Gay culture and traditional marriage are antithetical to each other

Folsom Street Fair leather guysI’m a reasonably confident blogger, but I have to admit that I always like it when someone with knowledge greater than mine validates something that I’ve been hollering about for years. In this case, the validation comes regarding my contention that gay culture is fundamentally unhealthy, as well as being inconsistent with marriage and children. I’ve hope I’ve never said this in a moralistic way (i.e., “they’re evil”) but in a factual way (e.g., “You need to understand that the gay lifestyle is inconsistent with the public policy they’re pushing”). At least one person from inside the gay community thinks I’m right.

Over the years, I’ve often commented in my posts about the terribly unhealthy, hedonistic, self-centered gay lifestyle.  I fully developed the idea in 2014, when I read a post by a gay man who remained committed to a heterosexual marriage.  In commenting on his choice, I had this to say about the unhealthy excesses of the gay lifestyle in my San Francisco hometown:

By the mid-1970s, hippies were passé in San Francisco.  The new “in thing” was the gay scene.  The libertarian part of me thought it was a wonderful thing that men and women (but mostly men) could love freely, without being afraid that they would be humiliated, beaten, ostracized, or imprisoned.  Even as the gay lifestyle flowered in San Francisco, we heard stories about gays being imprisoned in Soviet Russia for no other crime than the fact that they were gay.

Nevertheless, even though I appreciated the gay liberation movement, I was revolted by the movement’s excess.  The drug use, nudity, orgies, etc., were too reminiscent of the hippies.  I already knew the price people paid for excess.  After AIDS came along, and the stories really broke about what was going on in the bath houses, I wasn’t surprised.

When I tried to explain to people my sense of repugnance about the gay lifestyle, what I always fell back on was the fact that this type of hedonism couldn’t be good — not for society and not for the individual.  In addition, I was offended by the lack of intimacy.  Getting naked with a stranger and having drug-fueled sex is not intimacy.  Getting to know someone, loving them, sharing the highs and lows of life together, understanding what makes them tick, wishing them well — those are the ingredients for intimacy.  The gay lifestyle I saw around me was aggressively opposed to those “mundane” relationship attributes.

Growing up and working in San Francisco, I was able to see that, to too many gays, their choices have always been, first and foremost, about sex.  Without exception, every person I knew from high school who came out of the closet instantly embraced a package deal.  It wasn’t just that they selected their partners from their own sex.  It was that they suddenly only went to gay movies, had gay porn magazines in their household, hung out only with gays, and voted gay . . . which meant an increasingly hard Left political agenda.  They were no longer “Larry, a teacher and father who happens to have a male partner.”  Instead, “they were a gay man named Larry who happens to teach on the side and is proud to raise his kid in a same-sex parent home.”

This obsessive focus on sex left little room for anything else.  As the 70s and 80s demonstrated (and as is becoming true again today for a young generation of gay men), brief, intense, drug-heightened sexual encounters were like meth for the brain.  Why have a stable, loving relationship with anyone when you could go to the bathhouse, or just walk down the street, and be a sexual endorphin junkie getting hit after hit?  Even those men I knew who were in stable relationships with long-term partners weren’t monogamous.  Instead, their relationships were still about having sex with as many men as possible — provided that they shared dinner with the same man every evening.

(See also this post or this post.)

Yesterday, The Federalist published a long article by Jason Hill, a self-identified gay conservative Democrat.  The article’s title and subtitle are pretty descriptive: “Loveless, Narcissistic Sex Addicts: A Gay Man Critiques His Community : Short of a moral and radical revolution in nihilistic gay culture, the moral gay minority will have its aspirations for traditional marriage obliterated.”  I urge you to take the time to read the whole thing.

My article was about an outsider looking in. His is about an insider looking in — and it paints the same picture of the gay community that I painted. Sure, when there’s a political push the activist community puts front and center the lesbian couple that’s been together for decades or the handsome gay men with the pretty surrogate bred half-siblings in their designer clothes. The reality, though, is that this is a lifestyle that’s dedicated to and defined by the pursuit of sexual pleasure.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with sexual pleasure, which is a God-given gift. Moreover, there are plenty of childless heterosexual couples who’ve chosen hedonism as their drug of choice. Nevertheless, there’s a difference between the overarching theory of heterosexuality — marriage is for procreation, which sexual pleasure being the icing on the cake — and the overarching reality of gay relationships — sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. The fact that specific individual relationships may vary isn’t the point. The point is what does the majority paradigm offer to society, and what benefits or burdens does it visit upon those who live and die by the paradigm.

I’m struggling through boring legal work, so I’ll sign out now. I just wanted to have my little “I told you so” moment. Your comments are always welcome here, provided that they are thoughtful and polite. I believe a society is healthiest when its focus is on encouraging stable heterosexual relationships, and I’ll argue that case strongly, but this is no place for vulgar, threatening, or nasty attacks against gays or lesbians.