by William Irwin Thompson

“We Irish think otherwise” Bishop Berkeley

Sappho and Erinna, Simeon Solomon, Tate Gallery

It was the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau who first fought off the hordes of the self-righteous who rose to the attack of homosexuality by insisting that “The State had no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” In the evolution of culture since the sixties—and because of the sixties, I might add—we have made some progress and people have come to accept homosexuality as a cultural reality and not simply as an “abomination in the eyes of the Lord.” Or, at least, those sensible people who prefer to live in a culture and not a cult have come to be more tolerant and pluralistic in their acceptance of tempora et mores.

So let us take a step back to look at the issue of Gay marriage from an evolutionary point of view, both cultural and biological—although these two are never really separated in human reality. If, in the terms of Natural Selection, homosexuals do not reproduce, what possible selective pressure can there be that enables homosexuals to survive over the millennia? They should have died out long ago as a kinky approach to orgasm that arose when we all had to huddle together in caves in the Ice Age and no one really knew late at night what was going on under all those furs. By the time of the sunlit nuclear families of the Neolithic, when houses shifted from round to square and had an extra room for individual food storage and private property, people began to domesticate animals and notice which black goat sired more black goats, and paternity reared its—well, you get the idea.

Homosexuality should have disappeared, but in fact most of those Abrahamic cultures of the Middle East and Central Asia have strong traditions of boy love, and those love poems of Hafez that celebrate the beauty of the “slim Turk,” are not talking about women. Across the vast continent of Eurasia to the Greeks and Romans, and up to the birth of Latin poetry with Catullus, poetry is celebrating homosexuality and bisexuality. And if we go back even further to the Gilgamesh Epic, we find a celebration of the love of men for men. When Gilgamesh couples with women, it is merely the relief of a biological drive, but his intense love for Enkidu is a sublime love of a higher order. Homosexuality has been with us for a long time and probably antedates the institution and so-called “sanctity of marriage.”

So we have to ask ourselves, what selective pressure exists for the continuation of homosexuality when it is obviously not an agency of reproduction? The answer is, of course, that there is a process of Baldwinian Evolution going on, and that the selective pressure is cultural. The homosexual is the magical “wounded healer,” the man with the vulva that heals itself. From the dawn of culture, vulvas were inscribed on rocks and cave walls, and the figurines of the Great Mother, like the Venus of Laussel, were daubed with red ochre to signify the menstrual blood. The vulva was the wound that healed itself in rhythm with the lunar cycle. The man with the vulva was the shaman, the wounded healer who had knowledge of animals and stars, healing and weather. When Christ shows the labial-shaped wound in his side to the doubting Thomas, he is showing that he is the vulva-man, the wounded healer who has healed death itself in his resurrection.

Androgynous men were often selected in early adolescence and marked out in their femininity for training as future shamans. So it is cultural selection and not simply natural selection that produces the selective pressure that insures the continuation of the homosexual. Unconsciously this is why Roman Catholic priests wear soutanes, Bishops and Cardinals dress in colorful and outrageously draggish clothes, and have a fondness for altar boys. It is naïve to think that child abuse is merely a case of a few bad apples; it is basic to the institution of priesthood. It is the boy love culture of Eurasia surviving into our day under wraps.

But as society evolves through the cultural vehicle of the city, from Athens to Rome to London to New York, the shaman also evolves from the sacerdotal figure to the artist. The small town or village still was religious and ignorant, so the Gay man, a Walt Whitman or a Hart Crane, had to move to the Big City. And what was true of Gay men was also true of Lesbian women, from Sappho to Yourcenar. In a more secular society, the shaman becomes the artist.

So if we are going to invoke tradition as the foundational justification of the family, then we had better be sure we know what our traditions really are.

But really–as Trudeau said–the State has no business in any of this. The State may need to issue certificates for birth and death, but certainly not for baptism or extreme unction. And so it is for marriage or confirmation and Bar Mitzvah. The State should issue certificates for civil unions that have to do with property rights and medical visitation rights, and that is all. After one receives a birth certificate from the State, one’s parents can choose to take one to church to be baptized. And so it should be for marriage: after you have been to City Hall, then you can go to whatever religious institution you choose that is willing to bless your union. If you are, for example, a Catholic or Evangelical, and your Church won’t accept your union, then that is grounds for divorce—from either your partner or your religion.

Choir Boys

Not the organ answering Job out of the whirlwind,
nor the tiny pointed notes of the harpsichord–
metallic and discrete as knights in armories
unfurled and elevated above the clubbed blood
of churlish battle or bones struck on mammoth skulls,
nor the sun’s arteries drained in stained glass truncheons;
bound in cassocks to their claustral occulted place
where priestly functions anoint the choir boys’ throats
in rituals thousands of years before the Mass,
cherub buttocks lean on the misericord’s hard love
tangled in wings of the dove and coils of the snake
that soon break sunset’s shaft on the rising full moon;
but now the pianoforte in thundering halls
breaks gods’ hold in revolution’s noisy applause.

Cultural philosopher and poet, William Irwin Thompson, is founder of the Lindisfarne Fellowship. He became nationally known as a writer for his best-selling book on contemporary affairs, At the Edge of History, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.  He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award for his science fiction fantasy novel Islands Out of Time and has published four books of poetry. As a cultural historian, he is most widely known for his books, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture and Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness.  His collection of poems, Still Travels, will be published by Wild River Books, an imprint of Wild River Review, this summer.