The strangers who have babies together

A fascinating look by the BBC at "platonic parenting".

In 2014, Charly Bourne, a then 43-year-old nurse living with his husband in Philadelphia in the US, started to think seriously about having kids. At first, he considered adoption. But after hearing about ‘platonic parenting’ from a colleague, he decided to set up a profile on Modamily, a website that helps connect people who want to start a family. As traditional notions of family get redefined, people like Charly are choosing to raise children as platonic partners.

See the video here.

Over the last few decades, the constraining straitjackets of gender identity have been progressively loosened.  First came the pill, then came easier divorce, then gay rights, then gay marriage.  Step-by-step the old identities and relationships, which seemed immutable, have shifted and changed.

In my writings, I have bisexual men who love both their women and their men, and at some point, I'm going to have to think how they will parent children, and how it will all work.  But all I know is that things will be different.  Just how, I don't know.  I have talked about this broad topic before, here and here.  And in ElvenSword, DemonThrong and AngelFire, I specifically created a society where these relationships are more complicated and subtler than the heterosexual marriage that the ChrisTaliban insist is the only way.

How to vex a ChrisTaliban

Unimaginably huge

.... and so beautiful.

Catherine Hill Bay, NSW. Photo: Karl Lindsay

I did a piece a few years ago railing against the smallness of the imagination of most rabid right Christianists.  They focus on petty "rules" and "laws", when the universe is unimaginably vaster and more strange than anything they can imagine.

The recent discovery of nearly a thousand galaxies which were hidden from view by the stardust in our own galactic disk just emphasises this.  Our own galaxy has 200 to 400 BILLION stars.  And we are part of a pretty normal galaxy.  And now another thousand galaxies have been discovered.

You would think it was pretty hard to hide a galaxy containing tens of billions of stars – but nearly a thousand of them?

Hundreds of new galaxies have been identified within 250 million light years of Earth, hidden behind the glow of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The discovery is helping us understand the structure of our nearby universe and could challenge some of the assumptions of modern cosmology.

"The region we looked at is a very hard region to study; it's know as the 'Zone of Avoidance', another name for the plane of our own galaxy," Professor Lister Staveley-Smith at the University of Western Australia, told Fairfax Media

The centre of our galaxy is teeming with dust clouds and billions of stars. Very little optical light is able to penetrate the dense dust and gas. Even when it does, the foreground stars are so densely packed together that they blind our telescopes to the faint glow from more distant objects. Space behind the Milky Way is invisible to us on Earth.

Using novel techniques in radio astronomy, Australian scientist Professor Staveley-Smith and his team were able to detect 883 new galaxies, a third of which have never been seen before and the rest of which were barely smudges.

Read more here.

Gay Marriage

A Cathy Wilcox cartoon (from The Sydney Morning Herald)

(click to enlarge)

The man who walked through hell

Every gay man over a certain age has stories to tell of prejudice, disdain, contempt, unhappiness, loneliness, of being an outsider, of being shunned and excluded.  In my own life, the way I have been treated by straights, by the crackpot religious has scarred me, physically (I am blind in one eye as a result of bullying at school, and I was bullied because I was "effeminate"),  and mentally.  

But mankind is hateful to mankind.  This interesting article tells the story of a man who was imprisoned by the Japanese and forced to endure intolerable things, yet has somehow survived and is happy.  He does what I try to do, which is to focus of the good things.  Life brings good and bad, joys and woes.  This doesn't excuse the vile behaviour of the bigots and the narrow-minded religious fanatics.  But it's how we live that matters.  And to be happy we must count our blessings, not just all the bad things in our lives.

Finally

Gay marriage is now legal throughout the US.

God has no religion

Marriage equality

More and more ppl in the US favour marriage equality.  The ChrisTaliban are losing.

Lifestyle choice?

Religious freedom

Is 10% of the population gay?

Alfred Kinsey

David Spiegelhalter in a Guardian article analyses new statistics which suggest that that's not a bad guess.  But it's a question of definition.  Which is pretty much what I've been saying for a few years now.


For a single statistic to be the primary propaganda weapon for a radical political movement is unusual. Back in 1977, the US National Gay Task Force (NGTF) was invited into the White House to meet President Jimmy Carter’s representatives – a first for gay and lesbian groups. The NGTF’s most prominent campaigning slogan was “we are everywhere”, backed up by the memorable statistical claim that one in 10 of the US population was gay – this figure was deeply and passionately contested.

So where did Bruce Voeller, a scientist who was a founder and first director of the NGTF, get this nice round 10% from? To find out, we have to delve back into Alfred Kinsey’s surveys in 1940s America, which were groundbreaking at the time but are now seen as archaic in their methods: he sought out respondents in prisons and the gay underworld, made friends with them and, over a cigarette, noted down their behaviours using an obscure code. Kinsey did not believe that sexual identity was fixed and simply categorised, and perhaps his most lasting contribution was his scale, still used today, in which individuals are rated from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual on a scale of 0 to 6.

Kinsey’s headline finding was that “at least 37% of the male population has some homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age”, meaning physical contact to the point of orgasm. He claimed that 13% of males were predominately homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55 (scoring at least 4) and that 4% of males were exclusively homosexual all their lives (scoring 6). For 30-year-old US men, he estimated that 83% would score 0 (totally heterosexual), 8% would be 1 or 2 on the scale, and 9% would be at least a 3. He acknowledged that people could move on the scale during their lifetime, and indeed Kinsey himself is said to have moved from a 1 or 2 when younger to a 3 or 4 in middle age.

When he published his study on women in 1953, Kinsey estimated that 20% of women had had some same-sex experience and 13% to orgasm. In unmarried females between the ages of 20 and 35, he claimed there was at least some homosexual experience in 11%-20%, and 1%-3% were exclusively homosexual.
So, in 1973, when Voeller was putting together the NGTF campaign, he went back to Kinsey’s estimates for those with predominantly homosexual experience (4 to 6 on his scale) for at least three years. As this was around 7% for women and 13% for men he took an average to get the headline figure: 10% of the population was gay.

This 10% claim was controversial, to say the least, and reignited old arguments about Kinsey’s poor survey methods. But even cleaned-up data gave similar answers, and Voeller stuck to the 10%, stating in 1990 that “the concept that 10% of the population is gay has become a generally accepted ‘fact’… As with so many pieces of knowledge (and myths), repeated telling made it so.”

However, later surveys gave much lower results, and of course the ChrisTaliban seized on them as proof that gays don't need rights (as if Jews, for example, who are much less numerous, shouldn't have rights either because there are so few of them)

The explanation lay in the terminology.  If you ask ppl whether they're "gay" or "lesbian" or "bi"  most say no.  Even if they have had same-sex experiences to orgasm.  

Same-sex sexual behaviour can come in all degrees of intensity. So Natsal carefully distinguishes a “same-sex experience”, which could be just a smooch in the dark, from a “same-sex partner”, who is someone with whom you have had any genital contact intended to achieve orgasm. Respondents are asked about activity at any age, so adolescent fumblings counted.

For women in the age range 16 to 44, the proportion who report having had some same-sex experience has shown a dramatic rise over the past 20 years: from 4% in 1990 to 10% in 2000, and to 16% in 2010 – a massive change in behaviour over such a short period. But this is not all just girls kissing girls in imitation of Madonna and Britney Spears; around half report genital contact, and around half of these in the past five years, so that overall nearly one in 20 women report a same-sex partner in the past five years.

But has there really been a change, or are women simply more willing to report what they get up to? Using some neat cross-checking, Natsal reckons that the change between 1990 and 2000 was partly due to more honest reporting, but the rise in 2000 and 2010 was all real.

And it is clear that there is a lot of experimental activity – roughly, for each woman who has had a recent same-sex partner there are two more of the same age who have had some same-sex contact in their lives, but no partner in the past five years.

Men show a different pattern. In 2010, about 8% of 16- to 44-year-old men reported having had a same-sex experience: this is higher than in 1990, possibly associated with both better reporting and the decline in fear of HIV, but there have been no substantial recent changes.

Overall the proportion of people with same-sex experience is far higher than the proportion who identify themselves as gay and bisexual. This must mean that many same-sex contacts are by people who do not consider themselves gay or bisexual. That’s just what we find in reputable surveys: in the last big US survey, 10% of women and 3% of men who identified themselves as “heterosexual” also reported a same‑sex contact.

Read more here.

Other pieces about this:

How many of us are there?

How many American Men are Gay?

What makes us gay?

The Cum-and-Go Culture

I kiss them because I love them

Labels

Straights

All my life I have been despised by straight men.  Not because I was a thief, or a liar, or a rapist.  Not because I was cruel or vicious or evil.  But because I didn't conform to their image of what a boy, or teen, or man should be.  For something I couldn't help, because I was born that way.  They were happy enough for me to pretend to be what I wasn't, to lie to myself and them.  They were happy enough for me to do without love, and without the affection and caring that they got from their partners, because their partners were women, and I (for a long time) wasn't even allowed to make love to a man because it was illegal, punished by a prison sentence.  Their contempt has scarred me and deformed me.

"There had never been a time when he hadn't thought of himself as one of this company the mischance of battle had brought together: one with a secret, as many others had of one sort or another; one with an oddity, but there were plenty of those.  Lovell, who had owned a freak-booth that toured the fairs; Jansen, who was three parts coloured; Willis; Charlot; Odell, who had started with the handicap of 'talking posh'.  Now in a cold solitude he imagined, everywhere in the shadows, men quietly watching, curious, or mocking, or repelled, according to their kind, but all thanking their Maker for the solidarity that didn't include him."  [The Charioteer, by Mary Renault]

But if I say I despise and dislike and mistrust straight men, the response I get is that that is "so unfair", that "not all straight men are like that", and so on.  Indeed.  Yet the anger and hurt and disdain inside me aren't salved by exhortations to be "forgiving"  and "understanding"  and "accepting".  Bitter experience has taught me again and again not to trust men, not to let them into my heart, even as friends, not to rely on them to accept me for what I am.  No one can say I am stupid, and one definition of stupidity is to go on doing the same thing again and again even though what you do doesn't work and merely gives you pain.

And behind this whole cultural hate-fest lies the Church, with its assiduous drip-feed of homo-hatred and lies: "abomination", "intrinsically disordered", "kill the gays".

I cannot forgive or forget.

Ryan Kwanten Begged for 'True Blood' Gay Sex Scene

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.  Times change, and we in them change too.

Who would have thought that a straight actor would have asked for a "gay" sex scene?  My generation still bears the scars of the intense homo-hatred we grew up with.  But younger people shrug off these taboos, indeed, welcome a chance to do something different.  Which is as it should be.  Note though that there are still the hate-filled comments from the unhinged brain-dead in the comments sections below the articles.

Read more here and here.

The Good Lord

Grow two inches

Image from Waking Up Now

I know a girl whose father used to beat her because she wan't tall enough.  He used to measure her height every six months, and if she hadn't grown enough she would get a hiding.  Maybe she was supposed to eat more protein.  Who knows.  I tried never to have any interactions with him.

And of course, most people would regard his batty behaviour as I do:  utterly bizarre, unfair, unproductive, stupid, cruel.

But it made me think.  A friend of mine once said that trying to make a gay person straight was the same as asking them to grow two inches taller.  And this is exactly what gay-haters want.  They want to make us grow two inches taller.  And when we can't, they beat us.

Many of us are bisexual, so we can pretend we're two inches taller.   We can lie to ourselves (the ChrisTaliban prefer us to lie and be miserable than to be gay).  We can even suppress with varying degrees of damage our "gay side".  But some people are 100% gay.  And every day they stand against the wall and someone measures them, and finds them wanting, and punishes them.

[See also NOM = OAGR]

Is hatred of gays innate?

The ChrisTaliban believe that being gay is an abomination.  This isn't an intellectual position, though they try to produce a (feeble) justification for it.  It's felt viscerally, which is a lovely word and means "in your gut".   They have a gut feel that it is evil and wrong.  So why would they think this?  Is it something we're born with?

Think about incest for a moment.  There are powerful biological reasons why incest is a taboo.  In almost all societies, parent-child and sibling incest is taboo.  Inbreeding produces unhealthy offspring; unwell, mentally defective, stunted, short-lived.  It would make evolutionary sense if there were innate guards against incest.  And it seems there are.   So an incest taboo represents not just custom but a genetic (innate) predisposition, a perfect example of the interaction between genes and culture.

Or murder.  There is such a powerful taboo against murder that new soldiers have to specially trained to learn to kill.  And they don't like doing it:

"It is  a curious fact that the majority of soldiers, although well armed, never kill.  During World War II, only one out of every five US soldiers actually fired at the enemy.  The other four were plenty courageous, braving grave danger, landing on the beaches, rescuing comrades under fire, fetching ammunition for others [...]  yet they failed to fire their weapons.  One officer reported that 'squad leaders and platoon sergeants had to move up and down the firing line kicking men to get them to fire.  We felt we were doing good to get two or three men out of a squad to fire.'"  (Frans De Waal, The Age Of Empathy -- he gives several other examples)

Now, let's consider gayness.  At first sight, if you're not thinking carefully, it might seem that gayness would obviously be a genetic taboo.  After all, a gay man or woman is presumably less likely to produce offspring.  Evolution would bias survival against those with a putative "gay gene".   So if society has a taboo against gayness, this is, according the the ChrisTaliban, logical and obvious.  Only, it isn't.

Whatever one's culture is, one is inclined to believe that the way things are in your society, in your family is the way things ought to be, the right way, the proper way.  We in the West find it horrible if dogs or cats are maltreated ("It's just wrong!") but are quite happy to torture cows and sheepen and pigs so we can eat them ("Those animal rights people are extremists!") In India, however, killing cows is unthinkable.  Forbidden.  Cows are sacred.  Eating animal flesh revolts them.

The ancient Israelites were few, and monotheists, surrounded by many other different polytheist cultures.  They felt threatened.  So they wanted to encourage population growth.  Their priests told them to go forth and multiply.  And they told men not to have sex with other men (not women, interestingly, because women were assumed to have little choice in sex or marriage, and would therefore reproduce willy-nilly).  This proscription by the priests, written down as the Old Testament, was added to St Paul's distaste for the promiscuity he saw in the Hellenic world of Asia Minor and it became Christian dogma that being gay was wrong and evil, even though Jesus never mentions it.

So in cultures which have been influenced by a long Christian history or by recent Christian conversion, being gay, especially if you were male, became taboo.  When I was growing up it was quite clear to me that being gay was worse than being a rapist or a murderer.  Which is both absurd and clearly a taboo -- that fascinated horror when you do something "wrong".  These values were exported to Africa and South America and Asia, overriding the more tolerant indigenous values,  so that ironically today, as the West is just getting over its homosexuality taboo, Africa and Russia and Eastern Europe is on the whole getting more backward and narrow and less safe for gays.  Encouraged and prodded of course by Christian crackpots.

But before Christianity/Judaism/Islam, in Europe and in Africa, homosexuality was tolerated and accepted.  The Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Celts, the Teutons, Japan, China, India, Africa, Native Americans--all accepted one or more forms of gayness.  It's only where Christianity and Islam have spread their message that gayness has become taboo, evil and unacceptable.

Mankind didn't survive as individuals wandering the African savannah.  Everything about us indicates that we were members of groups of proto-humans dependent on each other for our survival.  Just as we are now, only now our connections and dependencies stretch around the globe.  Even today, a solitary hermit still depends to some extent on the products of civilisation (candles, oil lamps, salt, axes) and civilisation is nothing other than groups writ large.  Even our intelligence appears to have evolved because as members of a group we needed to satisfy both our personal needs and those of the group.  Empathy, sympathy, insight, self-sacrifice, love, companionship .... you name it, things we consider quintessentially human, these are essential to the survival of groups, but not of individuals. Without them humankind would not have reached where we are now.  Without them we would not survive at all.  Darwinian survival for us humans is not about individual survival but about the survival of the group.  This is an essential insight, vitiating much of economics and politics and received wisdom in our own culture. When I board the train, or walk down the street, ppl do not fall upon me and rob me.  Why not?  Think about it.  Don't take our broad human culture for granted.  We have innate rules on how to behave.  Because without them we would not be here.  We would be orangutans, who are solitary, unsocial, and relentlessly heterosexual.

The taboo against incest is a logical one because of the damage that inbreeding produces.   And incest doesn't just affect the individual, it affects the group.  It makes the tribe/the group/the band less fit, less likely to survive, because the group supports its weaker members. Our ancestral small bands of proto-humans would have had enough problems with inbreeding anyway.

You might surmise that gayness would have been bred out of us.  A Kinsey 6 bloke for example, would have no offspring, and so his genes would not be passed on (though it's true that in a tribe, his genes would still have been passed on by his fellows because the tribe would be somewhat related).  But if gayness is such a genetic disadvantage, why are there so many of us?

It's only an apparent mystery, one that exists because we insist on a dualism: ppl are either gay or straight.  Most gay-shaded people are bisexual.  In fact I suspect a substantial chunk of so-called heterosexuals are actually bisexual, at least potentially.  In the tribe, as a bisexual, your genes would still have been passed on to offspring.  But your love for your fellow tribesman would have helped hold the group together.  Actually, even if you were 100% gay and never had a child, you would still have helped your tribe be more fit, in a Darwinian sense, because you would have strengthened the ties within the tribe.  Of course, the ChrisTaliban and the MusTaliban don't believe in evolution, so this explanation will not satisfy them.  It is our intrinsic evil which makes us gay.

Everybody who has experienced it talks of the love that develops in war between members of the same corps, or about the love and comradeship which develops between the blokes in the same sports team.  Team sports contests are of course substitutes for tribal warfare.  Hunting dangerous animals would have required teamwork and sometimes, self-sacrifice.  Anything that strengthened links within the team/group would have been beneficial for the team/group and therefore for its members.  How else do you account for the one who gives up his life to save the many, and for how highly this behaviour is regarded by most cultures?

Far from being dysfunctional (as incest is) a measure of gayness added to our likelihood of survival.  Because our survival was about the survival of our group, even more than it was about our survival as an individual.    Except for the Abrahamic religions and the societies they have moulded,  hatred of gays is not "innate".  Even within them, the feeling "it's just wrong" has everything to do with culture and nothing with genetics.

Hatred of gays is not innate.  It's taught, and can be untaught.  As Nelson Mandela said, "people learn to hate, and if they learn to hate they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite".

I loves ya

So beautiful and heart-warming.  How can anyone think this is wrong?

How Many American Men are Gay?

An interesting stab at a number.

The author of the New York Times piece comes up with roughly 5% (Note that he assumes that there are gays and then there are straights and nothing in between): 

There are three sources that can give us estimates of the openly gay population broken down by state: the census, which asks about same-sex households; Gallup, which has fairly large-sample surveys for every state; and Facebook, which asks members what gender they are interested in. While these data sources all measure different degrees of openness, one result is strikingly similar: All three suggest that the openly gay population is dramatically higher in more tolerant states, defined using an estimate by Nate Silver of support for same-sex marriage. On Facebook, for example, about 1 percent of men in Mississippi who list a gender preference say that they are interested in men; in California, more than 3 percent do.

Are there really so many fewer gay men living in less tolerant states? There is no evidence that gay men would be less likely to be born in these states. Have many of them moved to more tolerant areas? Some have, but Facebook data show that mobility can explain only a small fraction of the difference in the totally out population. I searched gay and straight men by state of birth and state of current residence. (This information is available only for a subset of Facebook users.) Some gay men do move out of less tolerant states, but this effect is small. I estimate that the openly gay population would be about 0.1 percentage points higher in the least tolerant states if everyone stayed in place.

The percent of male high school students who identify themselves as gay on Facebook is also much lower in less tolerant areas. Because high school students are less mobile than adults, this suggests that a gay exodus from these areas is not a large factor.

We can approach the question of whether intolerant areas actually have fewer gay men another way, too, by estimating the percent of searches for pornography that are looking for depictions of gay men. These would include searches for such terms as “gay porn” or “Rocket Tube,” a popular gay pornographic site. I used anonymous, aggregate data from Google. The advantage of this data source, of course, is that most men are making these searches in private. (Women search, too, but in much smaller numbers.)

While tolerant states have a slightly higher percentage of these searches, roughly 5 percent of pornographic searches are looking for depictions of gay men in all states. This again suggests that there are just about as many gay men in less tolerant states as there are anywhere else.

Read more here.   

And this graphic is very telling.

Tim Tebow

I was in two minds about whether to include this pic of Tim Tebow.

He's handsome and attractive --- on the surface.  But he has also proved himself no friend to gay-shaded men.  The argument about whether he's a homophobe  is still running, but he's a fundamentalist Christian.  And they are for sure hostile to us.   Extremely hostile.  The Christian-Fascists are always saying they don't hate us even as they deny us our rights.  You know, all that claptrap about hate the sin love the sinner.  Even as they tell us that loving another man is a sin, and that we will go to hell for it.   Even as they implicitly encourage us to lie about our sexuality, encourage us to go back to the poisoned confines of the closet, encourage us to pretend to be straight when we were born the way we are.  We cannot stop being gay.

Tebow's been involved With Focus on Family, a gay-hate group.  And his church, First Baptist Church, is profoundly homophobic.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.  After all, I suspect that many of the jocksters I portray here are homophobes, if less open about it.  There are very few like Ben Cohen, who is straight but gay-friendly.

Incensed

My colleague at work has a severely disabled daughter, who is in a wheelchair, has to have a hoist to lift her out of her chair into the shower or onto the toilet, can't get out of bed by herself, and so on and so on.

When she goes out in her motorised wheelchair, she is frequently stopped by so-called Christians who tell her that if her faith was only strong enough, she would get out of her chair and walk.

This incenses me.  It's not enough that she is disabled, will never walk or run or have a normal life, will spend her whole life being dependent on others.  It's also her own fault.

These loathsome people make other people's lives worse, not better.  There is no love there, just a self-righteous judgmental bossy-boots horribleness.  Repellent, sanctimonious, hypocritical cretinism.

Jesus wept.