On Recruitment

Sometimes the world can be a fucked up thing. In the last several posts, I have set aside my normal concerns, which have tended to be with literary theory and analyses of films and literature, to talk a little about my own life and the more distasteful topics that have occupied me more in recent years than I would like. One post I wrote a couple of months ago, "An Unpalatable Suggestion", concerned sexuality. I am going to talk about this subject again. I am not going to entirely withdraw the hypothesis I proposed in that post but I would like to amend it somewhat.

People are interested in the causes of homosexuality and so I want to offer a theory about it. In coming up with a reasonable explanation of the etiology of this 'condition', one requires a good basis. We must reject two principles, one from the Right and one the Left, that dominate discussion, but which are both wrong. The first 'axiom' is this. People choose to be gay. Sometimes fundamentalist Christians and other extreme conservatives argue that homosexuality is something like a lifestyle preference - that homosexuals decide, for some obscure reason, to choose to want sexual relations with people of the same gender. The reason these right-wing groups believe that sexuality is a choice is partly a result of the unshakeable conviction that people have free-will, that everything that happens to a person springs from their own volition. It is an idea that goes hand in hand with a faith in capitalism. Second, the religious people who believe this credo, that sexuality is a choice, often tend to understand sexuality in terms of morality. Homosexuality is a sin and it is the duty of all good Christians (or Muslims or Jews etc) to always try to choose virtue over sin. Gay people are sinners and are destined for Hell. Because they have chosen to be gay. Everyone is personally responsible for what they do and who they are and so their sexuality has ethical implications. Naturally, I think this right-wing credo is ludicrous.

The second 'axiom' is this. Sexuality is the result of nature, not nurture. Oddly enough, the idea that people are born one way or the other despite being a left-wing tenet is also a fallacy. (it was a fallacy interestingly that Kurt Cobain, for instance, believed). But this idea is equally ludicrous. To anyone who knows anything about biology, genetics and naturally selection, the idea of a 'gay gene'  is patently specious, as is the old-wives tale that sexuality has something to do with mother's milk during infancy. The issue of sexuality actually exposes a contradiction in the left-wing liberal world-view: on almost all other issues left-leaners believe in nurture over nature – but this paradigm, this belief in the power of society and environment to mold people, a notion beloved of the social sciences and humanities, is for some reason set aside when matters of sexuality arise. Identity politics here trumps rationality. Yet about this it is the Left that is wrong. I'm sorry, Lady Gaga, but people are not "born this way".

Instead we need to say, first, that sexuality is not a choice, and second, that sexuality is the result of nurture not nature. Given these two premises, it follows logically that homosexuality must be engendered by environmental factors and it falls to people who want to understand this murky issue to determine what those environmental factors might be. If they are at all interested in these things. I do not believe that there is a single environmental cause, that there are many; furthermore I believe that homosexuality is often the result of a combination of environmental causes. The one I want to focus on though is 'recruitment', a term that is often misunderstood. The word makes people imagine that the Gay community is like the military, with army centers at which young men can queue up and sign a form saying that they are opting to choose a career of spandex, the Scissor Sisters, ballet, small dogs, interior decoration, the Wizard of Oz and sodomy. Or that the the Gay community is like the Jehova's witnesses, going door to door converting bored housewives. This is not what I mean by recruitment. What I mean by recruitment is a situation where a vulnerable young person finds him- or herself in a scene in which he or she is preyed upon by a predatory homosexual - a homosexual who may well been the young person's friend. A sexual event, which may not have been entirely consensual, upsets the victim's sense of personal identity and can result in him or her deciding later that he or she must be gay. This is my theory in nutshell.

A less misleading and ambiguous term than 'recruitment' would be homosexual rape.

Fear of unwanted homosexual advances is evident in many films. In the 1987 blackly comic film Withnail and I, the two young male protagonists, cohabiting actors with highly disheveled life-styles, find themselves staying in a house belonging to Withnail's homosexual uncle. The film contain this amusing yet ugly piece of dialogue. The uncle comes into the protagonist's bedroom. "Are you a sponge or a stone?" says uncle Monty. When the protagonist, Marwood, asks him what he means, Monty says, "Do you like to experience all facets of life or do you shut yourself off from new experiences?". Monty is obviously soliciting Marwood for sex and despite Marwood's protestation that he is not homosexual, the sequence comes close to depicting a molestation. It turns out that Monty's advances are the result of a misunderstanding (the whole sequence can be viewed on Youtube) but it still makes for very uncomfortable viewing. In the 1979 film Being There, the protagonist Chauncy Gardiner is approached at a party by a gay attendee who asks him if he has ever had sex with a man. Chauncy, who unknown to everyone around him is actually quite simple-minded, replies "Not that I can remember". In the 1922 poem The Waste Land, TS Eliot describes being propositioned by "Mr Eugenides, Smyrna merchant" - a episode, which whether or not autobiographical, distresses the narrator and is intended to shock the reader.

What I am getting at here is that being approached for sex by someone of the same gender can be very upsetting and the reason for this is because it poses a genuine existential threat. When I was younger I was very non-homophobic, in the abstract, and even a keen supporter of Gay rights (I still am) - but nevertheless I strongly felt that gay men and women should only go out hunting for sexual partners in Gay clubs and through sites like Grinder, that they should avoid hitting on people in heterosexual locales because they should only come on to people who they already knew to be gay. I thought that the two worlds should stay separate. I know this makes me seem somewhat bigoted or insecure perhaps, but I believe my instinctive avoidance of gay men and dislike of being the object of male attention was the result of an extremely strong self-defense mechanism. At some level I found being the object of male advances threatening.

If homosexuality is something like a social disease that can be communicated person to person, it makes sense to avoid gay men.  Of course, when I use 'rape' I am not thinking of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Marcellus Wallace gets buggered by a couple of hillbillies. The line between consensual and non-consensual sex is often  hard to draw - people do not draw up contracts before they engage in heavy petting and sometimes, in heterosexual sex (to draw an analogy), a man can misread a woman's signals. It is precisely the ambiguity surrounding a sexual encounter that can create the conditions for a destabilization of personal identity. A person who has had a homosexual experience may for whatever reason not be able to appreciate the fact that he or she has been raped. I understand that in recent years it has been found that women can experience orgasm during rape (a disagreeable finding, yes, but apparently true). Is it not then possible for a woman to rape a woman perhaps and cause her to climax? Or for the same thing to happen to a man? Such a situation if it can occur is surely enough to mess with a person's mind.

There is, of course, the question about how someone can end up in a situation where he or she has become the victim of homosexual date-rape and this is presumably where other environmental factors must come into play. Presumably there must be something like an underlying vulnerability. Nevertheless the idea of recruitment is worth considering. It may seem odd. Surely, you might say, homosexuality is a matter of personal identity? Surely a person can't change from straight to gay as the result of an experience? Isn't this why gay men are camp and lesbians butch? I am still thinking about this issue and may never have a complete answer. However, this idea of recruitment still seems to me plausible. I think of the line from "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" by Faith No More, a song which has had some special relevance to my life: "If you don't make a friend now, one might make you, so learn the gentle art of making enemies".