Reacting against bigotry may be a fun form of entertainment, but can it be carried too far?

When I was in high school in the late 60s and early 70s, racism was ugly, raw, and a real national disease. The word "nigger" -- while it was starting to be used only in hushed tones in the (white) upper classes, was in wide use among working class whites, who lived in fear that "they" might move in and then "there goes the neighborhood." After the assassination of Martin Luther King I heard many people say that King had been asking for it and had gotten what was coming to him. Feeling very angry, emotionally enraged by the stupidity of racism, and ever more radical as a result, I became a Marxist Leninist, supported the Black Panther Party, and was a very outspoken 15-year-old. This occurred during adolescence, at a time when I simultaneously saw the tyrannical use of the term "faggot" on a regular basis -- to mindlessly instill conformity to sexual role models which I saw as preposterous on their face.

When I announced my homosexuality (which I called bisexuality at the time -- although I was told later that I can't call myself that lest I be accused of being "in the closet"), no one dared criticize me for it. I remember announcing it in the school lunchroom while my classmates froze and stared at their food. I guess it is fair to say that my "coming out" was in large part a reaction against the hypocritical stigmatization of something I had seen going on all over the place -- a thing which turned me on but which meant nothing to me on a guilt level. (I used to see myself as an ancient trapped in a horrible modern world.) True, I played around with both sexes, but the truth of the matter was I wasn't all that sexual of a person. Intrigued by androgyny, many of my LSD trips convinced me that the differences between the sexes were indeed often blurry, but that the ape-like desire to conform induced massive insecurity in people who reacted with anger and bigotry almost out of a need to protect their image vis-a-vis the herd. Well, to me that was a game, and two could play at such a game. Fuck 'em!

I still feel much the same way. I do not understand society's neurotic obsession with putting people into categories and judging them by things like skin color or something even more personal: the content of their orgasms.

This is a major reason I started Classical Values. I think it is high time for people to stop reacting. Homosexuals are a Victorian creation. So are heterosexuals. How long must this con game go on? I mean, I can play it as long as people want to, but I am getting a bit tired and a bit old.

The only person who has any right to know or care about where I put my dick is someone interested in it! To the extent other people want to get into my life, if they are not interested in sex, why, I suppose curiosity is OK, but if they are doing the whole gay-versus-straight, let's-assign-a-category deal, well I have no duty of honesty. I will always be proud to say that I am gay to anyone who wants to make an issue of it, because I consider it a form of bigotry to classify people that way. It is a bit like asking about someone's race; what the hell is the relevance?

The gay movement, however, wants to perpetuate this reaction business, and I think they have reached a point (degenerated to a point, I should say) where they are not about freedom, but about perpetuating society's tyranny. I think it is high time for the tyranny to go. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are arbitrary, bigoted categories. So is bisexuality. Who did this, and why? Krafft-Ebing has been credited with coining the term "homo-sexual" in the 19th century. Before that men were accused of engaging in sodomy -- something I tried to demonstrate (twice) to be primarily a "heterosexual" phenomenon (more properly, something practiced between men and women).

I do not know what it will take to convince people that they are victims of Victorian fraud, but that is what I think.

The gay movement is a reaction against bigotry, and has about as much credibility as the race-based, affirmative action movement or any other identity politics. In some ways it is even more bogus, as the identity is simply based on a reaction against bigotry imposed against a class of people defined and created Houdini-style, on the whims of Victorian shrinks.

[Parenthetical note: This Victorian fraud may well have been grounded in compassion for the plight of accused "sodomites" who were had been imprisoned, or far worse, over the centuries because of medieval interpretations of religious texts. But compassion does not make something logical which is not. Nor is it logical to substitute irrational medical quackery for medieval misapplications of religious texts.]

In ancient times, there was no such category as homosexual. People did sexually what they wanted to do without having labels applied to them for it.

Does such a simple concept have to be a radical idea in a free, modern country?

The last thing in the world I am advocating is intolerance. But tolerance implies that there is something to tolerate, as if to forbear. Why should anyone care where some guy sticks his dick or shoots his wad? I have never been able to understand why. All I know is that they do, and they act like a bunch of sexual control freaks (whose real motivation may be suppressed or misplaced apelike dominance urges). What I saw in adolescence was wrong then and it is wrong now. I don't care whether it is propped up by weak male egos seeking to be leaders or followers, by interpretations of religious texts, or by gay rights activists whose weak egos require them to do the same thing.

How might gay marriage factor into this? People may hate what I am about to say, and I may be accused of giving ammo to the other side, but I assure you I am not. Gay marriage strikes me as a continuation of the gay movement: an insecure, artificial aping of something which is not there -- or at least has no logical need to be there. It is grounded in a movement which arose out of (and is still driven by) anti-homosexual prejudice. Reactions like this, like racial insecurities brought on by racism, should not have been there in the first place, because reactions do not solve reactions.

My argument is not so much against gay marriage as it is for self respect.

I had three long term male lovers. All died. I never needed a government institution to tell me I was OK, and I don't need that now. What is stopping people from living together or doing whatever it is they want to do? Private contracts and adoptions can take into account almost any circumstance I can think of. If I decided to marry a woman, well, I could do that legally regardless of whether we were both gay, straight, bi, or defined ourselves as auto-erotic strangulationists. (And no; the latter not my shtick, OK?) So what? There are a lot of reasons the law protects opposite-sex spouses -- not the least of which is the traditional role of women as the "weaker sex," as the child-rearers who need money because they give up careers, the coming together of the two male/female yin/yang as one, etc. The fact that marriage is changing -- even that it is falling apart as an institution -- does not alter its history, nor does it supply any reason why two members of the same sex should feel forced to imitate an institution intended to use official state glue to cement into place an otherwise consensual contract between men and women.

Why this need for a piece of paper from the government? So that someone can say "I'm just as good as you are?" That is a logical fallacy, because if you need a piece of paper to say you are as good as someone else, you must have doubts. No paper will prove you are just as good. You are in fact just as good and entitled to your life. Needing that paper is insecurity. There is nothing which it gives you which cannot be obtained by other means.

Especially respect. Anyone who requires a government issued piece of paper for self respect in my opinion will not get it from that piece of paper.

Analogizing to a drivers license sheds some light on the problem. Other than a law requiring a license, there is nothing about a drivers license which enables someone to drive. Likewise, a man in his natural state may live with and have sex with any other person, male or female, for whatever length of time the two (or more) may deem fit.

What we are arguing about here is not a living arrangement, but a definition. Unlike a drivers license (without which I may not drive) I can live with anyone I want for as long as I want, share whatever portions of my life, property, inheritance rights I want, without needing any piece of paper from the government to prove it.

If I live with another person without that piece of paper, what are the real, day-to-day consequences? The only one I can think of is that someone might say that I am not married.

Oooohhhh, that is sooo scary! Someone might say I am not married! What trauma! I might not be able to sleep at night if the neighbors didn't think I was married.

Or, suppose I told my neighbors that I consider myself married, or in a common-law situation analogous to marriage. If I didn't have the right piece of paper to wave in his face, he could, I suppose, say, "You're not married and I am!"

"Nyah nyah!"

But if I had the piece of paper, I could wave it is in face and return the nyah nyah?

Is that what this is about?

The right to say "nyah nyah?"

Isn't that like saying "Mommy and daddy said it was OK!"?