Now that you are all offended (and yes, lonicera, that includes you)...
The Victorians were very frank and open in their discussion of sex. It was quite a passion of theirs, and the terms in which and by which we discuss it ourselves have not changed from their time. The idea of "free love" is Victorian; the defence of homosexuality, late-Victorian. By 1900, Germany had an organized homosexual movement based in Berlin. (People do not remember it much, because it ended up being a part of the German extreme right and one of the component parts of Nazism.) Freud and Havelock Ellis were typical late Victorians, and they inherited a tradition of intellectual debate of sex that went back to the late seventeen hundreds and such figures as Lord Hamilton (the husband of Emma, Nelson's lover), who wrote earnestly scholarly treatises on sexual matters. To think otherwise makes it impossible to understand such a writer as George Eliot, or such works of art as Tristram und Isolde and Dejeuner sur l'herbe. It makes it impossible to understand why, seventeen years after the death of Queen Victoria, Lenin should include in his revolutionary program a commitment to destroy the family, liberalize sex, and legalize abortion and homosexuality. All these things were in the air, in the intellectual climate and thought.
The reason why we are under the impression that the opposite is true is that the Victorians generally recognized an obligation not to involve the young in this discussion. There was a general sense - which some wit called "the tyranny of the Young Person" - that under-age people, especially girls, should not be exposed too early to explicit treatment of sex; and therefore, every novelist and every publisher felt under the burden not to put anything in a novel that might corrupt the crowds of fifteen-year-old girls who devoured them. (A memorable image of teen-age enthusiasm for novels can be found in Louisa May Alcott's virtually autobiographical LITTLE WOMEN, where the four sisters form a club in imitation of the Pickwick Circle and elaborately assume the roles of Dickens' characters. Such things were all the rage.) The discussion of sex, however frank, was restricted to adults; among other devices, by a simple and ingenious means - sexually-related passages in classics or specialist works were written in Latin, a language which every educated adult knew, but which few teen-agers could be expected to possess to the required precision. Clearly, this was not a device that intended to seriously exclude anyone from the debate, at a time when not only educated women, but almost any self-educated working class person could be expected to learn Latin. It is found even in Pandit Ganguli's Victorian English translation of the Indian epic Mahabharata.
We are now in virtually the opposite position. Adolescents, whose "hormones" are usually said to be not only uncontrollable but positively not to be controlled, are showered with explicit sex. The excuse is to avoid them making foolish mistakes out of ignorance, but considering that the rate of adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is growing across the board and in every Western country, this hardly seems to add up. Adults, on the other hand, are increasingly discouraged from debating an ever-increasing and ever-deepening spectrum of propositions and areas of interest related to sex and especially to homosexuality. For instance, I have never encountered any really frank discussion of the details of male and female homosexual practice. The fact that anal intercourse inevitably involves getting your cock dirty with shit and sometimes - according to the fragility of the anal channel - with blood, is something that did not dawn to me until a specific response in a question-and-answer column on sexual matters. That was very instructive. The questioner was a young man who, like me, had learned about anal intercourse from artificially positive pornographic accounts, and had been disgusted by the reality. The expert, while waffling a bit, virtually said that there was no avoiding the problem - even condoms were not altogether reliable under the extreme pressures of the sphincter - and suggested trying a soapy enema up the anal canal concerned.
This is the sort of thing that we are simply not allowed to discuss in the matter of sex. It is swept under the rug. And that is why people live, where sex is concerned, in a dream-world. A staggering symptom of this, to me, was the comment from bufo_viridis, normally the wisest, most penetrating and most poised of all my f-list. To my statement that homosexual practice inevitably narrowed people, he answered "I would be interested to hear how" - implying, one, that he had never come across a motivated statement of this viewpoint, and, two, that he found it hard to understand. To which I can only say, where have you been? Which part of "I am a Catholic" do you not understand? Have you not heard the screeching of the media when a Vatican document, hedged about with a million caveats, said that it was not a good idea to consecrate homosexuals to the priesthood? Do you not know that the Catholic Church has taught from time out of mind that homosexual desire is disordered and homosexual acts sinful? Of course you do; you are an educated and intelligent person from a Catholic country. Have I not written an essay on the Catholic view of the sexes within man, and of the union of the sexes as an image of God on Earth? (http://www.livejournal.com/users/fpb/84324.html) You may not agree with any of this. You may find our arguments wrong, our posture repressive, our activities criminal. But to express surprise that such a view should exist; to talk as though nobody had ever said or thought anything like that - and this not from the average teenie fangirl, this from bufo_viridis - just shows how narrow our field of discussion on these matters really is.
Think about it. Is there any reason why a person should not entertain the point of view that - as opposed to ordinary sex - homosexual practice tends to narrow experience and focus? Is it an absurd - I do not say an unlikely - an absurd notion? Is it stupid? Does it not apply to the categories? I do not think it is. I do not think that it can be argued that it is absurd, unreasonable, to say that to restrict your options to your own sex, rather than to the distance and difference of the other, must tend to narrow. I do not think that it is even stupid, in the sense of being a category mistake, a comparison of apples and oranges; to the contrary, it makes a suggestion very much in the correct area - it is about experience and practice, and what experience and practice might do to perception and to personality. In other words, it is a possible viewpoint, one for which it is possible to argue, one whose wrongness is by no logical means self-evident. Certainly, it will give offence; but most of us take pride in defending positions that give offence, if we consider them valid. Certainly there is no louder screaming, no angrier rejection, from what I have come to regard as the opposing party, than at any notion of censorship. Hijja even contests my right to delete posts to my own blog; to her, this is "censorship". And yet the censorship on these matters is so profound and automatic that Bufo, a brilliant and wise person, with personal knowledge of Catholicism, and a professional anthropologist to boot, finds the very proposition unexpected and bewildering.
The ideological pressure is to restrict discussion to one area, and one area only - the sufferings of the poor suppressed homosexuals at the hands of the wicked persecuting society. lonicera's comment is a perfect example. It is not an argument, it is a piece of emotional blackmail. ...I'm enraged and cannot at all share the writer's or your point of view. As the poster you answered to said, the unhappiness of the families would not have happened if these men had had the possibility to just go with the flow and not be programmed by their homophobic social surroundings. And the point you raise that no one actually cares what other people do in bed - be their hetero- or homosexual - may be in wide parts accurate for Europe, but the US of A is quite another story as I can only deduct from my own experience with bible-toting, nonsense-spouting born again christians. I haven't seen the film yet, but am told by people who have, that in fact it's not a film about sex, but a film about love. Those guys *love* each other, but their society forbids the _expression of their love and so everyone suffers, not only them, but everybody connected to them. A condition that could have been avoided by exercising the tinyest bit of tolerance - which is supposed to be a christian virtue, I believe?
I can only interpret the closing sentence as a demand that I should stop expressing opinions or endorsing the opinion of others, about the moral quality of homosexual practice. "Tolerance" (which, by the way, is not a Christian virtue; perhaps you mean "charity") demands that no such opinions should be held. That there is absolutely no difference between homosexual and normal "love", indeed no difference between any kinds of love, is a given; even though, if I were to follow this statement literally, I should express my love for my brother by committing incest. Above all, that there is no difference of kind and degree in love, that there is no such thing as corrupted or ignorant love, that all love is equally meritorious, that all love is equally binding, must at no cost be even brought into question. There is no thought in this statement, only a rockbound ideology reinforced by emotional blackmail - uhh, I had such a hard time in those terrible USA, so I demand that you should not multiply my sufferings - and expressed in a language that is nothing short of threatening.
What surprises me is that, of all people, this commenter is the one who ought to know that I am not very open to this kind of reaction: that I do not accept demands to follow viewpoints I disagree with, and that I do not react well to threats. She came to know me through the recent Blaise Zabini kerfuffle, during which she took my side in so extreme a way that I had, as I recall, to post more moderate reactions myself once or twice. And this, in a way, is as symptomatic as Bufo's bewilderment. By nature, Bufo is broad-minded, gracious, thoughtful and open to debate; by nature, lonicera tends to admire and support independence of mind, indeed to grow angry on its behalf, even where she does not share views. But the culture in which they live (aided, if I understand correctly, by a personal stake in her case) have made the very possibility of debate on this subject so remote, and so hedged it around with taboos - all around the ghastly sin of being "demeaning" - that neither of them ever awakened to the possibility that these views might be exposed to any question. When they were, Bufo_viridis reacted with bewilderment, and lonicera with anger, according to their natures.
This word love is the biggest begged question of the lot. It is used in a way that I can only describe as sentimental: to wrap all aspects of the phenomenon under one undifferentiated blanket called "love" and to give it a sort of blessing, by the inevitably positive overtones that word has in the post-Christian imagination. That love is what Anna Karenina and Othello felt does not seem to cross the minds of many people much of the time; nay, we reassure ourselves that love means wanting the good of the beloved, and that jealousy and the greed for possession are the very reverse of love.
Yet possession is at the very heart of this. The passion we are discussing, the passion outlined by Aung Lee and his cohorts, has this difference from ordinary male friendship: the desire to possess the body of the other person. If that desire was not there, there would be no issue, no point to make, no disagreement. Sexual possession and enjoyment, not love in any universal way, is the difference. I love my brother, but I feel no desire whatever to possess his body. I love the music of Beethoven or Schubert, but I do not masturbate to it. I love the city of Rome and the Italian nation, but neither has ever done anything to make my cock hard. Love does not imply sex. (Nor, for that matter, does sexual desire imply love in any shape or form, but that is another matter. Love, not desire, is being used by Hollywood to validate homosexual desire; so let us talk about it in the context of love.)
We are back, therefore, to what I mentioned earlier: the matter of bodily possession, physical sex. Homosexual love wants the body of the beloved. And this essay started with a little look at some of the mechanics of this bodily possession. And it would surprise me to hear that anyone could connect the sort of detail we came across with the notion of love. In my view, just as the use of the word "love" serves to smother debate about matter of fact, so attention to matter of fact immediately removes the very idea of love to an infinitely remote distance. How is love in any way to do with the idea of, say, easing the physical revulsion of the - uh, "lover" - by the notoriously painful and not very healthy process of pushing soapy water up the rectum of the, uh, "beloved"? I have been in love four times in my life, and I assure you that I do not disassociate sex from love; but this is at the absolute opposite end from anything I ever thought or felt about the body of the woman I loved. It is, to be blunt, enslavement and usage, reduction to matter, reduction to a thing.
No need to bother telling me that there is real love, love for that particular person, behind the act. I have lived with enough homosexuals of both sexes to know that. I have made a study of Virgil in the context of homosexual passion (http://www.livejournal.com/users/fpb/7089.html), translated Sappho's Hymn to Aphrodite and written It was all on account of the little Russian girl (http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/fabio_p_barbieri/IWAOAOTLRG01a.html). I am saying that in my view that this kind of love is crippled, deviated, or, as the Church says, disordered; aimed at the wrong thing.
Obviously, you will want to use my religion to dismiss my views. Well, I do not think that there is such a person as someone without a religion, unless of course you mean someone in a deep vegetative state. The point is however that this view does not depend on its being Catholic, and that it is certainly not limited to Catholics. If you meant to refuse the view that matrimony is a sacrament and involves the presence of God, well and good, that is a Catholic doctrine. But the view that there is design in human nature - whether or not you admit a Designer - is widespread, natural, and eminently defensible. And the view that the two sexes are, in this design, complementary and meant to encounter, is equally easy to reach. And that from it follows that what orientates sexual desire away from its obvious target and to one which has no evident design value at all, is a disorder. None of these propositions depends on Christianity in any way, and I would be grateful if you restrained from attacking the Church in this context - not that you won't, alas.
My view is that homosexual desire is natural in the same way that blindness or congenital disease are; because there are flaws in everything, and all things tend to go wrong. And that it is not as homosexuals - there is the error - but as human beings and citizens, that people who carry this particular feature or flaw have a right to be respected. This, in my mind, parallels the rights of disabled people. It is because a disabled person is still a human being, with the same basic value as all other human beings, that he or she has a claim on our respect; certainly not because he or she is blind or deaf or paralyzed or mentally disordered. Not as a victim, but in spite of being a victim. To go further: in certain ways, and in certain fields, disability may actually spur human beings to achievements that they might not have otherwise made or even thought of. One instance, in one area, would be the fairly numerous brilliant blind musicians; another, in a different way, is the development of elaborate sign languages. But for that we do not praise blindness or deafness, but the power of the human spirit to make use even of misfortune. By the same token, the number and greatness of homosexual artists and thinkers - from Sappho and Virgil to Tchaikovsky and Craig Russell - bears witness not to any value in homosexuality itself, but to the way that the human spirit reacts even to painful and incorrigible situations by creating the spiritual equivalent of pearls. In that sense, the homosexuality of a Tchaikovsky is the functional equivalent of the deafness of Beethoven or of Schubert's knowledge that he had syphilis and would die soon: it was the point of pain in the flesh around which, to make sense and value, music grew.
The dogma lonicera accepts unconditionally and tries to force on me, is that the pain and lack of self-love of homosexuals is entirely the fault of society, and that if and when society is finally brainwashed into being "tolerant" on her terms, it will vanish. I do not believe that for a minute. I have had a few close friends who were homosexual, and in every case you could see the direct link between their desires and some deep and ineradicable wound in their past, something that often manifested itself in ways other than homosexuality. It is not out of ideology alone, but out of experience, that I believe that homosexuality is itself painful. Indeed, the hysteria with which the discussion on these subjects is excluded and denounced, the loud claim that it makes them feel demeaned or insulted or degraded, is itself evidential in the extreme. The world is full of people who carry a real load of contempt from their neighbours: Jews, Muslims, negroes, and so on. This has no effect on their own self-regard, certainly none comparable with the violence evident in lonicera's comment; a violence which, in my experience, is endemic. Sane Jews do not start howling at you for a vicious anti-Semite if you question their claim to be the Chosen People; a few of them question it themselves, and all will recognize that it only means something within the context of Jewish beliefs. I very much doubt whether many Jews may be found to argue that any challenge to their own self-view must be silenced because it is demeaning.
The reason why we are under the impression that the opposite is true is that the Victorians generally recognized an obligation not to involve the young in this discussion. There was a general sense - which some wit called "the tyranny of the Young Person" - that under-age people, especially girls, should not be exposed too early to explicit treatment of sex; and therefore, every novelist and every publisher felt under the burden not to put anything in a novel that might corrupt the crowds of fifteen-year-old girls who devoured them. (A memorable image of teen-age enthusiasm for novels can be found in Louisa May Alcott's virtually autobiographical LITTLE WOMEN, where the four sisters form a club in imitation of the Pickwick Circle and elaborately assume the roles of Dickens' characters. Such things were all the rage.) The discussion of sex, however frank, was restricted to adults; among other devices, by a simple and ingenious means - sexually-related passages in classics or specialist works were written in Latin, a language which every educated adult knew, but which few teen-agers could be expected to possess to the required precision. Clearly, this was not a device that intended to seriously exclude anyone from the debate, at a time when not only educated women, but almost any self-educated working class person could be expected to learn Latin. It is found even in Pandit Ganguli's Victorian English translation of the Indian epic Mahabharata.
We are now in virtually the opposite position. Adolescents, whose "hormones" are usually said to be not only uncontrollable but positively not to be controlled, are showered with explicit sex. The excuse is to avoid them making foolish mistakes out of ignorance, but considering that the rate of adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is growing across the board and in every Western country, this hardly seems to add up. Adults, on the other hand, are increasingly discouraged from debating an ever-increasing and ever-deepening spectrum of propositions and areas of interest related to sex and especially to homosexuality. For instance, I have never encountered any really frank discussion of the details of male and female homosexual practice. The fact that anal intercourse inevitably involves getting your cock dirty with shit and sometimes - according to the fragility of the anal channel - with blood, is something that did not dawn to me until a specific response in a question-and-answer column on sexual matters. That was very instructive. The questioner was a young man who, like me, had learned about anal intercourse from artificially positive pornographic accounts, and had been disgusted by the reality. The expert, while waffling a bit, virtually said that there was no avoiding the problem - even condoms were not altogether reliable under the extreme pressures of the sphincter - and suggested trying a soapy enema up the anal canal concerned.
This is the sort of thing that we are simply not allowed to discuss in the matter of sex. It is swept under the rug. And that is why people live, where sex is concerned, in a dream-world. A staggering symptom of this, to me, was the comment from bufo_viridis, normally the wisest, most penetrating and most poised of all my f-list. To my statement that homosexual practice inevitably narrowed people, he answered "I would be interested to hear how" - implying, one, that he had never come across a motivated statement of this viewpoint, and, two, that he found it hard to understand. To which I can only say, where have you been? Which part of "I am a Catholic" do you not understand? Have you not heard the screeching of the media when a Vatican document, hedged about with a million caveats, said that it was not a good idea to consecrate homosexuals to the priesthood? Do you not know that the Catholic Church has taught from time out of mind that homosexual desire is disordered and homosexual acts sinful? Of course you do; you are an educated and intelligent person from a Catholic country. Have I not written an essay on the Catholic view of the sexes within man, and of the union of the sexes as an image of God on Earth? (http://www.livejournal.com/users/fpb/84324.html) You may not agree with any of this. You may find our arguments wrong, our posture repressive, our activities criminal. But to express surprise that such a view should exist; to talk as though nobody had ever said or thought anything like that - and this not from the average teenie fangirl, this from bufo_viridis - just shows how narrow our field of discussion on these matters really is.
Think about it. Is there any reason why a person should not entertain the point of view that - as opposed to ordinary sex - homosexual practice tends to narrow experience and focus? Is it an absurd - I do not say an unlikely - an absurd notion? Is it stupid? Does it not apply to the categories? I do not think it is. I do not think that it can be argued that it is absurd, unreasonable, to say that to restrict your options to your own sex, rather than to the distance and difference of the other, must tend to narrow. I do not think that it is even stupid, in the sense of being a category mistake, a comparison of apples and oranges; to the contrary, it makes a suggestion very much in the correct area - it is about experience and practice, and what experience and practice might do to perception and to personality. In other words, it is a possible viewpoint, one for which it is possible to argue, one whose wrongness is by no logical means self-evident. Certainly, it will give offence; but most of us take pride in defending positions that give offence, if we consider them valid. Certainly there is no louder screaming, no angrier rejection, from what I have come to regard as the opposing party, than at any notion of censorship. Hijja even contests my right to delete posts to my own blog; to her, this is "censorship". And yet the censorship on these matters is so profound and automatic that Bufo, a brilliant and wise person, with personal knowledge of Catholicism, and a professional anthropologist to boot, finds the very proposition unexpected and bewildering.
The ideological pressure is to restrict discussion to one area, and one area only - the sufferings of the poor suppressed homosexuals at the hands of the wicked persecuting society. lonicera's comment is a perfect example. It is not an argument, it is a piece of emotional blackmail. ...I'm enraged and cannot at all share the writer's or your point of view. As the poster you answered to said, the unhappiness of the families would not have happened if these men had had the possibility to just go with the flow and not be programmed by their homophobic social surroundings. And the point you raise that no one actually cares what other people do in bed - be their hetero- or homosexual - may be in wide parts accurate for Europe, but the US of A is quite another story as I can only deduct from my own experience with bible-toting, nonsense-spouting born again christians. I haven't seen the film yet, but am told by people who have, that in fact it's not a film about sex, but a film about love. Those guys *love* each other, but their society forbids the _expression of their love and so everyone suffers, not only them, but everybody connected to them. A condition that could have been avoided by exercising the tinyest bit of tolerance - which is supposed to be a christian virtue, I believe?
I can only interpret the closing sentence as a demand that I should stop expressing opinions or endorsing the opinion of others, about the moral quality of homosexual practice. "Tolerance" (which, by the way, is not a Christian virtue; perhaps you mean "charity") demands that no such opinions should be held. That there is absolutely no difference between homosexual and normal "love", indeed no difference between any kinds of love, is a given; even though, if I were to follow this statement literally, I should express my love for my brother by committing incest. Above all, that there is no difference of kind and degree in love, that there is no such thing as corrupted or ignorant love, that all love is equally meritorious, that all love is equally binding, must at no cost be even brought into question. There is no thought in this statement, only a rockbound ideology reinforced by emotional blackmail - uhh, I had such a hard time in those terrible USA, so I demand that you should not multiply my sufferings - and expressed in a language that is nothing short of threatening.
What surprises me is that, of all people, this commenter is the one who ought to know that I am not very open to this kind of reaction: that I do not accept demands to follow viewpoints I disagree with, and that I do not react well to threats. She came to know me through the recent Blaise Zabini kerfuffle, during which she took my side in so extreme a way that I had, as I recall, to post more moderate reactions myself once or twice. And this, in a way, is as symptomatic as Bufo's bewilderment. By nature, Bufo is broad-minded, gracious, thoughtful and open to debate; by nature, lonicera tends to admire and support independence of mind, indeed to grow angry on its behalf, even where she does not share views. But the culture in which they live (aided, if I understand correctly, by a personal stake in her case) have made the very possibility of debate on this subject so remote, and so hedged it around with taboos - all around the ghastly sin of being "demeaning" - that neither of them ever awakened to the possibility that these views might be exposed to any question. When they were, Bufo_viridis reacted with bewilderment, and lonicera with anger, according to their natures.
This word love is the biggest begged question of the lot. It is used in a way that I can only describe as sentimental: to wrap all aspects of the phenomenon under one undifferentiated blanket called "love" and to give it a sort of blessing, by the inevitably positive overtones that word has in the post-Christian imagination. That love is what Anna Karenina and Othello felt does not seem to cross the minds of many people much of the time; nay, we reassure ourselves that love means wanting the good of the beloved, and that jealousy and the greed for possession are the very reverse of love.
Yet possession is at the very heart of this. The passion we are discussing, the passion outlined by Aung Lee and his cohorts, has this difference from ordinary male friendship: the desire to possess the body of the other person. If that desire was not there, there would be no issue, no point to make, no disagreement. Sexual possession and enjoyment, not love in any universal way, is the difference. I love my brother, but I feel no desire whatever to possess his body. I love the music of Beethoven or Schubert, but I do not masturbate to it. I love the city of Rome and the Italian nation, but neither has ever done anything to make my cock hard. Love does not imply sex. (Nor, for that matter, does sexual desire imply love in any shape or form, but that is another matter. Love, not desire, is being used by Hollywood to validate homosexual desire; so let us talk about it in the context of love.)
We are back, therefore, to what I mentioned earlier: the matter of bodily possession, physical sex. Homosexual love wants the body of the beloved. And this essay started with a little look at some of the mechanics of this bodily possession. And it would surprise me to hear that anyone could connect the sort of detail we came across with the notion of love. In my view, just as the use of the word "love" serves to smother debate about matter of fact, so attention to matter of fact immediately removes the very idea of love to an infinitely remote distance. How is love in any way to do with the idea of, say, easing the physical revulsion of the - uh, "lover" - by the notoriously painful and not very healthy process of pushing soapy water up the rectum of the, uh, "beloved"? I have been in love four times in my life, and I assure you that I do not disassociate sex from love; but this is at the absolute opposite end from anything I ever thought or felt about the body of the woman I loved. It is, to be blunt, enslavement and usage, reduction to matter, reduction to a thing.
No need to bother telling me that there is real love, love for that particular person, behind the act. I have lived with enough homosexuals of both sexes to know that. I have made a study of Virgil in the context of homosexual passion (http://www.livejournal.com/users/fpb/7089.html), translated Sappho's Hymn to Aphrodite and written It was all on account of the little Russian girl (http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/fabio_p_barbieri/IWAOAOTLRG01a.html). I am saying that in my view that this kind of love is crippled, deviated, or, as the Church says, disordered; aimed at the wrong thing.
Obviously, you will want to use my religion to dismiss my views. Well, I do not think that there is such a person as someone without a religion, unless of course you mean someone in a deep vegetative state. The point is however that this view does not depend on its being Catholic, and that it is certainly not limited to Catholics. If you meant to refuse the view that matrimony is a sacrament and involves the presence of God, well and good, that is a Catholic doctrine. But the view that there is design in human nature - whether or not you admit a Designer - is widespread, natural, and eminently defensible. And the view that the two sexes are, in this design, complementary and meant to encounter, is equally easy to reach. And that from it follows that what orientates sexual desire away from its obvious target and to one which has no evident design value at all, is a disorder. None of these propositions depends on Christianity in any way, and I would be grateful if you restrained from attacking the Church in this context - not that you won't, alas.
My view is that homosexual desire is natural in the same way that blindness or congenital disease are; because there are flaws in everything, and all things tend to go wrong. And that it is not as homosexuals - there is the error - but as human beings and citizens, that people who carry this particular feature or flaw have a right to be respected. This, in my mind, parallels the rights of disabled people. It is because a disabled person is still a human being, with the same basic value as all other human beings, that he or she has a claim on our respect; certainly not because he or she is blind or deaf or paralyzed or mentally disordered. Not as a victim, but in spite of being a victim. To go further: in certain ways, and in certain fields, disability may actually spur human beings to achievements that they might not have otherwise made or even thought of. One instance, in one area, would be the fairly numerous brilliant blind musicians; another, in a different way, is the development of elaborate sign languages. But for that we do not praise blindness or deafness, but the power of the human spirit to make use even of misfortune. By the same token, the number and greatness of homosexual artists and thinkers - from Sappho and Virgil to Tchaikovsky and Craig Russell - bears witness not to any value in homosexuality itself, but to the way that the human spirit reacts even to painful and incorrigible situations by creating the spiritual equivalent of pearls. In that sense, the homosexuality of a Tchaikovsky is the functional equivalent of the deafness of Beethoven or of Schubert's knowledge that he had syphilis and would die soon: it was the point of pain in the flesh around which, to make sense and value, music grew.
The dogma lonicera accepts unconditionally and tries to force on me, is that the pain and lack of self-love of homosexuals is entirely the fault of society, and that if and when society is finally brainwashed into being "tolerant" on her terms, it will vanish. I do not believe that for a minute. I have had a few close friends who were homosexual, and in every case you could see the direct link between their desires and some deep and ineradicable wound in their past, something that often manifested itself in ways other than homosexuality. It is not out of ideology alone, but out of experience, that I believe that homosexuality is itself painful. Indeed, the hysteria with which the discussion on these subjects is excluded and denounced, the loud claim that it makes them feel demeaned or insulted or degraded, is itself evidential in the extreme. The world is full of people who carry a real load of contempt from their neighbours: Jews, Muslims, negroes, and so on. This has no effect on their own self-regard, certainly none comparable with the violence evident in lonicera's comment; a violence which, in my experience, is endemic. Sane Jews do not start howling at you for a vicious anti-Semite if you question their claim to be the Chosen People; a few of them question it themselves, and all will recognize that it only means something within the context of Jewish beliefs. I very much doubt whether many Jews may be found to argue that any challenge to their own self-view must be silenced because it is demeaning.