A Different Breed of Chosen People

A great poet and a great role model, both iconic.

This post will be widely condemned, I know. My purpose is not to propose a prescription consisting of problem-solving steps but to offer a different perspective on a subject that is being deliberately distorted on all sides. The LGBTQ liberation movement betrays all the ills of everything we begin as a Social Justice project. A few brave individuals speak up for a persecuted minority, achieve some success, become organized, and ultimately transmogrify into a political constituency bearing little in common with the intentions of its pioneers. I the past century, we’ve seen this phenomenon with Civil Rights, Feminism, and Gay Liberation. In all three cases, there has been a point of overreach that passes invisibly in the blur of sensational headlines, outrageous acts of protest and resistance, and then a counterintuitive drift toward resegregation and deliberately offputting demands on the commonweal.

While LGBTQ obviously has elements in common with Civil Rights and Feminism, I believe it is a subject better understood in comparison to two other permanent minorities in every population: Jews and alcoholics. I can already hear the screaming in the readership, but I ask you to bear with me because I can explain what I’m talking about from the vantage point of one who belongs to one of those minorities and has had more interaction with the other two than most people born outside of New York and California.

My feelings about all three groups are mixed but by no means hostile. As an alcoholic, I have empathy for the plight of those who have that inherent proclivity. All of my formal education has been in close company with Jews, with whom I have competed, enjoyed deep friendships, and by turns admired and disliked. In college, I was introduced to numerous highly talented homosexuals, whose charm and creativity were beguiling to me in every way but the sexual. I had rewarding but usually brief friendships with the gays I knew, largely because I lost track of friends after my university days, and also because they were still living their lives in the fabled closet in the business world where I had most of my social contacts. 

What do these three groups have in common? Lives lived at least somewhat apart from those outside the group, always aware of the threat of ostracism caused by attracting too much attention to this personal attribute. I belong to the largest of the three groups. Alcoholics seem to be a solid ten percent of the population, more male than female, but not a gender-barriered club. Jews are a reliable two to three percent of the U.S. population, as are, I am convinced, homosexuals. I never believed the Kinsey number of 10 percent; his gross data collection and reporting errors were at one time well documented, and my personal experience suggests that there may be more gays than Jews in the general population, but not that many more. Both groups can seem like they are more numerous than they are simply because they tend to be overachievers in the real world and well networked, even clannish, with one another through the kinship of shared social stigma. Alcoholics do not network together so much as cover for one another at times, and offer a helping hand if possible to the one who are at low ebb.

Some of you probably already are developing a wrong idea, that I am viewing all three of these conditions as an illness of some sort, principally because alcoholism has been so universally deemed a chronic disease. It isn’t. And neither are the other two, uh, ‘conditions.’ Alcoholism is in all likelihood an inherited  propensity, for which no ‘cure’ has ever been found or will be. It can kill you, but it can also be lived with to extreme age old. That is not a disease. No human society has ever been able to ban it, and virtually every culture has found a way to brew alcoholic beverages and consume them. The current identification of it as a disease is a strategem for removing guilt and enticing people to seek help for overcoming its worst effects. The same approach was employed for many years to the existence of homosexuality, branding it as a dysfunction which might be either controlled by abstinence or even cured by quack psychology. One of the first successes of the Gay Rights movement was to have homosexuality removed from the list of psychological pathologies.

Jews don’t have to contend with this particular form of classification. There is no cure for it, real or imagined. It’s in the blood. I’d suggest that the same is true of the other two groups. Nor is it a malignant mutation in the godless world of Darwinian Evolution. Which is also to suggest that authentic human evolution does indeed have a use, even a need, for all three groups. In their own terms, all three groups are chosen, in that they extend the range of human experience, for good and ill, and their possibly deeper emotional experience of life leads to levels of accomplishment by individuals that have been crucial to what we call progress, enlightenment, and civilization. These are loci of extreme behaviors, which inspire hatred in others but also admiration and imitation, all the ‘bad’ things aside.

Since it’s the group I know the most about, I’ll start with alcoholism. It’s been called “the writer’s complaint,” which I can attest to in voluminous detail. In this I am far from alone. The literary canon is chock full of drunks, so many and so well known as such that lists of names are unnecessary. There’s every chance that it’s also the “complaint” of a  significant percentage of artists and musicians, especially in company with other chemical substances that alter perception and push the human mind into the depths and heights of sensory and emotional awareness. It’s not a guarantee of achievement. The list of bad effects may outnumber the good effects, but the good effects remain behind after their creator has gone to his grave.

The simultaneity of good and bad applies to Jews as well. Why are they hated thoughout history? Because they are the “Chosen People.” Which is historically true. Chosen to push push push against the boundaries of, well, everything. They gave us Moses and the Ten Commandments, which remain the bedrock of western civilization three and a half millennia later. But they also gave us the killing machine called Marxism, which has destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions of people in a little over a single century. In between they gave us the charismatic fictions of Sigmund Freud, which has achieved both good and bad effects, if it’s possible to out the degenerated plagiarisms of his method into the stuff of cults, mind control, and epidemic obsessions with self rather than service and duty. Again, too much to go into, two many names to venture lists ranging from law to finance to philosophy to literature to art to comedy to political activism to sexuality of every variety. They have also raised up their own enemies, whose actions are often blamed on Jews, though the sins of envy, jealousy, and greed were not invented by Jews, only described and specified by them  Jews are chosen because they exemplify the best and the worst in humanity simultaneously.

In the blood. So it is with homosexuality. It has become common recently for evolutionary biologists to claim that homosexuality is not an inherent human attribute because it doesn’t perpetuate the species. Male-make and female-female unions do not produce offspring; therefore homosexuality does not contribute to species survival and must be a behavior created by nurture rather than nature. I suspect this is a convenient fad in scientific groupthink, a way of bowing out of the controversies of LGBTQ politics. There is every reason to think that the species naturally produces homosexuals just as it does alcoholics, melancholics, idiot-savants, and extreme risk takers of innumerable kinds. There are not mistakes of nature or nurture. They are aspects of human experience that broaden the realm in which consciousness and creativity can expand through generations of offspring.

Like Jews and alcoholics, homosexuals are a mixed bag. Neither inherently good no bad, they are potentially horrific as well as potentially great in terms of their contributions to culture and civilization. We are at a crossroads in their relation to the culture as a whole, which is why it's so important to take a fresh look at how they came to be where they are today in the body politic. Historically in western culture, their lives have been most defined by secrecy, quite apart from their many undeniable creative talents. They have survived and often thrived by leading a double life, hiding their sexual preference to avoid ostracism and persecution, while pursuing the same kinds of material accomplishments heterosexuals do. In my own observations, this leads to the development of two different personas in the same body. There is a straight version and a gay version. Depending on which identity they choose for this moment, they dress differently, speak and use language differently, interact with each other differently, and are adept at switching seamlessly between their separate identities. Just as Jews, by way of their Talmudic heritage, are shockingly over-represented in the legal profession, homosexuals are very significantly over-represented in show business and politics. Acting in public for an audience is something they have done every day since puberty. This is a skill that some businessman or attorney seeking a career in politics has to learn painfully with many missteps and “open mic” disasters. Not so for a gay man from practically any walk of life. Who must he be for this audience? “Do it, Be it” as the song says. (Not ignoring the female population in show biz and politics, just glossing over them because all women are also natural actresses because of the need to deal with heterosexual men.) Why they have prospered in these professions in addition to the vocations where homosexuality is not a liability, despite the occasional career ending scandals, which also happen to straight men. 

What’s different now? Why have I mentioned the danger of overreach? Because all the societal pressure for homosexuals to come out of the closet has awakened a long suppressed desire to be not just tolerated but admired for a propensity most of the population doesn’t share. Ending the double life aspect of their experience comes at a cost not many of their advocates or supporters have examined critically. The best place to see this is in a new category of AI video products featuring the hidden gay romances of Hollywood superstars, male and female, from the past. It may not be a visible cost to a young actor or actress who come out of the closet and play both gay and straight characters in the movies. What they may not realize is that there really is such a thing as TMI (too much information) that can curtail new careers and drastically impair the reputations of dead legends. Do I really want to know about the torrid gay affairs of Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck? No. I’d known of the rumors about both, but have no need to confront it directly. Is a new video recounting the affairs pics of 50-yo embraces popping up on a sidebar at YouTube a welcome new part of my life? No, it isn’t.

Here’s a thing I believe to be a reality, at least for men (I know men claim they like to see women in bed together… eh.)  there is an aspect of toleration for male homosexuality that I do not believe is political, intellectual, or culturally imposed. I have a positive aversion to the sight of male homosexual sex acts, from kissing to whatever. It makes my skin crawl. Maybe this kind of aversion will die with these old bones of mine, but I doubt it. I don’t know how women feel about female-female coitus, but I suspect it’s similar to my aversion. When I see either on the screen, I can’t escape the response that this is being knowingly forced on my because of my aversion. I will never learn to accept it, like it, or desire to go see a movie such scenes will be shown in. 

I feel much the same way, to a lesser degree, about the current fad of monumental gay parades and drag shows deliberately affecting the most outrageous costumes, props, and behaviors the local cops will permit. It doesn’t make me more sensitized to their identity needs than I was before, or ever want to be. Some private things should be private. As an alcoholic, I feel no special kinship with cinematic displays of drunks falling down, throwing up, and passing out half naked on someone else’s living room floor. If I ever did this in my own life I don’t do it anymore, and I don’t feel that non-alcoholics are enlightened by seeing how bad bender behaviors can get. 

I can get to know people very well without seeing them do their business on the toilet. Between the sexes flirtatious exhibitionism can be a turn-on, but it’s still best enjoyed in private. I know there are exceptions to this preference, but if I’m seeking a broad audience in a public career, the exceptions are only a niche audience and probably not one worth playing to. They have their own games for that.

What I am seeing in the LGBTQ movement is part and parcel of what’s happening in all the social justice vanguards. Going too far. The Civil Rights movement didn’t used to aspire to political office holders in short skirts, street makeup and porn fingernails, dropping F-bombs on men they don’t like. Feminism didn’t used to demand that men find women attractive even if they don’t find them attractive for reasons of weight, attire, or conduct. This insistence that groups be admired for everything they are on their worst day is not productive, in particular, for groups who have thrived in the past for transcending the worst in them to fulfill the best they are capable of.

My prediction is that ugliness will go out of style soon enough, probably when it’s advocates realize you can’t force people to love what they do not, and that exhibitionistic sexual behaviors will also return to the closet or back seat they came from. It’s my hope that the current commercial obsession with urination, defecation, menstruation, menopause, incontinence, erectile dysfunction, and associated products and appliances will also arrive at less explicit imagery. 

I can guarantee you I’ll be much more supportive of all the social justice campaigns if and when my predictions are realized.  You’ll notice I have never advocated, nor will I, for an Alcoholic Rights movement. No expectation or desire to be admired for it, though cognizant of perceptions it has enabled.

The pics up top are of Artur Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde, whom I believe would agree with what I’ve said here. They represent examples from the modern era of why I believe homosexuals are a Chosen People in their own right, embodying some of the best and the worst in the human species. Like Jews, they are over-achievers, driven by persecution and native talent above the average to compete successfully with the greater pool of talent in the much larger general population. Like alcoholics, they are also prone to self-destructive behaviors that do damage to others at a scale beyond that of the ‘healthy’ majority. 

The talent is very real. By anecdote at least, they can claim Sappho, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Lawrence of Arabia, and countless great poets, playwrights, novelists, musicians, dancers, actors, painters, critics, fashion designers, and, yes, political figures. Isolation is a breeding ground for introspection and the lure of intangibles like esthetics, beauty, style, wit, and graceful performance as a mode of living.

The downside of isolation (i.e., seclusion, ostracism, hiding and obsessive behaviors) is also real. Homosexuals are likely more inclined to substance abuse than the average heterosexual, and it’s probably pointless to quantify the overlap between alcoholism and sexual preference, which is certainly there and significant but immune to chicken-and-egg debates. Sex itself plays an outsize role in the lives of people whose preferences remain hidden from the majority. No one wants (is permitted?) to keep track of statistics like the correlations between homosexuality and pedophilia and serial murder, but the anecdotal evidence that it’s significantly high is abundant. Moreover, male homosexuals in particular have a proven record (due to AIDS research) of extraordinarily promiscuous sexual contacts, which has been demonstrated if not proven to be a major factor in the development and spread of AIDS as a disease that killed a catastrophic percentage of gay men at its height. Questions of morality aside, homosexuality can be very dangerous to your health and your life.

The mass media are bending over backwards to obscure the obvious relationship between homosexual propensities and the rise of gender transition through surgery and hormone treatments. They are also working overtime not to calculate the truly high percentage of mass murders committed by transgenders, who are an incredibly tiny percentage of the population with a long and growing rap sheet of stranger shootings.

The fact that current gender activists have entered a state of near war with self-defined homosexuals is one of the ironies of niche victimhood made into political movements. The gender fluid are now arguing that homosexuals are simply mistaken transsexuals who haven’t realized who and what they really are. None of this is good for anyone’s mental health.

Is it time for homosexuals to reclaim a large portion of their dignity, privacy, and unique identities? Fewer parades, less sexual exhibitionism in the presence of children, and more distance from those who would insist that there are no rules of any kind regarding sexual behaviors in public and in private? I think so.

Do I have any advice about how to achieve such a reclamation? No. All I can do is what I have already done here, which is to suggest that there is a point at which the benefits of claiming various kinds of victimhood become self-destructive and the very opposite of the hoped for progress in achieving universal acceptance. Which may never be possible. If it ever should be.

As I mentioned above, I carry no flag and organize no parades for Alcoholic Rights, despite my unshakable conviction that alcohol has given me, in sum, more than it has taken from me. Not that I should still be drinking. I shouldn’t and am not for now. But that’s my business even if I’m mistaken in my views. I don’t count drunks as one of the chosen peoples. But I’m allowed to see what we have in common with the ones who are. My perspective might be educational in the contemporary confusion and chaos.