, insisting in utter conformation to its dogma. But despite the risks, to deny our important role is to pervert ourselves and betray our sacred office. Oh, I know how many of you groan. Please, you want to tell me, even beat me up to understand, we are just like them, except we have this little private difference in who we desire. Well, I'd like to assimilate as much as the next queer, but it is the heterosexuals that insist on seeing us as different. And they can't help but do so given the central place of heterosexual procreation to their world view. I'd like to be a billionaire like Bill Gates, but as grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so." I have as much chance of getting Gates' money as I do of having heteros think that I am just like them. It is just too contrary to human psychology. It is simply not who they are. More importantly, it is not who we are. Whether our differences are innate or merely the products of oppressive times is almost unfathomable after only these brief fifty years. Of course, tactics to show our common humanity have had enormous success for us, and should continue and be strengthened, but not at the expense of examining our real differences, and how those differences might benefit all of us. Look inside yourself, fellow homosexuals, at the role you have played with others in your own life. Have you not been singled out as the one at the office who could help smooth things over between seemingly irreconcilable differences, particularly between men and women? Have you not been the one among the heterosexuals who has seen the special meaning in something apparently trivial, and ennobled those around you in your animated transference to them of that special insight? Is it not you who makes them feel more alive? Even in their fear of you, have they not held each other a little bit tighter, made love with more passion in their desire to forget your perversion? In your queerness, have they not gained some comfort at becoming conscious of their own normalcy? For to them, we are the divine exception that proves the rule. We are the comic relief in their drama. Absurdly, we enforce their hetero-fundamentalism even as our existence betrays it as a fraud; but in highlighting its boundaries, we also drive it back into its proper sphere. The wild cat, declawed and neutered, becomes a domestic pet. Despite our differences real and perceived, some of us have come to argue that to be treated equal to heterosexuals, we must be treated the same as them. Thus have we turned to the right to marry because our constitution and culture defines it as a fundamental right that cannot be denied, and we bristle at the illogic of narrowly defining it to include only opposite sex couples.
Never mind that barren heterosexuals can get married; it is the expansion to same sex unions that is perceived, albeit wrongly, as a potent threat to hetero-normalcy. In the hetero fairy tale, Jack Sprat can marry old mother Hubbard, but never Georgey Porgey. It is not our calling to destroy heterosexual normalcy, nor can we. Fundamentalism, hetero-normative fundamentalism, will always be with us. The animal will always reign on the planet. Rather, we can embrace our unique role as the messenger of the other, of the different, of the strange and beautiful, of all that goes beyond mere reproduction, like the siren songs, the mermaids, the fairies. And if you want a same-sex civil union with babies, go on ahead, for such a project is no less perverse, no less sacred, than our other work. What we provide is the balance, the other that gives definition to the normal. Ironically, we enforce fundamental notions of normal by being exceptions to it. But by doing so, we also push the dark power of fundamentalism back into its proper sphere. And more, in our privileged position of being free from their fairy tale, we allow the animals, so burdened by the yoke of child rearing, brief glimpses of the sublime, the grace, the freedom, that the last fifteen billion years has bestowed upon us. Is it any wonder they can hate us? Certainly the marriage question, perhaps more than any other, highlights the tensions between fundamentalism and liberation at the core of our oppression, and more, should we succeed in so liberalizing the institution of marriage, we will have domesticated that wild cat. Nevertheless, rather than aping heterosexuals as a tactic in self preservation, I suggest we take the more difficult but ultimately more successful approach of showing them why our special gifts are important, why fifteen billion years of evolution has produced us. It doesn't mean we have to toss out our Wall Street drag, only that we not be ashamed of what we keep further back in our closets. For surely if the heterosexual project is the animal urge to reproduce, in the twenty first century, the homosexuals' special gifts may be the heterosexuals' only means of survival. If you think absurd the idea that homosexuals are destined to, are genetically and spiritually responsible for, propagating human liberation, you're already on the right track. For indeed, we are the slaves of the notion of "free". Mickey Wheatley, a civil rights attorney and former gay activist in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., lives in Thailand. He may be reached at Mickeyw@loxinfo.co.th. |
But the logic of science is not so readily grafted to
fundamentalist institutions that have evolved over many years to protect
and privilege some at the expense of others. Let's finally admit that
heterosexuals have defined marriage as fundamental precisely because it
privileges the heterosexual union in the act of procreation as the core of
normalcy, of immortality.
© 1997-2000 BEI