h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>Why should you? Because you asked this in the first place.

Know your enemy, Xan.

>>Hmm. I feel that the sexually transmitted diseases one is a red herring, back-fitted onto bigotry.

My bad. Feel? I *know* it was. I was around in the '80s.

Indeed. Orson Scott Card wrote some stuff about this "devaluing of marriage" on his homepage during the Prop 8 debacle. You could have a look there.

Ed:
Hmm, in my answer I was more thinking about reasons why someone such as Nixon would have these views.
I'm not sure I agree that religious persons do give sound secular reasons about homosexuality and sexual immorality. I can derive some for the latter, but not the former.

I can certainly see homosexuality as a threat to their way of life - it fundamentally challenges their assumptions and world view which is one of the most scary threats many of us can face. Some come to peace with this, some don't.

If your question, then, is what secular reasons might be behind the false wall of 'god doesnt like it' then I can't come up with any for homosexuality. It has the same risks around multiple partners and lack of protection as heterosexual sex. It has the same benefits from stable relationships as heterosexuality.

The only explanation that seems to have any currency is the old case of a majority denigrating a minority (figures vary but seem to be 10% or less for percentage homosexual in the general western population) in order to bolster their own power and status.

"We none of us want society to collapse, do we?"
Personally, I'm reasonably open to that possibility.

"Jean Genet"
Ah, so that's who Bowie was on about.
Not someone I've read much on, but my understanding is him as seeing it as a deliberate act against the establishment, whereas my take is more the view of the establishment of such an act. Don't know enough about what he has to say to continue the debate here, though.

Well from a few linkies it seems to be about government non-interference in the right of a strong male to protect his family. But we're still left with the question 'From what'? (From temptation? )

I knew he was a Mormon, but do I not recall homoeroticism in 'Ender's Game'? (Jaysus! That takls me back.)

Yea - the Genet idea is that the Deviant won't conform to societal norms and is therefore a threat to good order. Which is as you say.

End with a song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHMRMXIyKIw

otoh one of guys in the office has most of his books and is going to lend me one or two. Should make for interesting reading on the train - shall see what sort of looks I get

Everyone will think you're being very interlekshewal.

or have a filthy deviant mind

Wellll...I think part of what Genet is saying is 'What's the difference?' You have to be outwith society's structures and mores to be able to analyse it properly. This is why (my theory is) Queer Theory is politically important.

Quote :

"'Homosexuality, drugs and immorality are what is destroying society.'"

Were these causes or effects?

Keir Hardie grew up convinced that alcohol was the root cause of distress among the poor of his native Scotland, in line with the Teetotal movement that had started in Lancashire in the 1830's and had been taken to Ireland by Father Matthew c1838.

So Hardie's first activist period was aimed against drink. Socialist literature convinced him that consuming alcohol was the only way for the modern worker to cope with the stress of mundane industrial work in an economic system that was fueled my mass-advertising that offered the thrills of "Bright Lights Big City".

In that Keir Hardie era-the 20 years before 1914- various US States passed Prohibitiion to prevent the destruction of their part of US Society by Alcholhol, Gambling and Prostitution.

T.R. Glover, comparing modern America to Rome of the second century B.C., quoted Aristotle saying that in a democracy everybody "wants to live as he likes". And this results, in an affluent society, in young men just buying whatever lifestyle they wish, ignoring the "old-man's advice "that it will sap your character and injure society".

In this regard Homosexuality has particular implications. Robert Skidelsky in referring to J.M. Leynes conviction that homosexuality was "the good life" says "there are interesting connections to be made between his economic outlook and what Schumpeter calls his 'childless vision'.

Human Society seems to be almost universally shaped by the long period of childhood and adolescent dependence which calls for a huge investment effort by the adult world. Then after rites of passage the young adults assume their adult roles becoming the power- house of Society, producing wealth and also the next generation, making the most intense investment in the Future through their relations with their own children.

With good health and luck their children will grow up and take up the burden alongside them in turn creating their own next generation- in a never-ending stream of life. Only by such processes could people hope to be looked after and cared for as they declined through old age and its period of increasing dependence, calling for a return to be finally made on their initial investment of selfless love and affection.

Of course wealth, science and technology now offers an alternative to this organic view of Society so that Homosexual relationships are no longer necessarily sterile, and pensioners can be left to the mechanisms - those of Private Enterprise and the State- that are made possible by money.

But perhaps, as in the very moving "Borrowed Times"- a Holywood Scriptwriters chronicle of his partners long and unsuccessful struggle with AIDS- or well-known Homosexual relationships within British Music (Britten-Piers)- artistic creativity is rewarding enough. Books and pieces of music taking on a life of their own in return for massive investment, and the comfort in old age is a body of work to leave to posterity so that something of you lives on.

>>
"'Homosexuality, drugs and immorality are what is destroying society.'"

>>Were these causes or effects?


Or neither. Irrelevances>

It's struck me that actually the Bible has very, very little to say about homosexuality. A few mentions in Old Testament, but nothing that I'm aware of in the New, although it might be possible to infer that some of the "outcasts" and "unclean" groups that Jesus ministered to might have included homosexuals as well as lepers, prostitutes etc. So I think a lot of the Christianity-based homophobia must be 'cultural Christian' rather than strictly biblically-inspired. When I was a Christian, I tended to file the homophobia along with the mixed-fibre phobia and the baconphobia and the money lendophobia and the slaveophilia that we didn't have to take seriously.

I think I remember reading somewhere that earlier generations didn't really see "homosexuality" as an orientation or characterisation, and perhaps filed homosexual acts as another form of marital infidelity or fornication, albeit a particularly humiliating one for the wronged spouse.

Sex is what society does. How can it be said to cause its collapse?

Edwards the Bonobo

Sex is what humans and all sexual creatures do-- whether or not they have any concept of a social function- and whether they are social creatures or not. The Widow Spider does not sit easily with that idea that Sex is by definition social. The tithe of rape inflicted by the Red Army on Germany is only one example of the way that sex has been used quite deliberately as an "act of war" or retribution between two populations.

But it is true that within Societies traditional concepts about appropriate and inappropriate conduct create pressures that are often portrayed in terms of right or wrong.

The Homosexuality of Ancient Greece that the Classics lecturer "Goldie" taught the Cambridge Apostles to believe was the highest form of relationship in that great age of Athens may well have been directly related to the constant population pressures on Greek society, and its need for endless new colonies. Sterile sex was socially responsible.

And it is interesting that the whole "Sexual Revolution" came at a time when the Malthusian spectre of world over-population was a major global issue. "The Pill" turned sex into a leisure activity/industry engaged in as a form of consumerism.

I believe that recent research has shown that the Indian sub-continental common practice of marriage between cousins, in addition to extended family social advantages, also has the effect of producing a much higher rate of natural abortions so it is/was a means of population control.

Otto Fisch

You wrote- "I think I remember reading somewhere that earlier generations didn't really see "homosexuality" as an orientation or characterisation, and perhaps filed homosexual acts as another form of marital infidelity or fornication, albeit a particularly humiliating one for the wronged spouse."

There seems to be very little sign that people used to define their whole identity by their sexual orientation- and turn it almost into a whole way of life. Gerald Durrell describes a conversation with shipmates going up some river in SE Asia. After a while an Indian gentleman who had merely been listening up to that point contributed: "Well. What I say is that every man needs a hobby".

When people were trying to make a success of coping with life through membership of various social units there were matters of life and death etc that transcended merely what way people preferred their sex. Husbands and wives were specialist workers in interdependent micro-units, though an expert on Amerindian society did assert that it was possible for a young man to refuse the rite of passage necesary to become a Brave and train to do Squaw's work, without making clear that this extended to granting sexual favours to the Brave who took "him" into his household.

One of the best modern examples of an open marriage with accepted Homosexual activity on the side was perhaps that of Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West. Their son Nigel (?) wrote a fascinating book [A Portrait of a Marriage] after his mother's death, when he discovered her homosexual younger days.

Vita was a great passion of Virginia Woolf, who describes with sheer admiration how the daughter of a great aristocratic house in British High Society was determined to do enough to meet her obligations to her ancestors, so that at least her beloved Sissinghurst would stay in the family. She and Harold produced two sons and Vita took on the burden of producinh at least one commercially successful book per year in order to pay for their school fees in a top public school as befitted their rank in Society.

In fact the letters that were published between the couple in Harold Nicholson's war diaries are full of their love for each other in all other ways, as highly cultivated people who shared an enjoyment of all the finer things in life- reflected in Vita's Nature poetry and her great garden which is still a major tourist attraction. It was something that they agreed that they could not bear to see destroyed under the impact of a German invasion and had a suicide pact, with "a bare bodkin" poison pill, should the Germans ever successfull invade and progrss up towards London- and over Sissinghurst.

>>And it is interesting that the whole "Sexual Revolution" came at a time when the Malthusian spectre of world over-population was a major global issue.

Which one?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/20/first-sexual-revolution?INTCMP=SRCH

And..,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/22/origins-of-sex-review?INTCMP=SRCH

Well the Eighteenth Century saw something of the Sex in the City syndrome and famous pioneers of sexual exploration who have given their names to things like D'Eonism, Sadism and Sado-Masochism.. It also produced Rousseau the proponent of the Noble Savage and the Social Contract, a man who fathered was it ten children and abandonned each baby at the doors of the Paris Foundling Hospital.

The Age of Enlightenment and the Worship of Nature certainly led on to revolutionary times, but in a very real way the whole of Western History since 1776 has been based upon resistance to the Nihilism and Anarchy which such ideas led onto.

The mention of Mary Wolstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Women, brings one quite naturally to her daughters great an propheted novel about the dangers of this new age with people trying to build new realities on the basis of their remote and unreal book-based knowledge and understanding. Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein can be read as a detailed and prophetic allegory of what happened over the next fifty years.

PS

How could I have left out Casanova?

Sexual humour often popped up in the "joke book" of the Second Viscount Palmerston from c1760 onwards.

Someone remarked to a Parisian lady who was infamously free with her favours that it was a surprise that she rarely got pregnant. 'Ah. Un petit souris qui n'a q'un trout est bientot pris."

Perhaps the kind of quip that was shared usually when the ladies had left the gentlemen to themselves, though not necessarily in some of the Paris salons run by the famous hostesses.