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By Perry Brass
The road up ahead seems so splendid, the choices so fantastic - now you can make "another" of yourself without having to screw, glue, or stew with another human being; now "immortality" is at your fingertips; now you can be in "control" of your own biological destiny. Etc. I am sure you have heard it all. And the truth is, there may be some truth in this. And the truth is, technology has shaped human biology greatly now for the last century. It is hard to believe that there was a time when clergymen fought small pox inoculations, because they were sure it was against God's will to scratch a small piece of infected sheep tissue into a human arm. They fought birth control tooth and nail, and are still doing it-and if you want to plumb the depths of sheer benightedness, you can go to any country practicing Islamic fundamentalism, where women are not allowed to drive and the word "biology" is spelled with four letters, as in "smut." Gay men and lesbians have certainly been in the forefront of knowing that sexuality is amazingly fluid, amazingly layered, and that sexual energy is not simply an animal procreative drive, but an intense, human tribal drive that shapes our lives. So why limit sex to procreation, an idea that even the Victorians, behind their corsets and fans, knew was bunk, and why limit procreation to mere, standard heterosexual sex? Of course, it no longer is. Babies are now started in petri dishes. Renta-wombs are available for so many thousands of dollars in many cities in this country. And any woman who wants to can play what I call "invitro-roulette" to have the child of her dreams. This has, to a certain degree, changed mores. We are now at the cusp of producing the kind of gorgeous next generation that people like Aldous Huxley and George Bernard Shaw dreamed about. One of my cousins, an "ex-lesbian" did this to produce the most beautiful little girl I had ever seen. She and her, at the time, female partner went to a sperm bank and picked out the most suitable, attractive, talented hunk of sperm they could find, directly from a catalogue, and had little Tanya (not her real name) by him. They wanted someone with musical talents; Tanya now has musical talents. They wanted someone with no genetic problems - cancer, arthritis, etc. - and Tanya will be almost guaranteed, as far as this is possible, of having no genetic liabilities. Nothing in human life is guaranteed, but what woman would not want to have a child by a six-foot-four Boss model, who is musical, athletic, well-arched, and, demonstrably, not a raving psychopath? So, just as our own, 21st Century American brand of openly sexual, romantic, matrimonially-fixated homosexual love did not exist in the marketplace of relationships in the nineteenth century (or at least some historians of "same-sex" sexuality are telling me), we are now in the middle of a plethora of procreative options. And why shouldn't cloning be one of them? Well, perhaps it should be. And will be. Since so much of human sexual "identity" is now market based - as many kids will tell you, a "gay identity" is now simply a consumer option: you buy "gay clothes," you read "gay books," you watch Will & Grace - human cloning in an open, free, opportunistically exploitable market, will soon be available.
I mean, if the Pakistanis, who in 1994 had a Gross National Per Capita Income of $440, can have an atomic bomb, why aren't they getting into the human-cloning race? There are huge bucks to be made here and this is an "all's fair in love and war" situation. So it seems fairly predictable that in the not-too-distant future, just as it has for many other forms of sellable sex and pornography, the Third World will become an exportable source for cloning, as a marketable commodity. But, before all of my cloning libertarians become tickled pink by this news, there is a real fly in this ointment: or a lot of ground glass. Ouch! Cloning has existed in nature all along. Many primitive organisms, such as algae, coral, and some seaweeds have always cloned themselves. Gardeners have used cloning for hundreds of years to reproduce an exact variety of a plant. This has meant that you can have a five-hundred-year-old apple tree, brand spanking new. There are strange alleys of cloning throughout nature. Usually these come about from species that have become geographically isolated. In order to reproduce, in any form, they have resorted to cloning. The armadillo, beloved by Texans, is an example of this. Armadillos are among the most primitive of all mammals. They are slow, toothless, and have only a thick hide of bony, armor-like plates to protect themselves. Female armadillos give birth to genetically identical octuplets. Each of their eight tiny creatures is a clone. Cloning has kept the armadillo at the lowest rung of the mammalian ladder; however, without this means of reproduction, these very slow-witted, slow creatures might have died out totally. In a species of duck called a coot, the female can produce fertile eggs on her own. Perhaps in the long-gone genetic past, cloning was much more prevalent, and there may be a chance that many extinct animals cloned themselves into extinction. The reason for this is that cloning only provides the resultant clone with half the immune-system support and resistance of "normal" propagation. In other words, if you have a real genetic disposition, say, towards colon-rectal cancer, as I do, then if I "cloned" myself, the resultant clone would have twice as much disposition towards this form of cancer, since my own genes would not be supported in any way by outside genes. This problem has already asserted itself in cloned farm animals, which, it has been found, are already having extreme immune problems after only one generation of cloning. Since genetically, I come from a gene pool rife with cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and some other problems I don't want to make public here, the thought of cloning myself is not all that cheering. Since a clone of me would not have the personal history I've had, I'm not sure that a clone of me would have all of the other characteristics I have: my sense of the importance, say, of human compassion. Or my adventurousness. Or, being an opinionated sonovabitch. Now, going back to my original thesis: cloning myself might be a hoot, as we used to say down South, but what sort of life would my clone have, with all of these genetic stumbling blocks already set up for him? How would anyone feel about being given a direct dice toss, say, to cancer without passing "Go" and collecting any other Monopoly dollars-i.e. cancer resistant genes from another person-along the way? Actually, the Monopoly idea makes a lot of sense, since what you are doing in cloning is producing a "monopoly" version of yourself. There is, in other words, only you producing him. So, you have a monopoly on everything you are going to pass down to your clone.
But physically, there is also the question: how would all of your genetic cards play as your cloned aged? I have enough genetic I.O.U.'s right now that I have mentioned-arthritis in the mornings, ulcers at night-that are starting to be recalled . . . in spades. When you are young and healthy, these things hardly phase you, but as you get older they are no jokes. Now I do know that both of my parents had skeletal problems, i.e., bad feet; severe back problems, etc., so I am evidencing that now. However, my father died of cancer, but there is no cancer in my mother's family. Supposed my sole genetic donor was marked with cancer? I know that I am stepping on some toes here. The promise, the idea of cloning seems so right to so many gay and lesbian people, in couples or not. But there are other alternatives to missionary-position-style sexual reproduction, things that might piss off the fundamentalists and the Catholic church just as much: such as, for one, we really do need to work at adopting kids who are now considered unadoptable. As anyone who has ever been loved as an adopted child knows, there is a tragedy going on on America now. A whole generation of kids who will not be adopted, are in various makeship foster situations, and many, many of these kids are gay or lesbian. We can also consider bringing other parties into our own reproductive processes: women who'd love to have a child raised with a responsible male parent who they didn't have to marry; or men who understand that parenthood is not just an ego trip or an antidote to loneliness. It is, at best, an act of genuine generosity towards someone else. And that person is called your child, not your clone. 
Perry Brass's newest novel is WARLOCK, A Novel of Possession,
that does deal with the interesting intersection of business and evil.
His "domestic partnership" is not underwritten by any of the Fortune 500.
He can be reached through his website www.perrybrass.com. For more information
on WARLOCK, go to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ASIN/1892149036/107-8161877-7587701
Telephone: 1 (800) 365-2401.
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Model Courtesy Of 
The fact that it has not become that way, so far, is actually a mystery to me. What I am not able to figure out is this: if the Chinese are now selling the organs of executed prisoners (and executing them very much in the fashion that I predicted in my 1997 "science-politico" novel The Harvest, where "vaccos," or "corporate cadavers" are being produced and "put to sleep" for their organs), then why hasn't the enterprising "Third World," where there are no brakes either on poverty or capitalism, started preparations to clone humans?
© 1997-2002 BEI