🚩 A Note from the Author (X.2021)

Growing up, I noticed that to be masculine you could only like girls. If you liked other guys, you were probably a feminine guy. But what if you were masculine and liked other masculine guys? After much reading, I found that such was pretty common in the Greco-Roman world. The result of my research is the free (priceless?) book below, also available as a YouTube/Odysee playlist, mp3 download, and printable PDF.

Check out my new videos on YouTube and Odysee. I also take pictures. Questions? Send emails 📨 to whatisgrero at gmail dot com.

Steve does cartwheels. He is a terrific athlete.

Grero: The Masculine Alternative to Gay and Straight

Once upon a time, there was a world where the love between men wasn't merely tolerated but understood as an attribute and requirement of masculinity. Their philosophers debated just how much better was the love between men. In their epics that codified their sacred virtues, their mythical heroes loved one another just as often as their gods took mortal men as boyfriends. As lovers, male couples slayed tyrants at home and vanquished enemies abroad. In politics, almost all of their emperors loved men. But this is not a fairytale: such was the documented history of the Greco-Roman world spanning a millennium. What changed? And how?


Table of Contents



Chapter 1: The Sexual Flexibility among Greco-Roman Males

Homer's recounting of the bloody Trojan War in the Iliad and Odyssey illustrates the real life "military culture based on permanent warfare in which masculinity was highly valued."[1] Given our current prejudices, it is then shocking to discover that one of the most celebrated military units, the Sacred Band of Thebes, was comprised entirely of male lovers. Plutarch tells us the reason for such an arrangement:

For when the going gets tough, tribesmen don't give much thought for their fellow tribesmen, nor clansmen for their fellow clansmen. But a battalion joined together by erotic love cannot be destroyed or broken: its members stand firm beside one another in times of danger, lovers and beloveds alike motivated by a sense of shame in the presence of the other.[2]

After half a century of victories, the Sacred Band was finally defeated by Phillip II of Macedon who wept at the thought of such noble pairs dying.[3] As he had many male lovers himself, Phillip's remorse is easy to understand.[4] His son Alexander the Great in turn grieved "uncontrollably" at the loss of his "dearest friend" Hephaestion by "flinging himself on the body of his friend and lay there nearly all day long in tears, and refused to be parted from him until he was dragged away by force by his companions." A heart-broken Alexander died a few months later.[5] There was no shame in those days about open male-male love, sex included.

The real life warrior couple, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, was honored in poems for assassinating the tyrant Hipparchus.[6] Is it any wonder that tyrannical regimes always have had suspicions of same-sex relationships and sought to outlaw them?

These mortals merely imitated the king of their gods Zeus who as an eagle in one account[7] carried his lover Ganymede back to Mount Olympus. Homer confirms:

Tros, king of the Trojans […] had three noble sons, Ilus, Assaracus, and Ganymede who was comeliest of mortal men; wherefore the gods carried him off to be Zeus's cupbearer, for his beauty's sake, that he might dwell among the immortals.[8]

The inclusion of such an unmistakable same-sex relationship (verified by numerous graphic plates[9]) in perhaps the most well-known literature from the era boggles the mind but only if we let our current culture convince us that the love between men cannot be masculine and belongs to a certain stereotypically weak-jointed minority. The Ganymede myth is merely a reflection of a wider custom.[10] To be masculine and reach full adulthood, a Cretan adolescent needed a sexual relationship with another male, the fake abductor in a "prearranged mock kidnapping" who prized the youth not for his handsomeness but his manliness.[11] If the younger abductee's friends determined that the abductor was of equal or superior rank and suitably masculine character, they would cheerfully send the pair off to spend the next two months hunting, feasting, and having sex in the countryside.[12] Upon return, this rite of passage ended with the newly-minted adult receiving a military outfit and a drinking cup, signifying his equality with men and difference from women and children. You had to get with a guy to be a guy.

Zeus was not the only god to be madly smitten by a male mortal. His brother, Poseidon, the god of the sea, was "overwhelmed with desire" for Pelops. The poet Pindar addresses the beloved mortal:

Your father Tantalus had invited the gods
to banquet in his beloved Sipylus,
providing a stately feast in return for the feast they had given him.
It was then Poseidon seized you,
overwhelmed in his mind with desire, and swept you on golden mares
to Zeus' glorious palace on Olympus,
where, at another time,
Ganymede came also
for the same passion in Zeus [13]

After his expulsion from Olympus (his father bootlegged the immortality nectar of the gods), Pelops tried to win the daughter of the king of Elis who had challenged every previous suitor to a chariot race and promptly killed each after their loss. Pelops called in a favor to his former lover Poseidon who granted him victory with a "golden chariot and winged horses." Peloponnesus, the large southern peninsula of Greece, derives its name from this Pelops.

Certainly, anyone can write a story. However, the origins of the poem give insight into the whole of Greek culture rather than just the imagination of a single writer. The poem was commissioned by Hieron I, tyrant of Syracuse, to celebrate his Olympic horse-race victory, a sporting event from which women were barred. We can conclude it was no insult to be compared to the male lover of a god: it was an honor. The macho all-male set encouraged same-sex sex in those days.

The Iliad also mentions a pair of close warriors, Achilles and Patroclus. When told of the demise of Patroclus, "by far the dearest to him of all his comrades": [14]

A dark cloud of grief fell upon Achilles as he listened. He filled both hands with dust from off the ground, and poured it over his head, disfiguring his comely face, and letting the refuse settle over his shirt so fair and new. He flung himself down all huge and hugely at full length, and tore his hair with his hands.[15]

Achilles is so heart-broken that he vows revenge on Patroclus's killer, Hector, even so knowing that his own death is prophesied to follow soon after Hector's:

I will pursue Hector who has slain him whom I loved so dearly, and will then abide my doom when it may please Zeus and the other gods to send it. Even Hercules, the best beloved of Zeus—even he could not escape the hand of death, but fate and Hera's fierce anger laid him low, as I too shall lie when I am dead if a like doom awaits me.[16]

While Homer is not sexually explicit about the two, only pudding-headed puritans could conceive otherwise. As Aeschines believed twenty-three centuries ago, their "extraordinary degree of goodwill towards one another would be self-explanatory."[17] Indeed, the contemporary Greek debate about the sexuality of the two focused on just how the pair confirmed to the age-structured ideal of Greek relationships not whether or not any sexuality was implied. Aeschylus argues Achilles was the older one; Phaedrus in Plato's Symposium calls this "nonsense" as Achilles was more beautiful, had not yet grown a beard, and was chronologically younger.[18] Homer in his sequel, the Odyssey, is explicit about another male couple. He has a married Nestor encouraging a young Telemachus to sleep with the former's son Pisistratus, despite that both of them later marry women.[19] Such fluidity was the mundane norm, not the exception.

In Xenophon's Symposium, Socrates and his friends are invited to a dinner to discuss the nature of love.[20] He concludes that "Achilles is depicted by Homer gloriously avenging the dead Patroclus not because he was his favorite boy but because he was his companion" (8.31) reasoning that one "should consider love of the soul more important than intimacy with the body" creating a dichotomy between love and lust (8.28), not a refutation of the sexual relationship between the warriors. The rest of that very dialogue shows that the Greeks took same-sex sex between men as an obvious given.

For example, Critobulus starts the initial conversation by answering that he takes greatest pride in his looks (4.10) and that he lusts after a (male) Cleinias "with more pleasure than I watch all other beautiful things in the world" (4.12). However, Critobulus had recently married a woman (2.3). He furthermore creates equivalence between liking boys and girls when he boasts to Socrates that he "could persuade this boy and this girl to kiss me sooner than you could, Socrates, even if you were to give a very long and clever speech" (4.18).

For Xenophon then, it's not that Achilles and Patroclus couldn't have loved one another but that as idealized mythical heroes they should be understood as having the self-control to not act on such carnal same-sex temptations, temptations that were taken for granted. We can surmise as much from when Socrates compliments Callias that he finally managed to fall in love with the (male) Autolycus (a fact the "whole city knows") who wasn't "weakened by softness" but rather had "strength, endurance, courage, and temperance" (8.7-8). You can like men, as long as it is for more than sex, according to Xenophon.

Roman Emperors

Whatever the exact nature of Achilles-Patroclus and the gods, we don't have to settle for fiction to understand a different culture. The first twenty Roman emperors[21] provide possibly the most concise indictment against the quaint Western folk belief in the exclusive heterosexuality of the vast majority of males. Of these twenty leaders, eighteen are recorded to have had male interests on the side or outright lovers, one of whom was deified after death. That's ninety percent:

Emperor (term)

Source material

Julius Caesar (49 BC – 44 BC)

… and being dispatched into Bithynia to bring thence a fleet he loitered so long at the court of Nicomedes as to give occasion to reports of a criminal intercourse between him and that prince; which received additional credit from his hasty return to Bithynia under the pretext of recovering a debt due to a freed man his client.

 

The only stain upon his chastity was his having cohabited with Nicomedes and that indeed stuck to him all the days of his life and exposed him to much bitter raillery. I will not dwell upon those well-known verses of Calvus Licinius: "Whate'er Bithynia and her lord possess'd / Her lord who Caesar in his lust caress'd."

 

… [he] entrusted the command of three legions, which he left at Alexandria, to an old catamite of his, the son of his freed-man Rufinus.[22]

Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD)

In his early youth various aspersions of an infamous character were heaped upon him. Sextus Pompey reproached him with being an effeminate fellow; and [Mark] Antony with earning his adoption from his uncle [Julius Caesar] by prostitution. Lucius Antony, likewise Mark's brother, charges him with pollution by Caesar; and that, for a gratification of three hundred thousand sesterces, he had submitted to Aulus Hirtius in the same way, in Spain; adding that he used to singe his legs with burnt nutshells to make the hair become softer.[23]

Tiberius (14 AD – 37 AD)

In his retreat at Capri, he also contrived an apartment containing couches, and adapted to the secret practice of abominable lewdness, where he entertained companies of girls and catamites, and assembled from all quarters inventors of unnatural copulations… He likewise contrived recesses in woods and groves for the gratification of lust, where young persons of both sexes prostituted themselves, in caves and hollow rocks in the disguise of little Pans and Nymphs… It is also reported that during a sacrifice he was so captivated with the form of a youth who held a censer, that, before the religious rites were well over, he took him aside and abused him…[24]

Caligula (37 AD – 41 AD)

He never had the least regard either to the chastity of his own person, or that of others. He is said to have been inflamed with an unnatural passion for Marcus Lepidus Mnester, an actor in pantomimes, and for certain hostages; and to have engaged with them in the practice of mutual pollution. Valerius Catullus, a young man of a consular family, bawled aloud in public that he had been exhausted by him in that abominable act. Besides his incest with his sisters… [25]

Claudius (41 AD – 54 AD)

[We find in Edward Gibbon's 18th century History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 1 on page 38 footnote w: "Yet we may remark that of the first fifteen emperors, Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct."[26]]

Nero (54 AD – 68 AD)

Besides the abuse of free born lads… [he] gelded the boy Sporus and endeavoured to transform him into a woman. He even went so far as to marry him, with all the usual formalities of a marriage. Settlement, the rose-coloured nuptial veil, and a numerous company at the wedding. When the ceremony was over he had him conducted like a bride to his own house and treated him as his wife.

 

He prostituted his own chastity to such a degree, that after he had defiled every part of his person with some unnatural pollution, he at last invented an extraordinary kind of diversion; which was to he let out of a den in the arena covered with the skin of a wild beast, and then assail with violence the private parts both of men and women while they were bound to stakes. After he had vented his furious passion upon them, he finished the play in the embraces of his freed man Doryphorus, to whom he was married in the same way that Sporus had been married to himself; imitating the cries and shrieks of young virgins, when they are ravished. I have been informed from numerous sources, that he firmly believed, no man in the world to be chaste, or any part of his person undefiled; but that most men concealed that vice, and were cunning enough to keep it secret.[27]

Galba (68 AD – 69 AD)

In his lust, he was more inclined to the male sex, and such of them too as were old. It is said of him, that in Spain, when Icelus, an old catamite of his, brought him the news of Nero's death, he not only kissed him lovingly before company, but begged of him to remove all impediments, and then took him aside into a private apartment.[28]

Otho (69 AD)

[After he] got into Nero's good graces, he soon became one of the principal favourites, by the congeniality of his disposition to that of the emperor; or, as some say, by the reciprocal practice of mutual pollution.[29]

Vitellius (69 AD)

He spent his youth amongst the catamites of Tiberius at Capri, was himself constantly stigmatized with the name of Spintria, and was supposed to have been the occasion of his father's advancement, by consenting to gratify the emperor's unnatural lust.

 

In the subsequent part of his life, being still most scandalously vicious, he rose to great favour at court being upon a very intimate footing with [Caligula], because of his fondness for chariot driving, and with Claudius for his love of gaming. But he was in a still higher degree acceptable to Nero, as well on the same accounts, as for a particular service which he rendered him.[30]

Vespasian (69 AD – 79 AD)

[Vespasian is mentioned as "desirous to gain, by all possible means, the good graces of Caligula"[31] but this is too vague to count. Otherwise the count would be 19/20 or 95%.]

Titus (79 AD – 81 AD)

Besides his cruelty he lay under the suspicion of giving way to habits of luxury, as he often prolonged his revels till midnight with the most riotous of his acquaintance. Nor was he unsuspected of lewdness on account of the swarms of catamites and eunuchs about him, and his well-known attachment.[32]

Domitian (81 AD – 96 AD)

He is said to have spent the time of his youth in so much want and infamy, that he had not one piece of plate belonging to him; and it is well known, that Clodius Pollio, a man of pretorian rank, against whom there is a poem of Nero's extant, entitled Luscio, kept a note in his hand-writing, which he sometimes produced, in which Domitian made an assignation with him for the foulest purposes.[33]

Nerva (96 AD – 98 AD)

Some, likewise, have said that he [Domitian] prostituted himself to Nerva who succeeded him.[34]

Trajan (98 AD – 117 AD)

I know, of course, that he was devoted to boys and to wine, but if he had ever committed or endured any base or wicked deed as the result of this, he would have incurred censure; as it was, however, he drank all the wine he wanted, yet remained sober, and in his relation with boys he harmed no one.[35]

Hadrian (117 AD – 138 AD)

During a journey on the Nile he lost Antinous, his favourite, and for this youth he wept like a woman. Concerning this incident there are varying rumours; for some claim that he had devoted himself to death for Hadrian, and others — what both his beauty and Hadrian's sensuality suggest. But however this may be, the Greeks deified him at Hadrian's request, and declared that oracles were given through his agency, but these, it is commonly asserted, were composed by Hadrian himself.[36]

Antoninus Pius (138 AD – 161 AD)

In my father [Antoninus Pius] I observed mildness of temper, and unchangeable resolution in the things which he had determined after due deliberation; and no vainglory in those things which men call honours; and a love of labour and perseverance; and a readiness to listen to those who had anything to propose for the common weal; and undeviating firmness in giving to every man according to his deserts; and a knowledge derived from experience of the occasions for vigorous action and for remission. And I observed that he had overcome all passion for boys…[37]

Marcus Aurelius (161 AD – 180 AD)

[In his teens to his tutor Fronto:] "Go on, threaten me with hosts of arguments, yet shall you never drive your lover, I mean me, away; nor shall I the less assert that I love Fronto, or love him the less, because you prove with reasons so various and so vehement that those who are less in love must be more helped and indulged. So passionately, by Hercules, am I in love with you, nor am I frightened off by the law you lay down, and even if you shew yourself more forward and facile to others, who are non-lovers, yet will I love you while I have life and health.[38]

 

[In his 50's:] I thank the gods … that I never touched either Benedicta or Theodotus, and that, after having fallen into amatory passions, I was cured…[39]

Lucius Verus (161 AD – 169 AD)

When he set out for Syria, however, his name was smirched not only by the licence of an unbridled life, but also by adulteries and by love-affairs with young men.[40]

Commodus (177 AD – 192 AD)

… Commodus lived, rioting in the Palace amid banquets and in baths along with 300 concubines, gathered together for their beauty and chosen from both matrons and harlots, and with minions [puberibus exoletis], also 300 in number, whom he had collected by force and by purchase indiscriminately from the common people and the nobles solely on the basis of bodily beauty.[41]

Pertinax (193 AD)

He held a sale of Commodus' belongings, even ordering the sale of all his youths and concubines, except those who had apparently been brought to the Palace by force. Of those whom he ordered sold, however, many were soon brought back to his service and ministered to the pleasures of the old man…[42]

 

While lending support to the overwhelming sexual difference from today, the histories still sound rather homophobic. Why? First, the English translators superimposed their hysterical Victorian morality on the ancient past. These translations (and contemporary medical books dating from the late 19th century) either bowdlerize out the naughty parts (brought to you by the letter X) or leave them in the original Latin to prevent the pious reader from contracting the vapors bibliologically.

Second, the cause of the negativity was not homophobia as the Romans lacked a concept of homosexuality (and without it, homophobia cannot exist). What some busybody Romans objected to was what they considered feminine behavior. They objected to men taking it up the ass and sucking dick not because they were homophobic but because they were misogynistic: a man should not submit to another man like a lowly woman. (Obviously, those who partook must have disagreed with such sexual mores.) Notice then that Augustus is accosted for submitting to his predecessor Julius Caesar, but Julius Caesar is not accosted for fucking Augustus. Likewise, the only stain on Caesar was his early relationship with Nicomedes, not his later relationship with a younger man. The restrictions on submission applied only to free men and not slaves or foreigners, relationships in which neither men would be negatively judged: Nero crime's was the "abuse of free born lads."

A Stoic trend also called for moderation, hence the negative tone concerning orgies and throngs of prostitutes. But such denunciations provide evidence of sexual flexibility: it is assumed without hesitation or comment that the emperors enjoyed both men and women. The outrage is often directed at the number of partners, not their genitalia. Underscoring that point is the commentary on Vespasian: despite not divulging any same-sex partners for this emperor, Suetonius viewed negatively his insatiable whoremongering of the opposite sex. Similarly, Trajan's love of wine and boys does not arouse rebuke from Dio: rather, the omnipotent emperor's moderation shows his good character (or a strong liver and cock).

It is with these men of power we close this introduction, neither providing an exhaustive review nor a model to slavishly emulate. We are not re-enactors. I don't want slaves or emperors. However, the contrast could not be more clear between their past and our sexually inflexible present, the false homosexual-heterosexual dichotomy included. This jarring contrast between then and now illustrates that the love between men was not just merely tolerated but so surprisingly common leading one modern scholar to conclude that "… it would be a monumental task indeed to enumerate all the ancient documents in which the alternative 'boy or woman' occurs with perfect nonchalance in an erotic context, as if the two were functionally interchangeable."[43] They seem so different from us but they are us. They share our genes and in many cases, we have actual Roman or Greek ancestors. The only tangible difference between the Romans, Greeks and us is culture. Culture does not cause men to like women, a biological inevitability for most males. However, culture must cause the majority of men to not like other men and to only and exclusively like women.

These men married women (and sometimes other men). They certainly liked women, but it's undeniable that they also liked men. Despite giving a somewhat muddled history lesson on the origins of our sexual orientation system, actor James Franco correctly notes that our current system precludes the sort of sexuality we saw with the Greeks and Romans: "Because of those [current] labels, you do it once and you're gay, so you get fewer guys who are kind of in the middle zone." As the Romans did not have the our genital-based classification system for sexuality, they did not have to worry about straying from the good label "heterosexual" by refusing to engage in what today we would call "homosexual" acts. He continues: "It sounds as though I'm advocating for an ambiguous zone or something, but I'm just interested in the way perception changes behavior."[44] It sounds like grero: while most men do like women, our current culture prohibits them from acting on (or in most cases, even consciously realizing) their innate attraction to other men because of our erotic gatekeeper, the fascist heterosexual orthodoxy.[45] In the absence of Judeo-Christian culture, masculine likes masculine, or grero for short. Another way of looking at it would be to compare the sexuality of then and now using the modern standard of the Kinsey scale. The Kinsey scale gives the average of the total of heterosexual and homosexual relationships, from a scale of 0 to 6. If you mostly have male sexual partners but also some women, you'd be a 4 or 5. If we plot all men on the scale, we would get something like the figure below. Most men in the modern West allege themselves to be 0's or exclusively heterosexual. However, based on this chapter, it's safe to assume that most men in the Greco-Roman world would not be exclusively heterosexual but somewhere in James Franco's middle zone:

This conclusion that our current culture retards an innate sexual flexibility as seen in the Greco-Roman world raises more questions than it answers. What about gays incessantly droning on about being born that way? Surely, they weren't made gay by culture. What about straight men who insist that they only like women? Surely, they're not lying. We have to untangle quite a bit of gobbledygook to answer these questions.

Chapter 2: 10% Gay or 90% Non-Straight?

If you watch TV (which you shouldn't, but if you do) you'll come across The Gay Debate: are they born that way or did daddy not take them hunting enough?[46] The gay rights activist will insist that gays are born that way and thus entitled to rights. The representative of the 14th century will at best admit that perhaps gays have a predisposition, but, just like with alcoholism, this ill too can be overcome with plenty of prayer and costly quack reparative therapy. "Damnation! No donation, no salvation," to quote the game Grand Theft Auto 2.[47]

The meticulous thinker should be skeptical of the gay side's view of the origins of this strange species called the gays because the premise itself is illogical and shaky: supposed inborn traits do not give rights. On the contrary, every genocide has been started when a detestable minority group was found to have an incorrigible flaw, i.e. they were born that way. The Nazis believed that Jews were born that way and couldn't unjew themselves, no matter what. Those given to same-sex inclinations could change or at least control their urges enough not to be a public nuisance, so these brilliant thinkers thought. That's why under the Nazi regime six million Jews died, while perhaps only six thousand died of those arrested under Paragraph 175, the old Prussian law that made sexual acts between males illegal.

So why do gays hammer home the point that they are born that way? While logic does not grant rights for inborn traits,[48] the judiciary of the United States has a distinct bias against reason and logic. They think that "groups with such immutable characteristics as race or sex entitle them to equal protection of the law."[49] If gays are part of a protected class, they get the rights. Apparently, I have more right to collect coins if I can show that my numismatic urges are congenital rather than acquired in later life. Methinks that's a more limiting view of rights but a critique of the legal system of our banana republic is outside the scope of this work and will have to wait until a forthcoming volume.

The cleric shares a conflict of interest with the gays and needs truth bent his way too: he doesn't want gays to have been born that way because it contradicts his view that God created a perfect world. If gays were born that way, their interpretation of the Bible is wrong. Why would God make people who by nature tend not to go forth and multiply? Why would God endow people with desires that they cannot partake in? God cannot be a Hermes.[50]

So are gays born that way or not? And more importantly, how do our numerous Greco-Roman colleagues figure into this? Well, given the logical flaws and conflicts of interest, let's instead resurrect the now dormant debate between scientists and historians.[51]

Scientists have confirmed that gays are probably born that way, though the exact reasons remain elusive; the main culprits are genes and prenatal hormones. They point to myriad studies that show that perhaps 2-10% of the population would be in the catch-all category of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (or LGBT) that deviates (quite literally) in development from the heterosexual norm, the vast majority, at the very least 90%.

This 90%[52] is an awfully familiar number, it's also the number of Roman emperors with boyfriends. So what's going on? Why are the homo-hetero numbers inverted for the past if homosexuality is a fixed trait? There may be a few more gays in a culture without homophobia, but science does not expect the 90% figure, and thus shrugs it off as an irrelevant blip on the radar of massive contra-evidence. Opposed to these essentialists, some historians, social constructionists, and classicists hint at culture as an overlooked driver of sexuality. They are skeptical of the science because history shows a great deal more variety of sexuality between men, including dozens of cultures like the Greco-Roman world in the previous chapter.

Are the scientists making stuff up? Is all of history a big hoax? There is a way for both seemingly mutually exclusive views to be correct. While both have much to offer, science and history speak mutually unintelligible languages[53] so their differences have not been reconciled. How does a scientist interpret historical data that rejects everything seen in the lab? How does a historian interpret scientific data that rejects everything seen in history? A review of both history and science is needed. Spoiler alert: both are correct, as contradictory that may seem.

Chapter 3: The Gay Gender

As a child, the Urning manifests an entirely unmistakable inclination toward girls' occupations, toward the company of girls, toward playing with girls' toys, especially dolls. How terribly lamentable to such a child that it is not the custom for boys to play with dolls, that Santa Claus will not bring him any dolls, too, and that he is forbidden to play with his sister's dolls![54]

Even a cursory review of the science tells us that gays indeed are born that way. But there's an important caveat that the gay activists don't mention when trumpeting this good news. The science ties sexual orientation to gender, the sense of being masculine or feminine.[55] Namely, gay men are shifted towards the feminine: "what's striking is the large number of traits in which gay people's minds are at least part-way shifted in gender-atypical direction" according to Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist whose own research on sexual orientation is often invoked by the "born that way" side.

To put another way, even pro-gay researchers have found that under controlled experiments some well-known stereotypes about effeminate gay men contain at least a "kernel of truth."[56] While confirmation of these stereotypes goes relatively unmentioned in most of the press, this gay effeminacy is foundational to the conclusion that gay men are born that way.

The prevailing theory is simple: "Differences in levels of circulating sex hormones [of the fetus] – usually testosterone – during one or more critical periods of development cause the brain to develop in a more-male-like or more female-like direction, and these differences influence a spectrum of gendered traits in juvenile life and adulthood, including the preference for male and female sex partners."[57] More simply, prenatal hormones circulating in the mother's womb influence the sexual orientation of the fetus. In the case of gays, the hormones make them more feminine. Their effeminacy and sexuality are tied together and flow from the same gender-shift. Thus, if gay men are not feminine, there is no mechanism for them having been born that way. If gays don't acknowledge that gay is on average more effeminate, then they can't insist that they are born that way.

One exception to the lack of interest in the details of what exactly gays are born with was a 60 Minutes piece in 2006 on the "Science Of Sexual Orientation."[58] Intrepid reporter Leslie Stahl profiled two sets of identical twins to illustrate the overlap of sexual orientation and gendered traits. The first of two sets of twins:

The bedrooms of 9-year-old twins Adam and Jared couldn't be more different. Jared's room is decked out with camouflage, airplanes, and military toys, while Adam's room sports a pastel canopy, stuffed animals, and white horses. When Stahl came for a visit, Jared was eager to show her his G.I. Joe collection. "I have ones that say like Marine and SWAT. And then that's where I keep all the guns for 'em," he explained. Adam was also proud to show off his toys. "This is one of my dolls. Bratz baby," he said.

Adam's mannerisms matched his feminine interests: there was no difficulty telling which boy was more effeminate. But why is Leslie Stahl bothering small children whose gender and interests don't conform to societal expectations? Because childhood gender expression relates to adult sexual orientation in that the former predicts the latter: a feminine boy, more often than not, grows up to become a gay man.

To prove this correlation, a group at Northwestern University

…recruited homosexual and heterosexual adults who had videos from their childhood (i.e., from ages 0 to 15 years), and we also videotaped them during an interview. […] Subsequently, we recruited homosexual and heterosexual adults to rate the degree of gender nonconformity from both the childhood and the adult video clips.

The raters found that "prehomosexual children were significantly more gender nonconforming than preheterosexual children" and that these differences persisted into adulthood.[59] Another study at UCLA followed two groups of boys: one feminine and the other unspecified. Of the feminine group, 75% were gay as adults while none of the control group was gay.[60]

The other twins on the 60 Minutes program were Steve and Greg, two young adults. There too the gay twin was visibly more effeminate in both speech and dainty hand movements. These adulthood traits have evidence in research.

To test the accuracy of the so-called gaydar, premised on the idea of gendered traits distinguishing gays, some members of the previously mentioned Northwestern University group did another study using videos, this time using only adults:

We videotaped homosexual and heterosexual men and women answering an interview question about their interests. We then recruited two additional sets of participants to rate various aspects of brief excerpts from these interviews. The first raters judged targets' sexual orientations from unedited videos and from partial information extracted from the videos (e.g., video without sound for ratings of movement or sound without picture for ratings of speech).

The results: 87% of heterosexual targets and 75% of homosexual targets were accurately judged. In other words, people can pick up on non-sexual cues like movement, speech, and appearance to correctly assess whether someone is gay or not.[61]

According to a study at Tufts University, this assessment is accurately perceived in merely 50 milliseconds without even videos but just photos showing faces.[62] A New York University study found that computer-generated animations depicting human silhouettes effeminate swaying walks were judged to be homosexual.[63]

These differences are not just superficial mannerisms either, but are deep inside the brain. Within a part of the hypothalamus (which regulates male-typical behaviors) exists a cell group that is larger in males than females. In humans, this sexually dimorphic region is called the INAH3. Simon LeVay's research has found that the size of INAH3 in gay men mirrors that of women, while straight men's are considerably larger than both.[64] Similar findings in animal studies confirm this pattern in rats and sheep.[65]

Gay men perform worse than straight men at certain visuospatial tasks like mental rotation and targeting while women and gay men use the same navigational strategies of nearby-landmarks. The verbal fluency and memory of gay men exceeds that of other men, mirroring that of women.[66]

Science, though, is late to linking sexuality with gender expression. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first openly gay man, argued in pamphlets starting in 1864 that "… an Urning [his coinage for a gay male] is not a man, but is a type of hermaphrodite, a man-woman with the sexual orientation of a woman," a "third sex."[67] Ulrichs used the Latin phrase anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa (the soul of a woman in the body of man) to sum up his theory: "Distinct from the feminine persuasion of our sexual drive, we Urnings have still another feminine trait in us which, so it seems to me, offers the most positive proof that nature developed the physical male germ in us, yet mentally, the feminine one."[68] These traits are so obvious, "one is forced to assume that these traits are congenital."[69] Predating the current medical establishment by a century, Ulrichs noticed that this mental femininity was present in gay men from "earliest childhood,"[70] as the opening epigraph bears witness. He says that "the Urning avoids the company of boys, their occupations, their games"[71] while today we know that feminine pre-gay boys are not homosocial, preferring the company of girls, contrary to most boys who are well-aware of the dangers of cooties.[72] Coming out to his family in a series of letters in 1862, he mentions that pre-gay boys do not like scuffling and throwing snowballs;[73] science now tells us pre-gay boys do not like rough-and-tumble play.[74]

A century before Ulrichs, molly houses existed in 18th century England whose participants engaged in feminine behavior. A contemporary witness: "they rather fancy themselves as women, imitating all the little vanities that custom has reconciled to the female sex, affecting to speak, walk, tattle, curtsy, cry, scold, and to mimic all the manner of effeminacy that ever has fallen within their several observations."[75]

Historical examples of possibly gay men include the Greek/Roman kinaidos/cinaedi and Native American berdaches. The former were thought of as effeminate not just because they took the receptive role in anal sex, but because they were also feminine in dress and manner.[76] The berdaches, like the kinaidos, were feminine in both ways and also had an element of spirituality.[77] Both give credence to the idea that gays exists outside of our culture.

Of course, there's nothing shocking about any of these. They merely confirm what most of us have instinctively suspected and experienced. In the interest of working with a common source accessible to all, can anyone find gay men on YouTube who are not at least somewhat effeminate? Or take a Canadian show called "1 girl 5 gays."[78] With a rotating cast of about twenty gay men talking about "love and sex," you'd think one would be masculine but all exhibit varying degrees of effeminacy not generally seen in straight men. (And twenty? How many of them could have been Roman emperors?)

An effeminate ex-boyfriend of mine could flirt with women better than any other man I've seen. So I asked him why he didn't want to have sex with women. The response betrayed a feminine self-identity: "Ew, I'd feel like a lesbian." This explains the gay obsession with divas like Britney Spears, Cher, Madonna, and the like. Gay men identify with struggling women who overcome the odds because they often see themselves in a similar light. They often even use feminine pronouns amongst each other, and as much the same happened in the molly houses in the 1700's and during Ulrichs's time in 1864: "When Urnings get together, they mostly give themselves feminine nicknames; I suppose this is because they feel like women, even if only subconsciously: for example, 'Laura,' 'Georgina,' (instead of George), 'Mathilde,' 'Madonna,' 'Queen of the Night.' They also call each other 'sister,' for example, 'Sister dear.'"[79]

On the "Born This Way Blog" readers send in childhood photos with a descriptive anecdote. While the blog claims to be a "photo/essay project for gay adults (of all genders)," I have not come across a post that did not highlight childhood gender nonconformity.[80] Most of those on the site say they knew they were gay at an early age, before puberty. If gay is merely a sexual orientation, how did children know they were gay? Were they having sex? No, they remember being different in their mannerisms, interests, and habits.

Dan Savage, a professional gay columnist and founder of the "It Gets Better" project, and his husband adopted a son. In an interview with NPR, he described how he knew their son was straight:

Miller and Savage are the fathers of a 13-year-old son named D.J. He's in 8th grade, likes skateboarding and has never been harassed for having gay parents.

"If anything, we joke, that we're raising the kid who beat us up in grade school," says Savage. "If he didn't have us for parents — he's a little thuggy snowboarder-skateboarder dude — and I like to think that he's blessed to have us as parents because you can see in him the capacity to be a bully. But he's sensitized to the issue from being from a different kind of family."

Watching D.J. grow up, he says, has made him realize just how much of sexual orientation is hard-wired.

"From the time he was very young, I have been saying, 'Oh my son is straight,' because he is just straight," says Savage. "My mom, when she got over [my being gay] admitted that she kind of thought, all along, that I was gay. I liked to bake and I liked to listen to musicals and for my 13th birthday, I asked my parents for tickets to the Broadway tour of A Chorus Line. That's all I wanted. So I've always known that he's straight."[81]

Always known? Again, if you can tell a child's sexual orientation without any actual sexuality, you must be describing more than just sexual orientation. That's common sense. Some gays do acknowledge this, but the way in which they do reveals ambivalence towards full acceptance of the gender-shift:

I am masculine, but at the same time still gay.[82]

Or so says the online dating profile of a guy who says he's an acrobat who has been doing gymnastics since he was five. His pictures show an obviously gay man. Certainly, not as gay as unicorns farting out rainbows, but it's easy to spot the gayness even from still shots. Maybe there's a desire to be masculine or even in reality less effeminacy compared to other gay men, but even so there's an internal recognition that gay is a limiting factor for masculinity.

Then there are others who are outright hostile to the idea of effeminacy, despite their own effeminacy. And yet, with this overwhelming multitude of evidence, it's hard to bring this topic up. When referring to the lack of masculine gay men and asking where the real men were, an online poster to a gay forum was met with hostile remarks like:[83]

It is difficult to reply to this thread and stay civil. You insult pretty much everyone with your post. There are a lot of masculine gay men out there. Sadly there are also a few out there with the same attitude like you.

Or sarcastic ones:

Could you provide a better explanation of what's for you the masculine super macho man (as you surely are) you're looking for? I mean only to see who could possibly fit in that category. Sigh.

A possible answer to this self-delusion from a gay man:

Most of us grew up with our masculinity being called into question, and usually in a rather harsh and possibly violent manner. And most of us eventually stopped spending time with such people, and the ones we did hang out with didn't mention our femininity - partially because they didn't care, and partially because they (perhaps instinctively) knew that it was a sore spot growing up, and perhaps it wasn't a good idea to dwell on that topic.

So as time went on, and people stopped mentioning our feminine ways, we grew to believe they didn't exist. Hey, nobody said anything, so they're not there, right? It's certainly easier on our still-fragile ego to think that we're 100% straight acting than it is to think that the thing we got bullied for as a kid is still visible for the world to see.[84]

Gay men set themselves backwards when they refuse to acknowledge their feminine traits. Not only do they undermine the idea that they were born that way but also shame themselves, especially the most visibly effeminate.[85] There certainly is nothing wrong with effeminate, so why deny the obvious? Ulrichs says gays ought to be true to themselves: "… let us not be ashamed of our soft, emotional, feminine traits which nature gave us… Do not let us waste our energy by artificially adopting … manly prerogatives."[86] This is rather good advice. In fact, it's rather pathetic that gay men cannot acknowledge this self-evident truth when the first gay guy could two centuries ago.

Not only do gays set themselves back when they refuse to acknowledge the obvious, this self-denial has harmed greros the worst. While there have been efforts at infusing masculinity into the same-sex debate since the late 19th century,[87] there hasn't been a word to fully define the love between fully real men, or at least one that has stuck around. The love between men is grudgingly tolerated for men who are "that way": varying degrees of effeminate. The masculine are left out. By embracing their effeminacy, gay men foster greater tolerance for themselves while allowing grero to not be associated with it. Of course, there's nothing wrong with effeminacy itself, but you wouldn't compliment a woman on her moustache either. Same with grero: masculine men are much less likely to acknowledge their attractions if those are said to only occur with what they are not: effeminacy. It's better for both of us to acknowledge these facts.

The first of the two politically-correct Gay Dogmas states that gay men are no different from other men except in their sexuality. This is refuted by the science we have just reviewed: gay men are different: they are gender-shifted towards the feminine. While working in the right direction concerning gay gender, the current scientific mainstream is at fault for upholding the second Gay Dogma that males liking males is a small minority: maybe 2%, maybe even 5% but definitely not more than the oft-cited 10%. Our Greco-Roman colleagues beg to disagree with such low figures and so does the overlooked mathematical, scientific, historical, and anthropological evidence sampled in the next chapters.

Chapter 4: Grero in the Calculator and Laboratory

He said it didn't matter if a guy was married or not. He said half the married guys in the world were flits and didn't even know it. He said you could turn into one practically overnight, if you had all the traits and all. He used to scare the hell out of us. I kept waiting to turn into a flit or something.[88]

We are at an impasse. If gay is a minority gender, then what about the Greeks and the Romans? Our imperial Roman colleagues can hardly be recognized with their debilitating masculine dystrophy.[89] And their overwhelming majority contradicts the view that those who like members of their own sex or gender are a small minority. What are the odds that of first twenty Roman leaders, eighteen were not entirely straight by today's standards?

To answer that, a peek at numbers: Currently, the number of males aged 14-44 in the American Empire who self-identify as gay or bisexual is 2.8% while those who self-report any same-sex sexual behavior is 5.2%.[90] Using either number, the odds that so many were attracted to other men are nearing the mathematically impossible. 2.8% yields 0.000000000000000000000000020088 (2.00877E-26), while 5.2% gives the odds at 0.000000000000000000001319564007 (1.31956E-21).[91] That's a lot of zeroes so it may help to compare numbers to another evil vice, gambling.

Visualize a roulette table. Now bet on the same number for twenty spins in a row. Do you expect to win eighteen times? You would also suspect something had gone awry if your poker buddy got four royal flushes in a row? That's what we're talking about here.

Or imagine the destruction of the Earth by the enlarged Sun, forecast for about five billion years from now. Not only would the Roman Empire have had to survive past such an inhospitable event, but at least a billion times over. Not a billion more years, but a billion times five billion years. Only then could we expect to see a series of so many sexually flexible emperors, given the current numbers. What are the odds they hit jackpot on their first try? Not very much.

The Roman emperors could not have been gay (or bisexual) by the current numbers; however, we cannot have been born straight by theirs. Even though science ignores history that it cannot replicate in a lab, there are studies with faint echoes of ancient Greece and Rome.

A study on homophobia conducted at the University of Georgia may help us to understand the discrepancy between ancient and current statistics.[92] The study sought to "investigate whether homophobic men show more sexual arousal to homosexual cues than nonhomophobic men." By "cues" they meant showing porn to the test subjects while a penile plethysmograph measured their erections. The men were college students mostly in their twenties, self-proclaimed exclusive heterosexuals in experience and arousal, and divided into homophobic and nonhomophobic groups based on a questionnaire.

Shown lesbian and heterosexual porn, both groups showed similar arousal patterns. However, the two groups diverged in arousal when viewing same-sex porn:

Group

No significant tumescence

Moderate tumescence

Definite tumescence

Homophobic

20%

26%

54%

Nonhomophobic

66%

10%

24%

 

Yes, homophobes have latent same-sex attractions as 80% of them showed sexual arousal to gay porn. How Romanesque! Two important observations. First, the homophobic group represents a large real-world population, by no means negligible. (In the study, the homophobes made up a small majority which doesn't seem at odds with current social attitudes and polling.) Second, even among the nonhomophobic men, one-third got hard watching gay porn. That's exactly one-third higher than expected by reading the definition of heterosexual.

So if we extrapolate the numbers onto the general male population, napkin math predicts that about 60% of males would get hard watching same-sex porn. You read that right: a clear majority of straight men would get hard watching gay porn. Now those are Roman numerals! And maybe without the cultural bias against the love between men, the numbers would be even closer to imperial measurements.

Some have argued that the homophobic subjects displayed erections due to anxiety.[93] I disagree with that interpretation. Anxiety is surely there, but it is an effect, not the cause. The erections caused the anxiety, not vice versa. How do I know all this? Unbeknownst to me, I was part of a similar study a few years later. In high school, while watching same-sex porn, I, too, frequently got erections. In the homophobia study, all men gave honest responses to their level of arousal except the homophobic men to same-sex porn. They essentially denied having erections. In my study too, I remember rationalizing the very clear evidence starting me eye-to-eye. The cognitive dissonance between actual reality and desired reality felt like a split personality. I knew I liked seeing other guys naked but a nagging force inside of me would be outraged, not at me personally, but at the general concept of such perversity as if the topic was some intellectual matter disconnected from the matter at hand, my raging boner. It is not surprising that such latent desires bubble to the surface in the form of homophobic slurs or physical attacks against gay men. These men do not have a way of acknowledging their attractions. Grero solves that.

In conclusion, something is rotten with the state of sexual orientation theory if 60% of men get erections to same-sex porn while none of them admit to same-sex attractions, while only 5% of the general male population does. Am I suggesting most men are secretly lusting after other men? Some could be. But the majority is fine with the current situation they find themselves in. They do not actively pursue their subconscious attractions, attractions that they may not even realize but are there and just as in-born as effeminacy to gay. Culture tells all men to get a girlfriend, go the prom, get married while tarring relationships between men as morally wrong and personally effeminizing. Until recently, such relationships were illegal as well in the West. Is it surprising that with all the stigma we only have maybe 5% willing to either admit to wanting or having same-sex relationships? Not at all.

Neither the participants in the homophobia study nor I are alone in our latent attractions bubbling to the surface, despite culture working its hardest to prevent as much. Such experiences have been chronicled in print below.

Chapter 5: Grero in the Modern World

Get the fuck off me! We don't fuck, Vince! We're buddies, we're pals, we're partners, we're a duo. We love each other, but we don't fuck! We're fucking stars. We can - we can travel together. We can hang out together. We can live together, but we can't be queers! It's not funny![94]

We don't need to dig in studies or the ancient dustbins of history to find grero. Even within our homophobic society, there have been plenty of masculine men who have had relationships with others like them. I don't want to review or copy the entire record of anything that could be labeled "homosexual" as that has been done better elsewhere and needlessly includes the non-masculine. Instead, I've compiled five short excerpts that highlight just grero. Two are fictional accounts that not only represent universal truths exceptionally well but also have relevant back stories.

Writhing Bedfellows

In 1826, two young men from South Carolina exchanged letters.[95] Addressed to Jim from Jeff:

I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole – the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling? Let me say unto thee that unless thou changest former habits in this particular, thou wilt be represented by every future Chum as a nuisance. And, I pronounce it, with good reason too. Sir, you roughen the downy Slumbers of your Bedfellow – by such hostile – furious lunges as you are in the habit of making at him – when he is least prepared for defence against the crushing force of a Battering Ram.

Jeff signed the letter with the valediction, "With great respect I am the old Stud." In two short decades, Jim became James Henry Hammond, the governor of South Carolina. Later in the US Senate, he popularized the term King Cotton in reference to the South's most famous crop. His "elongated protuberance" (to quote Jeff) took an interest in multiple young women, causing a whisper campaign that he dismissed as "a little dalliance with the other sex."

His writhing bedfellow Jeffrey grew up to become the Honorable Judge Withers, a signatory to both South Carolina's secession and the Confederate Constitution.[96]

The Most Beatific Look

150 years later, two boys would also become writhing bedfellows in a small town in a big Southern state. Recounting the experiences in his 40's, Luke writes:[97]

When I was 17, in 1971, a boy moved to town from my state's biggest city. I am sure this was quite a culture shock for him. He was 16 years old, a freshman and his name was Stephen.

Luke invited Stephen to his grandfather's ranch to hunt and spend the night. After deciding that it was okay to sleep in the same bed,

We continued to talk and the conversation turned to sex, specifically Stephen asked me if I masturbated. I answered yes I did. To say that I was sexually naive would be a gross understatement. My experience with girls had been limited and I was not what you would call sexually bold. That said, Stephen then asked if I had ever jacked off with another guy. Well, no, I hadn't. It was at this point he said he wanted to show me something that he and a buddy of his from the big city used to do.

They both enjoyed it:

It was like I had been electrified. I could not believe the indescribable feeling of his hand on our cocks together, He stroked once, twice and I came as powerfully as I ever had. The first ejaculate hit me directly under the chin; the second landed splat on my chest. My head was literally spinning because I had never felt this kind of pleasure solo.

[Another] time we played it for all we could, wrestling closely together, then moving apart and fondling one another, moving closer together with our legs entwined, both of our hands grasping and stroking our dicks until finally we came, almost simultaneously while sitting facing one another. I collapsed into Stephen and then I kissed him full on the lips, my tongue curious for his and he returned the kiss, urgent and hot.

The hunting trips became a tradition and two grew on each other:

Sometimes we had little wrestling matches, sometimes we were gentler and sometimes we were extremely physical. It was all good and I never tired at looking at Stephen's face, as he was about to come. He would get the most beatific look; his eyelids fluttering slightly as he gasped and made little noises. That, in and of itself, was enough to get me off, big time.

Sometime, around Thanksgiving, as I recall, I told Stephen I thought that I loved him. He admitted that he thought he loved me too. I have to admit, although I was conflicted about the nature of our relationship, I was over the moon.

Alone in the woods they were safe, but at Stephen's house they were ultimately caught having sex:

Suddenly, someone burst through the locked door. I looked up and saw that it was Stephen's father. I jumped up and the Colonel began yelling at Stephen, calling him a little faggot and how he should kick his ass and how could he do this, etc. etc. I was embarrassed by my nakedness and a bit intimidated by the Colonel. He was a pretty big guy and he had definitely blown a gasket. After a minute, I jumped in and said I didn't think that this was Stephen's fault and I told him we hadn't done anything wrong. At this point, the Colonel backhanded me. I had never believed in the old saying "seeing stars" when you've been hit hard, but I did, literally, see stars and the next thing to hit the floor was my ass.

Luke would never see Stephen again.

The City and the Pillar

While Luke and Stephen had to meet secretly, the first novel to unabashedly describe such a relationship was written two decades before in 1948, when The City and the Pillar invented homosexuality.[98] Better its author Gore Vidal than me explain:[99]

I knew that my description of the love affair between two "normal" all-American boys of the sort that I had spent three years with in the wartime army would challenge every superstition about sex in my native land... Until then, American novels of "inversion" dealt with transvestites or with lonely bookish boys who married unhappily and pined for Marines. I broke that mold. My two lovers were athletes and so drawn to the entirely masculine that, in the case of one, Jim Willard, the feminine was simply irrelevant to his passion to unite with his other half, Bob Ford: unfortunately for Jim, Bob had other sexual plans, involving women and marriage.

This earned Vidal a ban from the New York Times reviewing his five next books. Poignant, but not explicit:[100]

They were very still. Jim found the weight of Bob's arm on his shoulders almost unbearable: wonderful but unbearable. Yet he did not dare move for fear the other would take his arm away. Suddenly Bob got to his feet. "Let's make a fire."

"There," he said, looking into the yellow flames, "that's done." For a long moment both stared into the hypnotically quivering flames, each possessed by his own private daydream. Bob's dream ended first. He turned to Jim. "Come on," he said menacingly. "I'll wrestle you."

They met, grappled, fell to the ground. Pushing and pulling, they fought for position; they were evenly matched, because Jim, though stronger, would not allow Bob to lose or to win. When at last they stopped, both were panting and sweating. They lay exhausted on the blanket.

Then Bob took off his shirt and Jim did the same. That was better. Jim mopped the sweat from his face while Bob stretched out on the blanket, using his shirt for a pillow. Firelight gleamed on pale skin. Jim stretched out beside him. "Too hot," he said. "Too hot to be wrestling."

Bob laughed and suddenly grabbed him. They clung to one another. Jim was overwhelmingly conscious of Bob's body. For a moment they pretended to wrestle. Then both stopped. Yet each continued to cling to the other as though waiting for a signal to break or to begin again. For a long time neither moved. Smooth chests touching, sweat mingling, breathing fast in unison.

Abruptly, Bob pulled away. For a bold moment their eyes met. Then, deliberately, gravely, Bob shut his eyes and Jim touched him, as he had so many times in dreams, without words, without thought, without fear. When the eyes are shut, the true world begins.

As faces touched, Bob gave a shuddering sigh and gripped Jim tightly in his arms. Now they were complete, each became the other, as their bodies collided with a primal violence, like to like, metal to magnet, half to half and the whole restored.

So they met. Eyes tight shut against an irrelevant world. A wind warm and sudden shook all the trees, scattered the fire's ashes, threw shadows to the ground.

But then the wind stopped. The fire went to coals. The trees were silent. No comets marked the dark lovely sky, and the moment was gone. In the fast beat of a double heart, it died.

The eyes opened again. Two bodies faced one another where only an instant before a universe had lived; the star burst and dwindled, spiraling them both down to the meager, to the separate, to the night and the trees and the firelight; all so much less than what had been.

They separated, breathing hard. Jim could feel the fire on his feet and beneath the blanket he was now uncomfortably aware of small stones and sticks. He looked at Bob, not certain of what he would see.

Bob was staring into the fire, face expressionless. But he grinned quickly when he saw Jim watching him. "This is a hell of a mess," he said, and the moment fled.

Jim looked down at himself and said as casually as he could, "It sure is."

Bob stood up, the firelight glittering on his body. "Let's wash up."

Pale as ghosts in the dark night, they walked to the pond. Through the trees they could see the light from their fire, yellow and flickering, while frogs croaked, insects buzzed, river thundered. They dove into the still black water. Not until they had returned to the fire did Bob break the silence. He was abrupt.

"You know, that was awful kid stuff we did."

"I suppose so." Jim paused. "But I liked it." He had great courage now that he had made his secret dream reality. "Did you?"

Bob frowned into the yellow fire. "Well, it was different than with a girl. And I don't think it's right."

"Why not?"

"Well, guys aren't supposed to do that with each other. It's not natural."

"I guess not." Jim looked at Bob's fire-colored body, long-lined and muscular. With his newfound courage, he put his arm around Bob's waist. Again excited, they embraced and fell back onto the blanket.

Dedicated "for the memory of J.T.," Vidal's novel was inspired by his real life relationship with Jimmie Trimble. While the two's relationship was short and any hope of a reunion was undercut by Jimmie's death on Iwo Jima during World War II, Vidal says that Jimmie was the only he ever loved,[101] his unfinished business:[102]

I not only never again encountered the other half, but by the time I was twenty-five, I had given up all pursuit, settling for a thousand brief anonymous adhesions… where wholeness seems, for an instant, to be achieved.[103]

My Own Private Idaho

Unrequited love and unfinished business are the fate of many such relationships when they have neither a name nor acceptance. In cinema, grero has no better illustration than in My Own Private Idaho. Taking a page or two from The City and the Pillar, the pivotal scene in the movie features two young hustlers around a campfire:[104]

Scott (Keanu Reeves): Getting away from everything feels good.

Mike (River Phoenix): Yeah, it does.

Scott: When I left home, the maid asked me where I was off to. I said, "Wherever, whatever, have a nice day."

Mike: You had a maid?

Scott: Yeah.

Mike: If I had a normal family, and a good upbringing then I would have been a well-adjusted person.

Scott: Depends on what you call normal.

Mike: Yeah, it does. Well, you know, normal, like a mom and a dad and a dog and shit like that. Normal.

Scott: So you didn't have a normal dog?

Mike: No, I didn't have a dog.

Scott: Didn't have a normal dad?

Mike: Didn't have a dog nor a normal dad anyway. That's alright. I don't feel sorry for myself, I mean, I feel like I'm well-adjusted.

Scott: What's a normal dad?

Things get more emotional:

Mike: I don't know... I'd like to talk with you. I mean I'd like to really talk with you. I mean we're talking right now, you know, I don't know, I don't feel like I can be... I don't feel like I can be close to you... I mean we're close, right now we're close but I mean you know...

Scott: I mean, how close?

Mike: I don't know, whatever... What do I mean to you?

Scott: What do you mean to me? Mike, you're my best friend.

Mike: I know man. I know I'm your friend. We're good friends. And it's good to be, you know, good friends. That's a good thing.

Scott: So?

Mike: So, I just... that's okay. We're gonna be friends.

Scott knows what Mike can't say:

Scott: I only have sex with a guy for money.

Mike: Yeah.

Scott: And two guys can't love each other.

Mike: Yeah. Well, I don't know, I mean, for me, I could love someone even if I wasn't paid for it. I love you and you don't pay me.

Scott: Mike?

Mike: I really want to kiss you man... Goodnight, man. I love you though. You know that. I do love you.

[The two embrace but we see nothing else.]

While the director Gus Van Sant is gay, he originally wrote the scene about a horny Mike needing a quick fuck, instead of anything committal:[105]

In the original script he doesn't tell Scott that he loves him, but he does ask him if he fools around with guys, and Scott says, "Well I only sleep with guys for money." And River says, "Yeah but we're out in the desert and it's boring."

However, by rewriting the script, River Phoenix changed not just the scene but the rest of movie. In a later scene after Scott picks up an Italian chick (his future wife), an annoyed Mike puffs smoke into the girl's face. Without the campfire scene, Mike is merely annoyed at a distraction from the broader goal of finding his deadbeat mother; with it, we see an interplay of jealousy, fear of abandonment, and grero.

As with The City and the Pillar, art imitates life:[106]

While filming his previous movie, Dogfight, Phoenix had received oral sex from another male actor, saying he needed to do it because he was going to play a gay [sic] hustler." He had other brief involvements with men over the years, and it was no big deal to friends who knew. Phoenix simply didn't censor his affections. "If he loved somebody, male or female," says one of Phoenix's longtime girlfriends, Suzanne Solgot, "he felt he should check it out."

"River dropped clues about his sexuality, but I never really followed them up," says Van Sant, who is gay. Phoenix asked ceaseless questions about Van Sant's relationship with his boyfriend: "What, exactly, do you do in bed? Which side do you sleep on? Do you ever tell him to shut up? If you're angry at him, do you still buy him an expensive birthday present?" Van Sant says, "I would laugh because these questions were so personal, and he'd say, What? What?'"

In late 1992, a gay filmmaker (not Van Sant) staying at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles heard a knock at midnight and discovered Phoenix outside, drunk and wanting to talk about his struggles with bisexuality [sic]. The filmmaker reassured him that it would all work out.

Boarding School Hijinks

Noted author and professional atheist Christopher Hitchens had relevant experiences in boarding school:[107]

Mr. Chips's feminist-socialist wife had phrased it in a no-nonsense way by saying that official disapproval of public-school homosexuality was the equivalent of condemning a boy for being there in the first place. I knowingly run the risk of absurdity if I offer the spiritual or the transcendent in opposition to this, but actually it was my first exposure to love as well as to sex, and it helped teach me as vividly as anything could have done that religion was cruel and stupid. One was indeed punishable for one's very nature: "Created sick: commanded to be sound." The details aren't very important, but until this I have doubted if I would ever be able to set them down: "He" was a sort of strawberry blond, very slightly bow-legged, with a wicked smile that seemed to promise both innocence and experience. He was in another "house." He was my age. He was quite right-wing (which I swiftly decided to forgive) but also a "rebel" in the sense of being a cavalier elitist…

The marvelous boy was more urbane than I was, and much more knowing, if slightly less academic. His name was Guy, and I still sometimes twitch a little when I run into someone else who's called that – even in America, where in a way it is everybody's name.

Were poems exchanged? Were there white-hot and snatched kisses? Did we sometimes pine for the holidays to end, so that (unlike everybody else) we actually yearned to be back at school? Yes, yes, and yes. Did we sleep together? Well, dear reader, the "straight" answer is no, we didn't. The heated yet chaste embrace was exactly what marked us off from the grim and turgid and randy manipulations in which the common herd – not excluding ourselves in our lower moments with lesser beings – partook. I won't deny that there was some fondling. However, when we were actually caught it must have looked bad, since we had finally managed – no small achievement in a place where any sort of privacy was rendered near-unlawful – to find somewhere to be alone. The senior boy who made the discovery was a thick-necked sportocrat with the unimprovable name of Peter Raper: he had had his own bulging eye on my Guy for some time and this was his revenge.

The usual "thing" would have been public disgrace followed by expulsion. But "things" were made both more cruel and more arbitrary, and also less so. Various of my teachers persuaded the headmaster that I was a good prospect for passing the entrance exam for Oxford: a statistic on which the school annually prided (and sold) itself. The same could be said of Guy, though he didn't eventually make it. Accordingly, having been coldly exposed to public shame, we were allowed to "stay on" but forbidden to speak to each other. At the time, I vaguely but quite worriedly thought this might have the effect of killing me.

No comment needed.

Chapter 6: Grero Internationale

For, according to one possibility, the tribesman isn't really gay – he just spends half his life having oral sex with other males…[108]

Grero obscures itself in half-forgotten ancient Western history, hides in today's laboratories and studies, and lurks around a suspiciously large number of campfires. Before Christian sexuality completed its subsumation of the rest of the world in the 20th century, this singular sexual norm we take for granted as natural was not the experience of other cultures. There was no norm, though common threads existed. People generally had two feet in other cultures. Another commonality was the masculine-masculine relationships, existing beside others.

Similar to Roman emperors, "all of the chiefs" (ali'i) of late 1700's Hawaii had male sexual partners. These aikane were treated as real men: like the chiefs, they had wives and had typical male occupations. The Hawaiians thought such relations were so natural, they assumed the visiting Brits had a similar setup. As such, the chiefs attempted to procure British junior officers for themselves, much to the shock of the Captain Cook's crew, denigrating the near-universal "sodomy" as:

… a shocking inversion of the laws of nature, they bestow all those affections upon them that were intended for the other sex.[109]

How can a law of nature be inverted? Can you violate physics? You can violate cultural norms but that shows just how artificial and unnatural such "laws" are. "Very nearly ever male" islander of Melanesia must have had supernatural powers that violated natural laws:

… it is considered a kind of duty to obligingly accede to the demands of an older man, but also, with young men of the same age, homosexual interaction often occurs between persons who are merely good friends, sometimes even brothers… At some time during his life, very nearly every male engages in extensive homosexual activities… it usually begins with foreplay, which consists of mutual masturbation or unilateral masturbation, and ends with anal intercourse culminating in orgasm.[110]

Among Amazonian tribes:

"A young man will often lie in a hammock with his 'brother-in-law,' nuzzling him, fondling his penis, and talking quietly, often about sexual exploits with women."

"…most unmarried young men having homosexual relations with each other but no stigma attached to this behavior. In fact, most of these bachelors joked about it and simulated copulation with each other in public."

"Young men sit around enticingly sedate and formal in all their finery, or form troupes of panpipe-playing dancers." Occasional sex is regarded as expectable behavior among friends: "One is marked as nonfriendly – enemy – if he does not join, especially in the youth age group (roughly 15-35)... Homosexual activity is limited neither to within an age group nor to unmarried men." Moreover, intervillage homosexuality is encouraged, and some "best friends" relationships develop.[111]

That those in Amazonia who refuse same-sex as regarded as enemy mirrors a custom of the Celts who took it as insult to reject an invitation to same-sex sex.[112] Clearly, same-sex activities were not merely tolerated for a small minority but expected of the great majority. Equally as clear, we don't see this diversity anymore. Most cultures around the world have industrialized and absorbed our sexual ethics. Whereas pre-modern China and Japan had open same-sex relationships in the 16th century (to the dismay of Jesuit missionaries),[113] Christian sexual ethics inculcated fascist Japan and nationalist-then-communist China.[114] It's truly remarkable how enemies absorbed an ideology foreign to both. We see this assimilation trend in the myriad cultures across Africa, not profiled in detail here. Whereas racist African demagogues now speak out against "homosexuality" as the white man's invention, it is actually the source of opposition to varied same-sex behaviors, Christianity, that is the white man's importation.[115]

The point is that "we're all living in Amerika."[116] For the first time in human history, the 21st century begins without a culture that allows for masculine same-sex relationships, much less one that expects such. Other cultures had no words to describe grero because it was so obvious and prevalent; we have no words for grero because we prohibited it into extinction.

Grero in Great Apes

Name

Frequency of male same-sex sex

Shared genome with humans

Bonobo

Homosexual activity is nearly as common as heterosexual activity, accounting for 40-50% of all sexual interactions. Virtually all Bonobos are bisexual, interacting sexually with both males and females.[117]

~98.7%[118]

Chimpanzee

The prevalence of same-sex activities between male Common Chimpanzees is highly variable. Mounting between males constitutes anywhere from 1-2 percent to one-third to one-half of the behaviors involved in reassurance… Overall, 29-33 percent of all mounting activity occurs between males. In some populations, virtually all adult males participate in same-sex mounting, although such activity may constitute anywhere from one-fifth to three-quarters of an individual's mounting activity.[119]

~98.63%[120]

Gorilla

Among younger animals in cosexual groups, 7-36 percent of mounts are between males… Homosexuality occurs most commonly in all-male groups, where probably more than 90 percent of all same-sex activity between males takes place. Gorillas spend an average of six years in such groups... it appears that all males at least have the capacity for bisexuality. [121]

~98.25%[122]

Orang-utan

Male homosexual behavior is characteristic of younger Orang-utans. Mature adult males probably have a bisexual potential: although they rarely engage in homosexual activity in the wild, in captivity they often do (even in the presence of females).[123]

~96.6%[124]

Roman Emperors

Of the first twenty Roman emperors, at least eighteen (90%) had sexual relationships with other men.

100%

 

Marcus Aurelius is my favorite emperor not just we lived within blocks of each other at one point. While other emperors' dalliances with men could be dismissed as rumor and gossip, his two autobiographical accounts provide undeniable first-hand proof of his sexual flexibility. Suppose we cloned Marcus Aurelius and plopped him down in an average family somewhere in the West. Would he be surprised that his original copy liked other men? How vehemently would he deny the implication that he must too like men?

Chapter 7: So-Called Situational Sexual Behavior

Did you see [Colonel] Gaddafi [at the UN] complaining that American soldiers have been sodomising Arab boys? I thought, well that's been the case since the very beginning of the republic. They blamed the sodomy on those great forests out there which they said made them horny. There was nothing else to do but bugger boys, they said.[125]

We have seen that relationships between men are neither confined to an effeminate minority nor to a single culture. Masculine men of different eras and empires have loved each other spanning all continents. Moreover, they were unaware of each others' existence: the Hawaiians of the 18th century knew nothing about the Greco-Roman world, while Luke and Stephen could have hardly known about either. And likewise blissfully unaware of others were the warrior monks of Tibet.[126] If separate cultures across time and space had invented the same tool without collaboration, we would either claim space alien conspiracy (if we're crazy) or that such a commonality was a sign of some innate capacity, as is the case with language. And while the specifics of languages differ in vocabulary, we recognize that humans nonetheless have an inborn capacity for language in general. Along similar lines, that men love men should be a banality no more controversial than that humans can learn to speak languages or walk on two feet.

But the acknowledgement of the universal love between masculine men faces roadblocks: silence or excuses. The history deniers ignore the obvious in hopes that if we don't give it any attention, the indecent monster will slink away. Euphemistically described as the love that dare not speak its name, same-sex relationships of all kinds were shrouded in silence interrupted only with sporadic bouts of hysteria and moral panics. I remember an old and red World Book Encyclopedia from the 1960s that did not have an entry for homosexuality. In Edith Hamilton's famous Mythology (from the 1940s), Zeus's boyfriend Ganymede receives minor billing as a "beautiful young Trojan prince who was seized and carried up to Olympus by Zeus's eagle," but absent are any sexual implications.[127] Maybe Zeus wanted a beautiful cupbearer because lifting a cup was too much trouble for a god. Maybe not. Nineteenth century translations of ancient texts leave in Latin the descriptions of sex acts while medical books in the vernacular translate them into Latin, although such censorship may have had the unintended consequence of arousing more curiosity.

While ignoring history to marginalize taboos is infuriating, quite amusing and comical are the excuses of those who wish to explain away and cover up the past's ubiquitous same-sex relationships. The argument is that none of these people were real "homosexuals." This true but irrelevant non sequitur misses the point that their relationships with men were genuine regardless of their sex with women. Political correctness, sometimes even promoted by oblivious gays themselves, disparages such same-sex relationships by doubting their authenticity. Allegedly straight men getting hard to gay porn? It's just a reflex! Roman emperors having sex with other men? Women were not invented until 476 AD! Native and aboriginal peoples engaged in constant same-sex sex? They're faking it for their hokey-pokey tribal rituals! The excuse has many variations but generally goes under the name situational homosexuality or situational same-sex behavior, the greatest lie invented against masculinity. And you know, situational. Like something that only occurs in limited circumstances, like on all continents across millennia.

Those who provide these fanciful excuses generally make the following circular argument: Because most men are naturally inclined to women, any instance of them having sex with another man is situational, outside the ordinary. They're not "real" homosexuals, just heterosexual beings who engage in homosexual acts, in much the same way that a professional dermatologist was born that way and is merely engaging in culinary acts when preparing dinner.

LeVay & Dover

Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist, in Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why writes:

In some cultures, unmarried women have been sequestered and thus were invisible to men and unobtainable as sex partners. In such environments, male adolescents were often sought after as sex partners by adult men, especially by young unmarried men. Ancient Greece is a particularly well-known example – so much so that "Greek love" has long been used as a colloquial term for homosexuality. A more recent example was the same-sex culture that existed in Afghanistan under the Taliban, when all women were hidden behind their burqas. "I like boys, but I like girls better," one Kandahar resident told the Los Angeles Times. "It's just that we can't see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful." About half of all men in Kandahar engaged in sex with boys at one time or another, according to one local medical professor interviewed for the article.

In such cultures, the choice of adolescent boys as partners probably reflects the fact that these youths, lacking beards and adult musculature, are closer to women in appearance than are adult men. Thus, it would be quite wrong to assert that many or most men in ancient Greece or in Afghanistan were homosexual in the sense of having a strong preference for males when given the choice of sex partners. What these cultures do demonstrate is the degree to which sexual desire and sexual behavior accommodate themselves to a restricted range of options, just as they do in prisons and other single-sex environments today.[128]

Or they demonstrate completely the opposite: that maybe our culture is the one that's quite restricted. First, many Greeks did choose men, not necessarily over women but despite the presence of women. The idea that women were unavailable is outright false: many vases and plates bear witness to women freely fucking men, youths, or each other lesbianicly.[129]

Second, notice how Islam's homophobia is not mentioned as a limiting factor of same-sex behavior, while the alleged homosexuality is merely considered some accidental byproduct of Islam's misogynous segregation. Islam forbids the very open relationships that the coining of the word grero encourages, so why are we to assume that the only same-sex relationships are those that are due to segregation? Why is only restricting heterosexuality the only bias mentioned? That oversight makes the argument rather circular: it assumes that only exclusive heterosexuality is valid and thus anything else is an aberration that must be a result of suppressed heterosexuality. Same-sex love cannot exist for its own sake: its existence must be a heterosexual dysfunction. This from an openly gay scientist!

Third, it's not true that the preference for young men is really pseudo-heterosexual, whereby the younger male is a stand-in for a woman. Has Simon LeVay never seen teenaged males or, for that matter, women? The only thing young men have in common with women (that neither shares with men) is that neither has facial hair, most of the time. Given that sports are a Big Deal in high school, the musculature of young men is often much better than that of well-marbled hams that some adults morph into. The reason for the preference of younger men is precisely because they are physically at the peak of masculinity.[130] Masculine young men are quite the opposite of feminine Rubenesque women. The preference for such young men needs as much explanation as the preference of filet over hamburger or swordfish over swampy catfish.

Dover in Greek Homosexuality, perhaps the first work to comprehensively examine the topic, routinely makes the same mistake. Describing vase R712 as "Men and youths accost women," Dover draws note to the "physical similarities of the youths and women" as if to agree with LeVay that young men were pseudo-heterosexual substitutes for women. Dover is correct in his observation though: the youths and women do look alike. However, this does not support the desired conclusion as the women have broad shoulders and narrow hips. Whether we have a bad artist or one enamored by the masculine form, we can conclude that young men aren't proxies for women. The idea that such beautiful bodies need some sort of excuse to be appreciated isn't just plainly incorrect but also quite oblivious: what's so damn unattractive about a young fit male?

Mondimore

Describing the ancient Greeks more or less accurately in the first chapter to A Natural History of Homosexuality, Mondimore makes the following conclusion:[131]

These men were not homosexual – not in the modern meaning of that term. The Greeks had no such word or concept. It is perhaps more correct to say that the Greeks practiced a sort of "bisexuality" in that, for men at least, sexual activity with partners of both sexes was accepted.

That's an acceptable conclusion.[132] However, when explaining the current scientific theories on the origins of sexual orientation, Mondimore lets it slip that the "real" homosexuals in ancient Greece probably did not stand out because everyone was more or less into same-sex sex, even though most were "real" heterosexuals:[133]

A homosexual person might look different in different cultures. Among the Greeks, the existence of homosexuality has been described as being "submerged within cultural mores." Those for whom same-sex intimacy was consistently and compellingly more satisfying than heterosexual relationships did not stand out from the majority. For most ancient Greeks, perhaps homosexual intimacy was merely a pleasant sensual diversion from what they experienced as "the real thing": heterosexual intimacy.

Such ill-informed musings seek to pigeonhole the Greeks into our sexual orientation framework instead of us recognizing that our framework cannot be universal (as we presume it is) if it does not describe other cultures well. Again, to think that men in Greece choose men or women over the other is the wrong paradigm, which at least Mondimore acknowledged before in the previous quote but for some reason abandoned later on. Such speculation may be from the bias that Mondimore himself, like LeVay, is gay and cannot fathom that most men do indeed like other men, at least in the absence of our culture.

Frost

The absurdities reach their zenith with a short college textbook entitled Greek Society.[134] After mentioning Zeus and Ganymede and numerous vase paintings attesting to plenty of same-sex sex, Frost casually dismisses all that with:[135]

Actually, the proportion of Greeks, both male and female, whose sexual orientation was unambiguously homosexual was probably the same as in any other human population in the history of the human race.

Probably the same? What's the evidence, aside from mere assertion? And what's with the straw man, Frost? No one argues that most of the Greeks were gay, but that their more diverse sexual appetites contrast jarringly to today's narrower cultural restrictions. Instead of using the Greeks to ponder our own culture's limitations, Frost tries to pigeonhole them into ours. To explain (away) the amount of same-sex sex with the Greeks, Frost argues:

Greek boys and young men were by the very structure of society thrown together from childhood on, in school, in gymnasium, and in military training. It was perhaps only natural that attachment would form and sometimes develop into sexual love; this has been true of every society we know in which an artificial, exclusively male grouping has been part of the normal structure.

It's simple really! An artificial group (whatever that means) that's part of the normal structure (whatever that means) can create attachments between men; it's only natural, but also completely artificial. The bad choice of words betrays the faulty logic: in Frost's world artificial begets natural. That seems contradictory, but we have more. The evidence of the artificiality of these natural same-sex attachments is that they happen in "every society" that has such conditions. How can a constant feature of "every society" be artificial? By definition, something that occurs in a variety of cultures must be indicative of more than just that single culture. But to Frost, the exceptionless universality of same-sex attractions proves that they are in fact artificial. The gist is that they're not really into other guys. Culture forced them! Of course, our culture's homophobia is not even a topic worthy of discussion. To recap, a culture that merely allows for same-sex attractions to flourish is biased; our own culture that actively discourages and penalizes such acts is the unmentioned standard by which everything shall be measured against. Zero self-awareness!

Frost also claims that social conditioning was responsible: "there were strong incentives and peer pressure inducing young men to court each other."[136] Let's suppose I argue against the innateness of the idea that most men are attracted to women by pointing out that the very structure of society has forced men and women to marry, per societal customs. Men and women are told from an early age that they should marry someone of the opposite sex. In every such society that has exerted such pressure, we in fact see marriage. Therefore, most men aren't really attracted to women. That's about as stupid as what Frost is trying to sell. Why is his book in fifth edition? Who do I talk to in order to get such a cushy deal?

None of these succeed in explaining anything, but they sure wind up in a self-contradiction. How can a genuine heterosexual man have any sex with other men, outside of genuine coercion or rape, and still be considered heterosexual? Am I to believe these womenless men don't know how to masturbate (alone, of course, not each other)? And if sex with men is preferable to no sex at all or just masturbation, isn't that admission alone enough to scrap the concept of heterosexuality? You don't get to round up from mostly or primarily heterosexual to bona fide heterosexual.

Prison Rape

At the beginning, LeVay mentioned the artificiality of prison rape. But even something as seemingly situational as prison rape can tell us about the absurdity of the current system. Along the lines of young men acting as a stand-in for women in, prison sex (whether consensual for both or not) is often thought as a situational and quasi-heterosexual. Even if nonconsensual, one partner (usually the top) is willing to have sex with another man. Since the aggressor will most likely be the top, this is dismissed as quasi-heterosexual mimicking the alleged heteronormative norm of the active male and passive female. But if we're redefining heterosexuality to include not just penis-vagina but penis-hole then we have to readjust the definition of heterosexuality's parallel, homosexuality. So are men who exclusively have sex with other men, but are always the tops, heterosexual now? Would the gay top in a gay relationship be considered heterosexual by the same standard? If penis-plowing-anyhole equals heterosexual, then certainly tops must be heterosexuals.

What about men who don't have anal sex but are "tops" orally or other positions with only other men? Mostly men? Sometimes men? What about men who are primarily tops, but not exclusively, with only other men? Mostly men? Sometimes men? What about men whose wives fuck them with strap-ons every once in a while? What percentage is the cutoff? Is it homosexual for a man to be fucked by his wife? For whom if the wife is the heterosexual male and the husband the heterosexual female? And what if he's a total top with other men? Mostly top?

Shifting the goalposts for heterosexuality but neglecting to do the same to homosexuality is special pleading. Such redefinitions that seek to rescue the concept of heterosexuality by generously expanding it have a domino effect that shows the absurdity of it all. Conclusion: it's pretty clear that the hetero-homo paradigm can neither stand up nor be rescued without collapsing.

So by radically redefining heterosexuality as to allow some homosexual contact (as long as it's arbitrarily defined to be not "real"), situational homosexuality destroys the very definition of heterosexuality it seeks to rescue. Heterosexuality is not "men have sex with women, but sometimes also men given such and such criteria." If I say that I'm not prone to anger, but only if someone drops a bowling ball on my foot, we are saying that my anger is in fact innate but only in certain circumstances. So the excuse of situational homosexuality is another way of saying that same-sex desires are natural, but only in certain circumstances. That's why we get the Freudian slip from Frost in that most awkward construction that proposes artificial conditions (an all-male military) giving rise to already existent "natural" essence (the attraction to men).

The brazen hypocrisy and double standards evaporate what little remains of situational homosexuality. Why is it that heterosexuality is never situational? (Or rather, only for gays. You know, those poor gay saps who wanted to be just like everyone else with a wife, kids, white fence, and a normal dog. But they realize it's all a farce and get invited on to The Oprah Show.) Why don't we say, "Men have sex with women in Situations A, B, and C while with men in Situations D, E, and F"? Why the double standard? Why are only same-sex relationships marked as situational? Situational homosexuality fails because it is circular and assumes what it seeks to prove: most are exclusive heterosexual therefore anything that debunks this must be false.

Chapter 8: Passively Acquired Cultural Trait (PACT)

So homosexuality and heterosexuality are fictions? "Yes, of course." He adopts a camp voice and adds: "But it makes a lot of girls happy." Why do so many people believe it to be true about themselves if it's false? "They believe in Jesus, and that's a much bigger fiction, with more money spent on it. Prettier clothes too."[137]

Until recently, same-sex relationships have been illegal in the West and certain relationships are still de jure illegal.[138] In Leningrad, the comrades have begun to arrest activists for so-called homosexual propaganda, which would presumably include this very work and many of its sources.[139] But why aren't today's legal and cultural barriers to grero not considered situational? Hypocrisy and a piss poor grasp of logic.

With Christopher Hitchens, that he went to an all-male boarding school is situational to his relationship. (Apparently, he couldn't sneak out on the weekends and never learned how to masturbate.) But that he and his friend were threatened with expulsion and forbidden to talk to each other, that's not situational. Exclusive heterosexuality is so fragile, people have to be threatened to stop doing what is allegedly so obviously "unnatural," a contradiction if there ever was one. One reviewer speaks of Hitchens' revelations as a "Window into Horny Teenage Bicuriosity" concluding that "the horniness of teenagers is a force greater than sexual orientation," in that great style of castrating heterosexuality of any coherent meaning and belittling genuine same-sex desires.[140] The fact that Hitchens remembered the episode fondly and that he was forbidden to pursue it further speaks against the idea that it was some temporary madness caused by instinctual horniness (that, again, neither women nor masturbation could cure). And of course, if Hitchens had been caught with a girl, told never to speak to her again, and then had a same-sex relationship, you can bet anything the clueless hypocrites would start screeching about situational this and that caused by the artificial pussy prohibition.

When Luke and Stephen were separated forcefully by the latter's father, why isn't that situational? If Stephen's father was not indoctrinated by his culture to be a homophobic asshat bigot, do we really think the relationship would have ended then? Maybe at some other point, as relationships do end, but no one would dare say the attraction was never "really" there or the potential for future similar masculine-on-masculine relationships wasn't there either.

After Gore Vidal penned The City and the Pillar, the New York Times refused to review his books. Surely trying to limit people's options creates a situation… But, of course, not when same-sex anything is limited. And then, when the gays hold a pride parade once a year, the bigots say the fags are the ones pushing their agenda down on everyone's throats. Any less self-awareness and such bigots risk classification as a pillar of salt.

What about the realization in three of the excerpts quoted? If you missed it, read it again. Luke, Bob, and Scott all realize that society is against what they feel:

I have to admit, although I was conflicted about the nature of our relationship, I was over the moon… You know, that was awful kid stuff we did... Well, it was different than with a girl. And I don't think it's right… I only have sex with a guy for money. And two guys can't love each other.

There was hesitancy in pursuing the relationship thanks to the effects of culture raping their minds. But what could be more natural than doing something that is expressly forbidden? The act of going against the mandatory shows its naturalness. That the love between young men is quite natural is proved every time it happens, especially when expressly forbidden. What could be more natural than doing the prohibited in spite of its prohibition?

This very stigma such secretive relationships overcome, for a while at least, proves grero is deep-seated not situational. One such example of the cultural tide grero had been drowning under shows a police officer propagandizing moral puritanism to middle or high school students in the 1960's:

There may be some in this auditorium. There may be some here today that will be homosexual in the future. There are a lot of kids here. There may be some girls here who will turn lesbian. We don't know. But it's serious, don't kid yourselves about it. They can be anywhere. They could be judges, lawyers. We ought to know, we've arrested all of them. So if any one of you, have let yourself become involved with an adult homosexual, or with another boy, and you're doing this on a regular basis, you better stop quick. Because one out of three of you will turn queer. And if we catch you, involved with a homosexual, your parents are going to know about it first. And you will be caught, don't think you won't be caught, because this is one thing you cannot get away with. This is one thing that if you don't get caught by us, you'll be caught by yourself. And the rest of your life will be a living hell.[141]

We have to take for granted that Christians drive people away from same-sex relationships by threatening them with hellfire. That's perfectly okay and "natural" because that's how it's always been, except when it wasn't. A society that threatens young men with prison, hellfire, and shame isn't situational. And neither are nagging mothers who demand grandchildren. Or every commercial that promotes exclusive heterosexuality with the Pavlovian prompt of busty women reinforcing what a man's only goal ought to be. Or every other commercial that belittles grero by regurgitating the cultural line that intimacy between men is at best an uncomfortable punchline (remember those awful Snickers commercials? [142]).

What a coincidence the only time situationality comes up is when same-sex attractions are encouraged or opposite-sex attraction downplayed. What a further coincidence that this makes our culture at large, save for those pesky counter-examples, completely unbiased and "unsituational." Our culture is the yardstick against which all should be measured! Distilled to its simplicity: Some situations are situational; some situations are not situational. Is there a better example of ethnocentric arrogance than this doublethink? The dominant culture is not a culture: it is an unmarked given. Woe onto those heretical perverts who dare expose this. This is why Wikipedia has various categories for LGBT writers, athletes, politicians, etc. but not a single one for heterosexual anyones.

Some readers may still be confused as to why certain situations are situational but not others. Here's a helpful chart in making the correct assessment:

A situation that

is

 

Examples of this are:

increases same-sex sex

situational.

cultures of all times and eras [except:]

decreases same-sex sex

not situational.

Christians threatening hellfire

increases opposite-sex sex

not situational.

nagging mothers wanting grandkids

decreases opposite-sex sex

situational.

boarding schools, militaries, prisons

 

This bias of marked same-sex while heterosexual sex remains the unmarked default shows even in today's politically correct climate. A 2011 article on a mainstream news site about new revelations concerning serial killer John Wayne Gacy says the following: "Due to Gacy's highly publicized homosexuality and pattern of preying on vulnerable teens, detectives believe the passage of time might actually work in their favor." [143] Would we ever see an article mention Ted Bundy's "highly publicized heterosexuality," as he preferred to rape and kill only women? Heterosexuality is hidden.

The gay debate is stuck between choice and the deterministic genes or hormones. But what about the unseen manipulative hand of culture? We can point out the biases of other cultures, but we are blind to our own. That's why anti-grero or heterosexuality is never situational while pro-grero, pro-gay, and anti-heterosexual is always situational. Girlfriends demanding exclusivity and weddings, not situational. Nagging girlfriends demanding exclusivity and weddings which leads men to try out other men, situational.

Take the clothing you own. Am I correct to guess that your wardrobe includes neither a top hat nor a monocle? How strange, indubitably! We're generally not forced to wear any specific kind of clothing (save for work) yet culture clearly reduces your choices to a small subset of acceptable norms without your knowledge. That's why Roman togas are funny, but you don't laugh every time you look in the mirror.

Exclusive heterosexuality is a passively acquired cultural trait (or PACT). You don't remember signing up? That's the point! And like the Warsaw Pact, if you try to leave, there will be severe consequences.[144] Anyways, while humans have a unique capacity for language, no one chooses what language they first learn. Situational homosexuality is the linguistic equivalent of claiming that if you grow up speaking English, you are oriented towards English. Evidence of knowing French by later learning it is merely situational. You weren't born to speak French, but can do so under certain circumstances. But what if you were raised in a culture that spoke French? Most humans have a capacity for language, but not a capacity for a single language per se. No one woke up this morning and choose not to wear a top hat with a monocle, culture took away that choice for you.

PACT is not merely about sexuality. It's about examining whether our values and beliefs are our own or just the product of the hidden white noise stealthily infiltrating our brains without our conscious knowledge. It's rather uncomfortable that all our deeply-held beliefs could be false, or were acquired passively. Time to disengage the autopilot or at the very least recognize that there is one running the show. As the basic unit of culture is people (especially parents, teachers, peers), grero is especially hard. Grero is not just "I like men" but "you like men." It is a spit on the face of culture, followed by a back-handed slap. Grero is not easy but it is true.

We have to conclude that in fact it is our current homophobic culture that's "situational" in that it denies the long and proud history of masculine-masculine love by replacing it with the circular sophistry of situational homosexuality that assumes what it fails to prove. Far from situational homosexuality representing an exception to most men's true nature, it is our culture that's the exception to our real nature. But even in the world of same-sex pornography, the lie lives on.

Sausage Jockeys Tossing Salads[145]

Halperin notes that

"Because we do not tend to see our own sexual categories as arbitrary or conventional, and because we regard them accordingly as empty of ideological content, we consider "homosexual" and "heterosexual" to be purely descriptive, trans-cultural, and trans-historical terms, equally applicable to every culture and period."[146]

Hence the constant anachronistic usage of homosexual and heterosexual to describe the Greeks, pigeonholing them into one or the other instead of neither. Or at the most, a concession that while the Greeks did not use our current dichotomy and may not have been entirely straight, they're definitely not gay or homosexual at all. This adoption of the binary hetero-homo system extends to those who should know better as they have experienced relationships that do transcend this evil dichotomy. Take Christopher Hitchens. In an interview, he gave this as a reason for revealing his boarding school affair with another male student:

I decided I'd put this in the book because they used to be such a staple of English biography, so I thought it might be as well if more heterosexual guys said, what most of them could, that they too have known what it's like to feel involved, emotionally as well, with a member of their own sex. And it might be wholesome thing. It would clear the air because as I never tire of saying it's a form of love not just a form of sex.[147]

Contradicting the tenants of situational homosexuality, Hitchens clearly recognized that his relationship wasn't "just" about sex yet he himself still claimed to be heterosexual. Quite frustrating!

This maddening lack of self-awareness reaches its peak with so-called gay porn stars, though as with the entire topic of sexual situationality, the now carefully trained reader will easily spot the contradictions and irately yell them out loud to the discomfort of nearby individuals. The excuses center around the negating effect of money on the essence of one's being. Namely, if you get paid to have sex with another man, you're not defined by it and you're not a homosexual. As another equally valid example, because a doctor gets paid to perform a surgery, he's not really a doctor. Everyone knows that. It's common sense! And of course, when your friends find out you have performed surgeries, you have to nervously explain that was merely a series of youthful indiscretions meant only to pay the bills.

Take Aaron, who tells Tyra Banks that he's straight but gay-for-pay, much to Tyra's amusement who had not heard the phrase before that day's show.[148] Aaron needs the money and swears he'll stop when he gets married. Just like smoking or leaving the toilet seat up! He started out as a male stripper (for women) and then dabbled in straight porn. But straight porn just doesn't pay enough to get him through college. Quoting probably his proud mother, Aaron rhetorically asks, "How can you say no to something that you've never tried?" Then he tells us that to make the same money in one scene with a guy, he would have to fuck twenty women. So the new definition of heterosexuality is: "I'd rather sleep with one guy than twenty women." Think of the time saved that you could spend on continuing to not have sex with women!

On the same show, Tyra Banks trots out Dean who does "stuff" with other guys.[149] Kisses guys, but he's just acting. You know, he needs the money. He doesn't get aroused, not really. The audience hisses in disbelief. Dean considers himself 100% straight, absolutely, despite kissing other guys for money. Then, popups out from the audience, Courtney, his bisexual girlfriend:

I have a little different interpretation of sexuality. I love him, I know that he's heterosexual, but I also think he's a little bit bisexual. I just don't think you can do what he does and not be somewhat bisexual but he has a different opinion of that. He thinks that if he doesn't go out on his own searching for men going to bars and whatnot that that makes him not gay, that he's heterosexual. But only because he's doing it for money that he thinks he's gay-for-pay or whatever. You know, he does it, so I think he's bisexual.

Finally, someone with a lucid thought who comes close to understanding grero, albeit clumsily grasping onto the current framework and its outdated terminology like "bisexual." George Duroy, the legendary porn director of Bel Ami, concurs. Talking about the importance of his company not appearing too gay, he notes in an interview with the now-defunct Manshots magazine:[150]

Duroy: If they feel it is gay environment, it would be probably more difficult to convince them to do certain things. When they see that all the other boys who work for me are as straight as they are, they would do it.

Manshots: "Straight" in quotes?

Duroy: It's difficult to say quotes, because they might be, and they usually are, very sexual. Still it's very difficult to say about somebody that he's gay, 'cause it's like, he would be gay if he looks for other boys, if he dates another boy, or whatever, and there is not that with these boys. They would be pretty much available if you asked them, I would say, under certain circumstances, but they would never be looking for it.

Manshots: I understand. Available but not aggressive.

Duroy: Yeah. I would say so It's like it certainly wouldn't be their preference, but it's not that - you can see in the films the' they can do it pretty well. I dare say they enjoy it while they're doing it.

A few things: monkey see, monkey do. Because society has repressed the full extent of masculine sexuality, no one knows what to do… and even if they got creative, they'd know it's not permissible. But what if that ignorance and roadblock are removed? Then perhaps even their "preference" would change. Who needs women for sex when you don't have to wait an hour for the guy to get ready? Or hold your farts in for three hours on a date you would never take any of your friends to. And remember, no inappropriate remarks or jokes. Pretend you're at the sterile airport! The relations between the sexes often remind me of Calvin and Susie playing house.[151] Maybe I'm a socially awkward penguin,[152] but I feel like an actor around women. I have to be a different guy. I've felt the same around gay men: it's as if I have to be this stereotype of a gentleman. I have to be what they want, not what I am. As boys, we're given a list of what is masculine. (Some of these are culturally-defined, but quite a lot of gender is inborn.) The last item on that list is liking only those with whom we share none of those previous masculine traits. What? As someone masculine, why is it deemed appropriate that I only like those with whom I do not share any attributes on the list? I'm quite certain other men have dealt with this better since they haven't written treatises on sexual orientation. Anyways…

Duroy is close to understanding the cultural influence nudging young men towards women and women only but unfortunately he reverts to a variation of situational homosexuality to explain "straight" men's unexpected liking of same-sex sex. Their like of same-sex sex is not necessarily in their innate nature, but a function of being "very sexual." And since they're heterosexual, another way of stating that is to say that a symptom of extreme heterosexuality results in homosexuality. The heterosexuality bucket overflows into same-sex one. Or, if you really like women, you'll be sure to like men. Again, "real" heterosexuality cannot be defined to include its opposite. Duroy certainly comes close, but even among enlightened individuals, the bias in favor of the current framework prevails even when first-hand evidence contradicts it.

I remember a porn site a while back called Fratpad. The premise was a bunch of young guys (the frat part) who live in a big house (the pad part) and have lots of sex (the porn site part). In the tour of the website, a nude but flaccid but large Spencer opens the door and warmly greets us inside.[153] As it turns out, Spencer is Dustin Zito, one of the stars of MTV's 2011 The Real World: Las Vegas. Revealing his past job as a nude greeter only in a later episode, we find Dusty trying to console an upset girlfriend by downplaying the extent of his sextivities.[154] "You got taped having sex! It's all over the Internet!" shrieks Derpina the girlfriend. Dusty hesitantly rationalizes, "I didn't get taped having sex. Yeah, okay, I got naked and stuff." By "not getting taped having sex" Dustin means that there exists a tape of his mouth stuffed with a dick and his ass getting fucked.[155] Dustyevsky should have told that shrill cunt that he likes cock and anyone who has a problem with that isn't going to get his. Instead, he knows on some level he likes men but tries to rationalize it to conform to societal standards. For example, we see a previous clip of a drunken Dusty shouting that he believes we were put on this earth to reproduce, clearly at odds with past employment of sucking dicks by the dozen.

These unwritten and unspoken standards are set by even the allegedly liberal and hedonistic MTV. The show's co-creator (and closet homophobic bigot) tells us that Dusty was asked to be on the show because "whether it's that particular story, having done one of these voyeuristic websites, or some other mistake someone's made in life" appeals to the audience. Yes, kids! Having sex with other men (and getting paid for it!) is a mistake. Don't worry though! A man can absolve himself of this mistake by continual self-loathing and repeating the party line about the temporality of situational homosexuality. The conservatives want zero gays via pray the gay away while the liberals don't want anything more than the token 2% effeminate minority.

As a sidenote, MTV is not the only socially liberal entity that's more homophobic than its reputation suggests. In The Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex, author June Reinisch answers a question from a "very upset" mother who caught her son and four of his friends masturbating each other in the garage:[156]

Studies, including ones conducted by The Kinsey Institute, have found that same-sex genital activity in childhood and adolescence does not predict adult homosexual behavior.

Don't worry, Mom! Johnny probably ain't a fag just because he's circle jerking half the class. Phew! And he especially won't become a homosexual if we tell him just how awful they are.

On the surface, the idea that money overrides alleged basic instincts superficially makes a bit of sense. However, we're not living in a 19th century French novel. No one is starving and has to do strange for a piece of change.[157] If we're on the topic of Les Miserables, yet another nasty hypocrisy must be pointed out. No one questions the sexuality of porn players and stars whose orientation matches the societal expectations. If the same-sex act is done with great vigor, it must be the money and good acting skills. If it's done hesitantly and the guy doesn't appear to enjoy it, it's obviously forced and thus it's not his real orientation. Situational homosexuality cannot lose by calling both sides of the coin. But yet, my personal viewing of an enormous amount of porn seems to disprove these situational excuses. I've seen the same guys perform in both so-called straight and gay porn. Those guys who are good at one are generally good at the other. Those who appear meek and petrified in scenes with other men aren't very good at fucking women either. But it's fun to watch nonetheless. There's a certain charm in sexual awkwardness.

Given that the alternative to not doing gay-for-pay is not starvation, I'm supposed to believe that Dusty who chooses to make a bit more money tossing salad than flipping burgers is still functionally a heterosexual. Really? And again the double standards: it's only with sex that we nervously yell about situationality. The guy who flips burgers because he may actually starve isn't a situational cook. "Hey man, I flip burgers for money! I wasn't born a flipper!" What joke. But when it comes down to it, these porn players prefer sex with men over folding shirts. They may be folders and flippers, but never call them tossers.

Aaron, Dean, Dusty, and many others would be much happier as greros, not having to constantly make excuses for their Romanesque proclivities. And that's why grero is important. Without the word, how does one even overcome the seemingly insurmountable numbers problem? Straight relationships rely on the unseen numbers to work. Basically all the women a man sees are potential mates. Sure, some are ugly, some are taken, some do not like you in return, but the remaining pool of mutually interested candidates is high enough. These days, few men can be assumed to be masculine and like other men. Whereas few women are offended if you show interest, many men can be violent if propositioned. So where does a grero meet another grero? Gay bars are full of the effeminate types so that's out. Where else? That's a good question without any good answers yet but at least there is a word.

In high school, I only knew about the Beatific story, the Kinsey numbers, and the homophobia study. From just these three, I knew even back then that the current sexual orientation framework could not be the whole truth. But who to tell and how? There was no context, no theory behind these. Culture's favorite hit, situational homosexuality, drowned it all out. "I think a lot of guys would like others guys" is not something for casual discussion. Neither is this work, but it's a start. This book does not turn every guy believing himself to be straight into a grero so it does not solve this numbers problem. The propaganda of exclusively heterosexuality has solidified into the reality of exclusive heterosexuality. Grero is a scarier word than bisexual or gay. Whereas these labels describes oneself, grero makes a claim on all men. You can like all the women you want, but you still like cock. If you are open about what you like and others know, the hope is that the shy ones may reflect on grero and gravitate towards you.

Even More Porn

Europeans tend to be more sensible in sexuality (and elsewhere) than Americans, though this difference is often overstated by both. George Duroy, Bel Ami's porn director from the last section had this interview with a blog:[158]

Q: I've heard lots of models are "straight". Is that true? Is this a cultural difference, because I think it's hard for some Americans to see them enjoying enthusiastic sex with men, then identifying as straight.

A: "Gay" porn was never dominated by gay models, and in the case of Bel Ami, not even half of the employees are gay. (In the last three years, we had seven babies born to our employees.) Gay porn should be more accurately called "all-male porn". I don't see this necessarily as a cultural difference—most of the models working for Corbin Fisher or Sean Cody are straight as well. I know some gay models in the U.S. who claimed to be straight to get a job with some of the American Studios.

On the other hand, I can't imagine that a really STRAIGHT man would be able to perform the way our models perform, no matter what they think they are. I, for one, certainly wouldn't be able to be "straight for pay". We live in a world where traditional labels don't apply anymore, partly as a result of gay emancipation. Being gay is not taboo anymore, and I'd say at least thirty percent of city boys in the Central European region happily experiment with their sexuality. Many enjoy it, but they wouldn't think of themselves as being gay. They simply mingle freely, going with their girlfriends to gay bars and fondling other boys in front of girls. And now tell me—what is their orientation?

Sometimes I joke, saying that very few gay men are so enthusiastic during sex with other boys as these "straight" boys. I suspect that gay men lost their monopoly on gay sex as a part of their social acceptance. Or that experimenting with all-male sex is simply "in".

Or all these contradictions of the current framework point towards grero. Namely, men can enjoy other men. It's as simple as that. One of Bel Ami's early favorites, Lukas Ridgeston, understood this even if he was unreflective:[159]

Manshots: What is your sexual preference? Do you consider yourself gay? (Lukas smiles)

Lukas: No, I don't. I never think about these things. I have a girlfriend, but after my scene with Johan Paulik in "Lukas' Story 2," I've realized that I can enjoy sex with a boy as well as a girl. I don't understand my sexuality even today. The only thing I know is that I am a very sexual person, and I don't feel any special prejudices to complicate my life. I am certainly not spending my time trying to understand it. I am just enjoying it.

An interview ten years later shows a more succinct if still vague acceptance:[160]

Gio: Do you identify as gay, straight or bi-sexual?

Lukas: I always say I am sexual.

Or grero. Far from situational homosexuality rescuing heterosexuality from counter-evidence of the allegedly rare and temporary instances of male-male contact, such relationships are the evidence of the grero beneath the fast fading veneer of exclusive heterosexuality.

Chapter 9: Gay Complicity

Many individuals who have had considerable homosexual experience, construct a hierarchy on the basis of which they insist that anyone who has not had as much homosexual experience as they have had, or who is less exclusively aroused by homosexual stimuli, is "not really homosexual."[161]

Many gays insist they're the only real homosexuals because a bit of same-sex horniness or experimentation in "straight" men does not make only fully homosexual, per the situational homosexuality excuses. This artificially deflates the very numbers that would allow for more social acceptance by virtue of "it's not a crime if everyone is doing it." This masochistic desire to exclude and minimize is not a recent phenomenon. The first openly gay man, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, in the 1860's originally estimated the number of gays to be 1 in 500 (0.2%)[162] while a generation later the early 20th century sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld pegged the number at around 2%.[163] Current gays like Dan Savage now acknowledge that previous numbers estimating 1-in-10 people to be gay were exaggerated.[164] However, this still oft-quoted 10% has an interesting backstory that shows gays downplaying their numbers, contrary to claims they are exaggerating for political purposes.

While the 10% figure comes from the research of Alfred Kinsey, the first gay man to use it was Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society, the first significant gay rights organization in the United States. In the society's first manifesto, Hay wrote:

We, the Androgynes of the world, have formed this responsible corporate body to demonstrate by our efforts that our physiological and psychological handicaps need be no deterrent in integrating 10 percent of the world's population towards the constructive social progress of mankind.[165]

However, if we look at Kinsey's work, we don't find a claim that 10 percent of males are gay or homosexual, per se. In fact, Kinsey prefaces his findings with:

Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.[166]

Furthermore, for Kinsey, the graphical representation of this continuum was a scale from 0 to 6, with 0 exclusively heterosexual and 6 exclusively homosexual. The ten percent is then the number of males who are "more less exclusively homosexual (i.e., rate 5 or 6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55."[167] However, why didn't the early gay rights movement pick the total of 2's through 6's? Surely, if they wanted inflate the total (as they were so accused then and now), Kinsey's research provides them with much higher numbers. Ratings 2 through 6 are 25% for example. So why pick the smaller number?

Such a baffling choice is also ironic since Kinsey, on the very same page as his ten percent claim, cautions against exactly that minimization:

On the other hand, there are some persons who would not rate an individual as "really homosexual" if he were anything less than a 5 or a 6.

While I agree with Kinsey that sexual behavior in and of itself is not indicative of any type of person, science through childhood gender studies now shows us that gays are in fact different: people with gender-shifted traits. As such, gays do feel different from other men and thus mistakenly conflate their sexuality and gender. Because gay men feel that their gender and sexuality are part of the same thing, it creates a group identity around these shared traits. If you like men, you're at least a little bit feminine, and vice versa. If you're not feminine, you must not be really gay or a real homosexual. You may like sex with men, but it's not your "real" orientation. You're just in it for the sex, money or women aren't available (maybe they're all in the bathroom or something). Or so goes the gay thinking on the matter.

We have dealt with the ridiculousness of situational homosexuality so no need for repetition. However, as with purposely reducing the numbers, gays dismissing other men's same-sex relationships as not real isn't new either. Ulrichs created a category of men called Uraniasters, "straight" men who only situationally engaged in homosexual acts, along pretty much the same nonsensical lines as now. In arguing against laws forbidding same-sex relationships, he made the case that Biblical prohibitions in Romans I against sex between men only applied to sex between non-gay men as same-sex sex was unnatural only for them.[168] So much for solidarity and not throwing masculine men under the bus. Hirschfeld promoted the term pseudohomosexuality to delegitimize the very real relationships between men and listed the same tired excuses used since then. Both of these men could see culture denying the gays their natural inclinations but their allegiance to the idea that other men who liked men must be part of the small, feminine minority blinded them to the fact that most men would like other men absent Christer culture. Today, we see the likes of outspoken gays like Dan Savage still promoting the idea that men can have sex with men and still be considered straight because incidental sex is "experimentation," not real, and just the product of getting too drunk.[169] But why do we continue to ignore the very real culture that tells men not to have sex with men and associates such acts with femininity? Why would we expect more than incidental contact given the repercussions, hostility, and even the lack of terminology to adequately describe the full gamut of masculine relationships?

Much of this gay cluelessness about masculinity derives from their effeminacy: they lack first-hand knowledge of masculinity. Some of the labels gays use give their superficial understanding of masculinity away. Take straight-acting. It refers to a masculine gay man who could pass for a straight guy. "But you don't look or sound gay," would be the response.[170] By this, gays acknowledge that gays are not masculine by default. More importantly, who's acting? When gays come out of the closet, they often become more effeminate as time goes on. Good for them. In their childhood and adolescence, the masculinity that was forced on them becomes an act. As such, they project their having to act masculine onto anyone who is masculine. "If you are masculine, you must be acting just like I did." Well, that's simply not true.

The book Straight Acting by Angelo Pezzote gives a glimpse into the gay mind's conflicted and contradictory attitudes towards masculinity. The books aim to turn gay men away from destructive masculine aping, a phony disguise: "There is no point in trying to be something you're not. The 'inauthenticity' of straight acting can be sensed."[171] I could not agree more. I've seen plenty of gay men who claim to be straight acting but are really just a bit less effeminate than the stereotype. The book, for example, quotes Lance Bass as identifying as straight acting and yet no one would have a hard time identifying him as gay from a five second video or audio sample. Not even other gay men are fooled: "If Lance Bass is a straight-acting gay, then I eat pussy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner."[172] Gay men are effeminate and should be in no way be burdened to act a certain way to please anyone else. They're fine just the way they are. However, the author, like so many people including non-gays, conflates gay with all-things same-sex (male-on-male):

And what about this [personal ad] – "straight men exploring their lust for other men." I don't know about you, but I'm a little confused. Doesn't "their lust for other men" make them gay - even if it's just a little?[173]

No, because gay is a gender and not merely a sexuality. As such, men can have sex with only men and still not be gay.

Pezzote then acknowledges that gay is more or less effeminate:

Sadly, a large number of us try to stamp out our "gayness" to appear more straight, masculine, or "normal" so we fit in. We downplay our "gayness" even after we admit it. There's a gay/straight blending that many of us do to be more accepted. Afraid to stick out too much, we try to blend like chameleons. At times we may offset, or balance, our "gayness" with masculinity. The use of such "normalizing," or "I'm gay, but I'm just like you" strategies, makes it hard to tell if we're really progressing socially and assimilating into mainstream culture, or if we're actually doing a type of social conforming, in which case we're moving backwards.[174]

But if gay is effeminate, and liking men is gay "even if it's just a little" bit, then the logical conclusion is that if you like men, you are to some degree also effeminate. Is it then any surprise that genuinely masculine guys (fashioning themselves as straight) who want to try something new avoid the gay label? Of course not. While it's legitimate to question their straightness, they are not gay since the two are not opposites on the same scale. Muddling the lines between sexuality and gender does not help: it makes masculine men less likely to have sex with other men openly, whether greros or gays. Whereas some gay men make excuses for why straight men having sex with other men are still straight, Pezzote goes the other extreme. But would masculine men who have sex with other men benefit from the advice below?

In being straight acting, we muffle the so-called "feminine" part of ourselves.

Gay men may be "programmed" not to be "too obvious," shunning others like us and steering clear of them to avoid trouble. Unlike sex, we can't easily hide our appearance, mannerisms, and voice if we allow ourselves to express ourselves naturally as men who are gay. So, to avoid potentially serious consequences, many of us try not to look "too gay," behave "too gay," or sound "too gay," in public.

We're straight acting to save face. Many of us are "gay" here and behave more masculine there. It feels safer. While it may be more comfortable, this "no fems" attitude separates us from "the gay" or "feminine" part of ourselves and puts a wall between us and other gay men, becoming an obstacle to finding true love.[175]

Do we feel part of his "we"? No. While this is good advice for gays, greros are not feminine. Masculinity for us is a being, not an act, just as feminine is natural for gays. Pezzote is not alone in assuming effeminacy in gays or even same-sex inclinations in general. Harry Hay, while wearing a glittering scarf, gives this advice to young gays:

We must begin to quit imitating the heteros as much as we do. And as far as the younger people are concerned, they have a big step on all of us because they haven't taken on as much of the frog skins that most of us had to wrap ourselves into in order to get through life. I've always said that we should tear off the ugly green frog skins and find the beautiful fairy prince underneath.[176]

This view goes along with the label queer, not inappropriate since Harry Hay later founded the Radical Faeries. The dictionary tells us that queer is "strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint, unusually different." Do greros feel strange? Do we feel like we have frog skins? Do we muffle any feminine parts? Do we even have any feminine parts? Well, if you don't know about history you may think your like of other men is unusually different, but gender-wise greros do not feel out of place with other men at all. We are the 90%, or were and will be.

For gay men who wish to conflate all same-sex sex and effeminacy, where does this confusion come from? Because gay men lack any first-hand knowledge of masculinity, they have a rather superficial view of it, not unlike some women. For Pezzote, stereotypical masculinity is the problem, a disease: "Masculinity is the villain behind straight acting."[177] In fact, he thinks gender roles are completely made up:

Think of gender roles and masculinity as a sort of routine mass conformity like something out of Pink Floyd's The Wall. Everyone follows the rules.[178]

If you're born with a penis, you're male. Our masculinity, on the other hand, is not something we're born with. It's something we're taught to develop. It's a social invention. Masculinity is a socially constructed set of expectations based on one's being male... Since masculinity is learned, it can be unlearned.[179]

The masculinity of the "real man" is a mask that boys, and later men, grow to wear to some extent. It's a man's facade, not his true nature. The true self hides behind the protective armor of masculinity forged by society. Behind the hard shield lies a man's true nature - a soft, gentle, sensitive, emotional, kind, loving human being.[180]

If gender roles are entirely made up and are not attributable at least in part to some biological innateness, why do gays fail so miserably at masculinity? Why does science show that gender nonconformity in boys is the number one predictor of adulthood gayness? While the specific manifestations of masculinity do differ between cultures, that variety alone does not point to a singular cultural genesis. Languages are different but there are enough commonalities (i.e. universal grammar) to conclude a genetic basis for language itself. Think of universal gender as a rudimentary seed that is the same across all cultures. The specific end result will differ, but even then one can see the shared commonality. For example, of 122 cultures studied, males exclusively made weapons in 121.[181] Surely this cannot be a coincidence: a universal masculinity must be the responsible agent.

Masculinity is inborn, according to the conglomeration of research. In The Essential Difference, Simon Baron-Cohen makes the case that female brain is more wired towards empathy while the male brain towards systemizing.[182] This is why seemingly disparate occupations like surgeon, Internet startup founder, and repairman are all almost exclusively male-dominated: these occupations all require tinkering. Could there be bias? Sure, but that's unlikely. While the number of female surgeons have risen by only 7% in the last forty years, almost half of all medical school applicants are women, meaning women are choosing subfields in which less masculine tinkering is required.[183]

Men are simply more aggressive. The feminists hypothesize that this is the result of nurture not nature: men are not naturally but are raised to be more violent. But has taking away toy guns and competitive sports at recess produced less masculine violence? No, if anything more. By repressing perfectly natural masculine urges, the feminist seeks the impossible: to remake man in her feminine image. Such a project is bound to fail and create the same kind of resentment that gays feel when they're told to act less faggy. And what hypocrisy! Is femininity an act? Why do gay men and feminists assume they are genderless or that their gender is the pure, unsullied form? Why do they assume that masculinity is just the unnatural deviation from this one true gender? If straight men are so easily inoculated by society to wear the completely phony mask of masculinity, in what society were gay men raised? What antidote do gay men have against cultural prescriptions of masculinity? If masculinity is just an act, why are gays so bad at it?

Why is it that all of our differences need correction? And by what means? Reparative therapy perhaps? The self-unawareness oozes. So how about this? Gays, including in childhood, can be feminine to their heart's content. Fag it up as much as you like. But to reciprocate, men and boys should not be castrated of their masculinity. To take away a masculine boy's toy gun is as offensive as taking away an effeminate boy's doll. Social engineering from both sides ought to be rejected as totalitarian horseshit.

In short, masculinity is not an act. That gays felt uncomfortable being masculine when they're actually more feminine shows that quite clearly. Or the transgendered who feel different from the gender they were assumed to be based on their biological sex at birth. If gender roles are assigned by mass conformity, why can't gay men or transgendered conform?[184] Why do they innately feel different? And why is that most men don't have existential problems about their masculinity and don't yearn to throw off their "frog skins"? Pezzote has an interesting ad hoc rationalization:

Just as straight-acting gays resent the queens, it's conceivable that straight men are envious of gay men in general. They may resent us for "gender trading." This could explain in part their hostility towards us. They may be stuck in the prison of masculinity. Relatively speaking, we have a freedom they don't.[185]

So this is still a case of projection. Because gay men had to act more masculine as children (since their gay gender was obvious in childhood and oftentimes disapproved by parents and peers), they're resentful of masculinity itself. And they should be resentful, but not of masculinity itself but rather the culture that imposed it on them. Gays do not owe their problems to masculinity any more than a thermometer causes a heat wave. There needs to be a separation between what one is and what one ought to be: descriptive versus prescriptive.

For gay men to question our deep-seated being is hypocritical since this innateness is what they claim for themselves. Gays are born that way. But so are we. To try to destroy masculinity with throwing a belated passive-aggressive hissy fit in adulthood serves no one. Some gay men are not dismissive of masculinity and either want masculine men or want to be masculine themselves. But their lack of first-hand experience of it reveals itself as superficial. Look at the homoerotic artwork of Tom of Finland who drew pictures of men with exaggeratedly masculine attributes (bulging muscles, oversized genitalia) in a variety of stereotypically masculine dress codes (policeman, lumberjack, motorcyclist). "Believing that a man could be strong, happy, manly AND homosexual, [Tom of Finland] began to formulate the prototype that has become the quintessence of gay masculinity the world over,"[186] "his great achievement was then seen as having liberated gay men from the shackles of femininity and unnaturalness."[187] There is a certain veneer of masculinity, but it's always struck me as very shallow. Why does a biker wear leather? Not because it's cool and pretty but because leather is a great insulator against the wind. And that's the difference between phony masculinity and genuine masculinity: function over form.

While Pezzote dismisses masculinity as both undesirable and nonexistent, he ironically clings onto it with all fury:

You have the power to opt out of masculinity, thus making a better life, by redefining manhood and being yourself. Being gay doesn't equal being less masculine, so there's no part of you to restrain.[188]

We must change our negative beliefs that being gay is less manly.[189]

If masculinity is a villain why not abandon it outright instead of merely redefining it, at least for gay men? How can you redefine a villain and why would you want to? Why not start from scratch? And did Pezzote not argue that because gay men tone "it" down, they are in fact less masculine than they put on? What's wrong with being less manly? Aren't women less manly? Is there anything wrong with them?

Why hold onto the false prescriptive notion that masculine is good instead of the scientifically-correct descriptive notion that masculinity is this and that without value judgments? Pezzote does not manage to make a clean break between the prescriptive and descriptive: "All men, gay or straight, have been have been socialized to believe that to be overtly gay is unmanly and shameful." Overtly gay is not shameful but it is unmanly, by definition. In other words, Pezzote, and gays like him, should take his own advice: "There is no point in trying to be something you're not." But that has to apply to everyone: gay men and masculine men.

Chapter 10: Invention through Procreation is Conflation

In Crete, to become masculine, a young man needed to have sex with another man. Yet, having sex with men is now seen as a sign of effeminacy, and tolerated only for that small minority. We know the culprit is culture, but just how did this dramatic transformation come about negating the sexual fluidity of pagan times that assumed same-sex relationships as part of normative male behavior to equating same-sex relationships with only an effeminate minority?

Defining procreation as the proper goal of sex changed all that. It would be easy to place the blame solely on Genesis for focusing on reproduction:

As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.[190]

However, Stoic[191] and other pagan sources started the procreative craze within Greco-Roman culture centuries before Christianity infected the West. Take this from ‎Musonius Rufus:

Men who are not wantons or immoral are bound to consider sexual intercourse justified only when it occurs in marriage and is indulged in for the purpose of begetting children, since that is lawful, but unjust and unlawful when it is mere pleasure-seeking, even in marriage. But of all sexual relations those involving adultery are most unlawful, and no more tolerable are those of men with men, because it is a monstrous thing and contrary to nature.[192]

Or this from Plato:

As I said, I have a method for establishing this law, and the law will prescribe that men use sexual intercourse for procreation, as in nature; that they refrain from the male, if they are to avoid intentionally killing the human race and sowing their seed, as it were, on rocks and stones, where a man's fertile seed will never take root…[193]

This focus on procreation explicitly singles out all same-sex acts as wrong because none of them can result in children:

While not all opposite-sex sex results in children or is proper according to other rules, many can be rectified by a shotgun wedding. As such, the Old Testament (OT) is less harsh on opposite-sex sex. This is why a rapist has to pay a bit of money and marry the victim, all in the service of procreation:

If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.[194]

However, the rule against same-sex sex is simple. Leviticus was written in the same procreative spirit but the letter of the law metes out harsh punishment for same-sex sex:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.[195]

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.[196]

Christianity's synthesis of procreative prescriptions with Levitical punishments created the concept of bad homosexuality (all same-sex sex is non-procreative sex) and good heterosexuality (even opposite-sex sex gets rounded up to good procreative sex). This was the fundamental shift from the sexually flexible Greco-Roman world.

These ideas were forcibly applied in the 300's with the Christian takeover of the Roman empire. The sexual ethics and punishments inherited from the OT began to be imposed on all. Initially, the old pagan ethics (that allowed for sexual flexibility but socially forbade citizens from playing the role of the receptive partner) were kept but updated with loving Christian punishments in 342:

When a man submits to men, the way a woman does, what can he be seeking? where sex has lost its proper place? where the crime is one it is not profitable to know? where Venus is changed into another form? where love is sought and does not appear? We order statutes to arise, and the laws to be armed with an avenging sword, that those guilty of such infamous crimes, either now or in the future, may be subjected to exquisite penalties.[197]

Notice that only the receptive partner is noted as erring (per Roman custom) albeit with a severe punishment (per OT custom). All that changed for good with a law from 390:

OF DEBAUCHERS

Moses says: "If anyone hath intercourse with a male as with a woman, it is an abomination. Let them both die; they are guilty ..."

This indeed is the law. But a constitution of the Emperor Theodosius followed to the full the spirit of the Mosaic Law.[198]

What's the difference? The difference is that the 342 law punishes only the penetrated, passive partner in anal sex (hereafter known as "the fucked"), not the fucker. We still see the last vestiges of the old pagan sexual ethic whereby a free Roman citizen could have sex with another man without bringing shame upon himself, as long as the free male was not the fucked (the same restriction did not apply to lessers like a slave or prostitute). While it was a long time coming, 390 then is the crucial moment that the sexual ethic changed from fluidity to prescribing exclusive heterosexuality to men and thereby inventing its opposite.

Not only does this obsession with procreation create the concept of homosexuality, but its subsequent criminalization also decreases the number of same-sex relationships. Fearing death or imprisonment, over the following generations, fewer and fewer men would be into what had before been commonplace. It then began to look natural that man only had sex with woman, as everyone began to forget that such restrictive sexuality was an artificial imposition backed up by force. (Though the concept of fluidity never quite left. Fundamentalist Christians often think gays are recruiting or one may be cured of homosexuality.)

The next millennium (and then some) offered not much new: that men only liked women became the default view since same-sex acts became rare through criminalization and what few men committed such unthinkable acts were put into the detestable sodomite category. Onto this category, with the assumption that most men liked women, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs transposed[199] his gay effeminacy, equating effeminacy with same-sex sex, just like what science tells us today. While some may see his coinage of the modern terms heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual[200] as radically innovative, Ulrichs did nothing new:[201] he merely created the terminology for a system that already assumed most men liked women only while a minority of sick sodomites lurked about. His only innovation was to argue that gays should be accepted because they were born that way: effeminate and same-sex attracted. And because they were born that way, the Biblical prohibitions (particularly in Romans 1:27[202]) did not apply:

How will I prove that [Saint Paul did not mean Urnings/gays in Romans 1:27]? Very simply – by the Apostle's own words. They read: "Leaving natural use of women, they were aroused in turn by a longing for their own kind: males practicing foul lust on other males." The words "natural" use and "leaving" do not apply to Urnings. For the use of women is not the natural one for the Urning, nor has the Urning left it.[203]

Ulrichs's argument explicitly threw most men under the bus:

However, both do apply in the case of the Uraniaster [or pseudo-homosexual engaging in situational homosexuality], i.e., the Dioning [heterosexual male] who seeks intercourse with men due to the lack of women or by choice (or also, says the popular argument as a result of self-abuse…)[204]

Ulrichs's argument mirrors science: both assume that non-gay (i.e. masculine) men engaging in sex with members of their own sex are fakes. This circularly kept the masculine men out of the newly coined homosexual category: masculine men became confined to the straight category since they were only situationally homosexual.[205] And what man would want to be associated with effeminacy anyways? Ulrichs's circular binary fallacy assumed that since he's different from men because he wasn't masculine and that he liked men, masculine men must be the opposite: they must only like women. But why can't masculine men like other masculine men (or feminine men, if the claim is that heterosexual men like feminine women)? If cats only like tea, it doesn't mean that dogs can only like coffee.

Also, his argument reinforced the very idea that created and demonized homosexuality, i.e. that procreation was the only legitimate focus of sex. Ulrichs meekly begged for an exception because it was not in the nature of gays to reproduce. Not surprisingly, his loophole was undermined by the same procreation ethic that he dared not touch. The medical book of the time on sexual maladies, Psychopathia Sexualis, argued that proper sexuality is procreative:

The propagation of the human species is not committed to accident or to the caprice of the individual, but made secure in a natural instinct, which, with all-conquering force and might, demands fulfillment. In the gratification of this natural impulse are found not only sensual pleasure and sources of physical well-being, but also higher feelings of satisfaction in perpetuating the single, perishable existence, by the transmission of mental and physical attributes to a new being.[206]

Since same-sex sex is not procreative, it's still wrong. The book is subtitled with "emphasis on contrary sexual feeling" the euphemism for same-sex sex, contrary because it is opposed to this proper sexual feeling, procreative sex. (The heterosexual maladies it mentions are mostly non-procreative fetishes like spanking or cross-dressing.)

And there we have it: sexual orientation is then the product of focusing on procreation, ignoring innate male sexual fluidity, with minor improvements from the first gay guy. Kinsey slapped two gradations both to the left and right of bisexuality. And that's why sexual orientation fails as a universal theory: it does not explain anything outside our culture and only that if we clumsily sweep under the situationality rug all the counterexamples. It does not explain pagan sexuality, nor does it explain the grero in other cultures. Far from describing our natures, these sexual labels merely describe our culture.

The politically-correct LGBT label shows the artificial conflation of hetero-homo system. Standing for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, LGBT sometimes gets appended with a few more letters for queers, intersexuals, and asexuals or LGBTQIA. While the acronym wants to be inclusive, is it not just a modern version of the "bad sex" category of non-procreative sex of yesteryear? It is! The only commonality of those considered LGBT is that they are not heterosexuals. But how can one be part of a group if that group is defined negatively? What does a lesbian talking about her vagina have to do with masculine men who like other masculine men?[207] Doesn't the cultural bias show when one is defined to be part of a singular freak category that in reality has a huge amount of variety which only gets ignored because the overriding factor in identity is one's lack of conformance to the predefined normal? Compare to the now-defunct word colored. That word too ignores the variety in the artificial grouping itself and sets white as the golden standard. Why? Culture.

Science does not accept the Bible's mistaken categorization of bats as birds[208] just because of analogous (but not homologous) wings through convergent evolution.[209] Neither does science accept the classical elements[210] but rather the Periodic Table of Elements. Yet when it comes to sexuality, science accepts the cultural propaganda that same-sex attraction constitutes a singular small category of mostly effeminate males and ignores the historical evidence of male sexual fluidity. Science should accept neither the conflation of all varieties of same-sex sex under so-called homosexuality nor the validity of sexual categories that descend from a moralistic focus on reproduction. Science does not allow for moral high horsing with phrases like "periods of moral decadence," "constant struggle between natural impulses and morality," or "Christianity is one of the most powerful of the forces favoring moral progress"[211] yet science still accepts the subtle results of these puritanical proclamations.

We should recognize that in the absence of our currently restrictive sexual ethics, most men would have no problem loving other men. Ghosts of empires past, rematerialize! Tomorrow belongs to us![212]

Chapter 11: The Gray Bloom of Youth

Naturally, like most men, I am attracted to adolescent males – this is, by the way, one of the best kept secrets of the male lodge, revealed in a study called The Boys of Boise, where most of the male establishment of that heartland Idaho city (each a mature married man) were revealed to be lovers of the high school football team. But I did not go prowling for fourteen-year-old athletes. After all, if the ideal is the other self, then that self would have had to age along with me, and attraction would have become affection, and lust would have then been diverted to… chance encounters or the other sex.[213]

When I was fourteen, Christer culture told me to hate myself for liking sixteen-year-olds. I'll be damned if I listen again to that bullshit, this time on the other side of the age divide even if this is tantamount to defending a taboo. Maybe the tools who tell me that consensual relationships between grown males of whatever age of whatever duration are wrong would have more credibility if they refrained from raping the very same vulnerable teens their sexphobic rhetoric creates.[214] Why do we give any credence to the morality of perverts who want to play Peeping Tom in our consensual personal lives while they themselves either rape others or turn a blind eye?

Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic Avengers League, took out an ad in the New York Times criticizing that newspaper for its allegedly slanted coverage on the Catholic sex abuse scandal, revealing an inability to distinguish between consensual sex and nonconsensual rape:[215]

The Times continues to editorialize about the 'pedophilia crisis,' when all along it's been a homosexual crisis. Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.

Donohue is correct that most of the victims are not prepubescent children. He is further correct that most of the abuse was same-sex. However, that two penises were involved is not the problem, but the rape part. The only way in which this is a "homosexual crisis" is that the Catholic Church's policies on ordination encourages closeted gay men to become priests whose failures to extinguish their sexual desires pervert into nonconsensual acts. After all, what's the only respectable job for a good Catholic boy who both believes the official line about the "intrinsically disordered" same-sex "acts of grave depravity"[216] and needs not to have wife? Problem solved! Of the five guys who became priests at the Catholic high school I attended, all of them were suspected to be gay beforehand. Whereas eighteen out of twenty gay Roman emperors is a mathematically impossibility (as we previously discussed), five out of five gay priests is really just what everyone has always suspected.[217]

Peter Hitchens, brother of Christopher, passes for a serious conservative commentator in Britain. Brain buddy of Donahue, the two share similar sentiments on the clerical sex abuse scandal:[218]

I will not be trapped into defending them; their actions were atrocious, particularly because of who and what they were, and the Roman Catholic Church has been feeble in dealing with them. But it can hardly be claimed that they were the only people ever to abuse children sexually, or to cover it up, or that they were in any way following the dictates of their Church. In fact most of this abuse involves homosexual assaults on pubescent boys, of the kind (not remotely connected with religion) which occurred at my private school. This fact is neglected at least partly because it is no longer respectable to disapprove of homosexuality as such, and many homosexual liberationists campaign for ever-lower ages of consent which would bring such offences perilously close to being legal, especially given the feebleness with which the current age of consent is policed. Yet the Church is simultaneously criticised by its foes for being against homosexual acts and for failing to act strongly enough against such acts, committed against its own code, by a minority of its own priests. There is a whiff of having it both ways here.

Fags want to screw each other but they want to arrest rapists?! Come on, gays, let's have some consistency, you hypocrites! For this Hitchens, it is logically indefensible to maintain the legality of consensual same-sex sex but not of same-sex rape. The mind weeps at such nonsense.

Like Donohue, Peter Hitchens does not understand that the problem with so-called homosexual rape is not the homosexual part. To him, same-sex sex is disgusting; rape is disgusting. As such they are one and the same disgusting mess. He further conflates the issue of age of consent laws with the old bogeyman that faggots need to recruit the young'uns because these predators cannot reproduce their own kind. Even the outright removal of age of consent or statutory rape laws would do nothing to nullify rape laws themselves, which is precisely why the former is not needed: rape is rape regardless of age and genitalia.

But the purpose of the age of consent laws is not stopping the predation of young'uns. If it were, the law would have banned schools and churches a long time ago. Statutory rape laws deliberately discourage sexuality, and especially the always wrong same-sex sexuality. Adolescents often look up to older men. They're bigger, stronger, and hence more attractive. This is why young boys like superheroes. And without cultural fiats, young men would like older men. Not grandfather old, but older in the sense of virility and strength: role models for what men strive to be. As such, the age of consent laws are to make young adults feel guilty about their feelings and thus nip the "problem" in the bud.

There is quite a lot of truth to the Christers who insist that "homosexuality" is learned behavior. Gays laugh this off as ridiculous because they have felt "that way" since they were very little. But we are greros, not gays, who know that the main driver of the lack of sexuality between masculine men is culture not genes. The Christers are right for once: we are coming for their husbands and sons. If adolescents had the option of same-sex relationships without the current stigma, you can bet the number of those reporting same-sex acts would be more than 5% (or whatever trifling number) and not predominantly made up of the effeminate minority, the gays.

In fact, some high-profile Christers have openly acknowledged that they must brand masculine-masculine attraction as evil precisely because it is such an alluring option:

If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one's own personal amusement, and all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get – and that is what homosexuality seems to be – then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist. The evidence is that men do a better job on men and women on women, if all you are looking for is orgasm… It's pure sexuality. It's almost like pure heroin. It's such a rush… Marital sex tends toward the boring end. Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does.[219]

The quote above is not from a radical gay activist or even your faithful author. It is from fundamentalist Paul Cameron, a psychologist who wants to make same-sex acts illegal precisely because of how addictive they are. It makes perfect sense then that the age of consent laws (along with homophobia) exist precisely for the same puritanical reason as age restrictions (along with general prohibitions) on alcohol and tobacco: to prevent hedonism.[220] Whereas we agree with the Christers that same-sex eroticism is "contagious," consensual personal choices ought not to be under the purview of nutty theocrats.

Such opinions about the desirability of same-sex sex are not confined to a single busybody. It was a well-known fact that same-sex attractions spread easily until relatively recently. A film from the 1960's features a detective John Sorenson barking at student-hostages:

There may be some in this auditorium. There may be some here today that will be homosexual in the future. There are a lot of kids here. There may be some girls here who will turn lesbian. We don't know. But it's serious, don't kid yourselves about it. They can be anywhere. They could be judges, lawyers. We ought to know, we've arrested all of them. So if any one of you, have let yourself become involved with an adult homosexual, or with another boy, and you're doing this on a regular basis, you better stop quick. Because one out of three of you will turn queer. And if we catch you, involved with a homosexual, your parents are going to know about it first. And you will be caught, don't think you won't be caught, because this is one thing you cannot get away with. This is one thing that if you don't get caught by us, you'll be caught by yourself. And the rest of your life will be a living hell.[221]

Dare to resist cock, or else. We must stop the contagion, a point that a propaganda film (Boys Beware) from that decade harps on about:

Then during lunch, Ralph showed him some pornographic pictures. Jimmy knew he shouldn't be interested but, well, he was curious. What Jimmy didn't know is that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind.[222]

What's curious is that both these clips feature neither rape nor pre-pubescent boys. Both are consensual hypotheticals that reveal that the fear was not about the rape of small boys, but the contagion of pleasurable same-sex sex. In Boys Beware, while Ralph is quite a bit older than Johnny, there is absolutely no mention of coercion. In fact, Ralph is arrested but Johnny himself is put on probation! Now, if Johnny is a poor little rape victim, the victim of an evil adult homoshecksual, why is he being punished? Precisely because it's a consensual contagion that must be exterminated.

Bill O'Reilly recently echoed these infecting sentiments half a century later when commenting on the contagious series Glee:[223]

O'REILLY: Here's the problem with a show like this, though. If you make the behavior of these people ... if children hear it, unsupervised children, okay who don't have parents watching their -- they might go out and experiment with this stuff.

PIRRO: Do you really think that this is the kind of thing that's contagious?

O'REILLY: I don't know.

PIRRO: That if kids see this, that they're going to say 'gee, I want to be a girl even though I'm not going to wear my mom's high heels tonight.'

CARLSON: I don't think that watching Glee is going to suddenly make kids want to be transgender or suddenly make them wake up one morning and say that they're going to be -

OREILLY: Experimentation. Experimentation.

CARLSON: But experimentation. I'm with you on this Bill because I wholeheartedly believe, in today's society, that kids are experimenting with homosexuality. We see it in celebrities who maybe just do it on the side, and it may be drug-fueled.

O'REILLY: When I was a teenager and I saw James Dean smoking, it made me want to smoke.

If only Bill O'Reilly knew that James Dean didn't just put cigarettes in his mouth.[224] While O'Reilly conflates gay, homosexuality, and grero, we understand his point even if we feel insulted by the implication that somehow same-sex sex is bad. In fact, we should run billboards featuring attractive men like James Dean with just the word GRERO. It will be more successful than selling underwear the same way. That's no joke: we have to again recognize that grero is not gay. Gay is an inflexible gender whereas the only way to explain 90% of the Roman emperors is to acknowledge the unseen but huge role culture has had in veering male sexuality away from itself.

I did not include the Catholic molestation scandal as a cheap but much-deserved diss against a hypocritical organization. But there is a connection between "homosexuality" as an alluring contagion and the attitude in Bill Donohue's insistence that the problem with the Catholic sex abuse scandal is homosexual sex and not rape. Think about it: The evil, according to these people, is not really rape, but homosexuality overall regardless of consensuality. Consensual sex is actually worse than rape because the former encourages more sex. The overarching villain (this invented "homosexuality" that's actually referring to the contagious sub-type, grero) can only spread consensually as rape is rather unpleasant. Consensual sex is worse than rape because rape victims at least will not enjoy it and therefore will not continue seeking it out. Such is the evil from rotten minds of moral crusaders that passes for morality.

This fear of an appealing same-sex erotic hook for young initiates into sins against nature takes us back centuries. A single example shall suffice. In the Genovese theocracy under nutbar John Calvin, the crime of sodomy covered child molestation of boys, sexual assaults against men by men, and consensual acts between males without any distinction between ages and consent, though those younger were generally less harshly punished, like Johnny in Boys Beware, and for the same reason.[225] Concerning the punishment of three youths convicted of "one of the most atrocious and abominable crimes," Taliban Calvin ponders about the leniency of drowning instead of burning them, but decides on meting out just public beating, or Jesus hugs:[226]

… to show them mercy it still seems that they cannot be excused from a public and exemplary physical punishment. Hiding this crime is impossible. There is a greater danger and scandal in not punishing the crime – or hiding the punishment – than in a public and exemplary punishment… Therefore [as a compromise], we suggest that the three older boys should be beaten publicly in the city's streets with a rope around their necks…. They should be threatened with the same if they re-offend. After the beating, they should be left in terror for some time, publicly chained up wherever you think best. Later they should be gaoled on bread and water and, if you think best, their relatives can guard them warning them about what will happen [if they re-offend].

Who are the real child molesters? If same-sex sex is so undesirable and so unnatural, why do such acts had to have been punished via public execution or torture? Maybe because they're so desirable and natural that you have to physically hurt people to get them to stop.

And that brings us back to "situational homosexuality." The moral totalitarians lording over us can no longer use a stick, so they prefer a more peaceful tool. Situational homosexuality is the modern tool used to steer people back to exclusive heterosexuality. It has been as effective as its predecessor. Given that we cannot burn or physically intimidate those not following the party line anymore, the lapsed heterosexual, like Dusty from MTV, gets a chance to come back to the fold. It was just temporary! I was just doing it for money! There weren't women and I forgot how to masturbate! As long this mantra is repeated, the prodigal son rebukes the heretic sexuality and is welcomed back as he shares in the communion of the fascist heterosexual orthodoxy.

As we have seen, same-sex desires have always been viewed in the Christian West as evil, but more importantly, as contagious. Anita Bryant and her Save Our Children crusade ran brochures asking, "Are Homosexuals Trying to Recruit Our Children?" To rid themselves of any accusations that they were sexually interested in the rather nebulous range of children (which could mean toddler or 17-year-old), gays made a pact with the devil. In an attempt to gain legitimacy from the "family-values" crowd (the same ones who disown their gay kids), the gays disowned their own "kids" and drew a clear line between sexable adults and off-limit on-adults, usually under 18 or somewhere near that.

What have the results been of confirming to fascist ethics? Dead gay teens, lots of them. Why are gay teens killing themselves if not because they have no one who is like them? Young gays feel the self-imposed isolation agreed to upon by their gay elders, who should know better as they themselves were young at one point. For what? To keep the Christer notion alive that 16-year-old Johnny is a sexually sterile being because sex is so yucky? Gays should stop seeking the affirmation they will never get from bigots that despise them, at the cost of dead teens.

We should not make the same myopic mistake that gays have. Grero is something I wish to have read when I was in high school instead of explaining it now. As such, the overthrow of the (im)moral standards governing sex between and with young adults is as crucial to grero as exposing the Levitical invention and the later 19th century re-invention of homosexuality. If we do not challenge these fallacies, we are guilty turning of our backs on not just our past selves but the very genesis of the problem we face now. Without the anti-masculine prohibitions instilled in youth, there would be no need for grero now as it would naturally unfold in the absence of the prohibitions.

I am not advocating sex between young adults or sex with young adults or even sex between adults. I am advocating that the decision to have sex be made by the parties involved and not a third-party like the motley group of busybodies, thieves, liars, and charlatans who fashion themselves as the State or Church. Or any of their numerous Peeping Tom agents leering into your bedroom. If teens are routinely tried as adults for crimes, they should enjoy all the rights and privileges of adulthood, not just the responsibilities. And those rights pertain not only to sex. Without the freedom of contract, teens with abusive or unsupportive parents have no recourse to escape their involuntary bondage.

We care some much about the "children" that in many states it's legal for a teacher to assault a sixteen-year-old, if the assault is called spanking.[227] Such an attack is both premeditated and coercive but any self-defense would not be excused. And yet, that same sixteen-year-old cannot legally have consensual sex with his eighteen-year-old boyfriend.[228] Molesting young adults is legal; them deciding to have sex with someone they like is not. They cannot consent to refuse hate; they cannot consent to love. The real assaulter goes free; the lover goes to prison.

So who are the real sickening child molesters? The perverts who support these laws whether they're John Calvin, his current priestly reincarnations, politicians who pass their laws, or the sadistic cops, prosecutors, judges, and juries who enforce them.

Greek Paiderastia

His sixteenth year he seemed to be both as much boy as man; both boys and girls looked to him to make love, and yet that slender figure of proud Narcissus had little feeling for either boys or girls.[229]

As discussed above, what goes on under the guise of "protecting children" is actually quite the opposite: it's about keeping in line those with more responsibility than children proper but less rights and privileges than those considered fully adults. Teens routinely get charged as adults for crimes, yet many are not eligible to drive, drink, or make contracts. So-called "adolescents"[230] get treated as adults or children based on convenience to the powers that be (society, parents, teachers). And make no mistake: it is about power: if you commit a crime as a minor but get tried as an adult, the "real" adults (society, parents, teachers) do not have to look in the mirror for their failure of poor parenting. Anything bad you do is your fault! But when the young adult wants take this principle of personal responsibility and establish his independence (sex, drinking, making a business, driving), road blocks must be erected. If society does not have someone to bully or lord over, what will these sadists do? They may have to stare into the empty abyss that is their shrunken souls.

Because the ancient Greeks conferred more rights, rather than just one-sided responsibilities, onto young adults, modern propaganda has cast them with sullied reputations as uncivilized child molesters. Greek paiderastia conjures up the image of a balding man in a trench-toga with a windowless horse cart abducting young children. They understood that sexually active teens were not children in any sense of our conflated word (minor) and specified that the proper lover should be old and wise enough:

Those who start a love affair with boys ["who are nearly grown up" and "old enough to think for themselves"] are prepared, I think, to be friends, and live together, for life. The others are deceivers, who take advantage of youthful folly and then quite cheerfully abandon their victims in search of others. There ought to be a law against loving young boys, to stop so much energy being expended on an uncertain end.[231]

Plato's reference to "young boys" is not an explicit prohibition of pedophilia but rather those sexually capable but just starting puberty. Of course, if the "proper" age for "proper" relationships is a few years after that, pedophilia is necessarily excluded from virtuous relationships. And yet, such disclaimers did not prevent the later bans on all same-sex sex (regardless of age) or associations with rape and child molesting. Why? When you cede to others the right to judge more than just the consensuality of relationships, you allow the slippery slope towards complete prohibition. If you grant the right to the state to regulate alcohol or drugs, it's not a surprise that the state may ban them altogether. But then grero faces the original problem the Greeks wanted to avoid: what about prepubescent boys? How does one hold onto to consensuality as the guiding principle and cornerstone of justice without advocating pedophilia or erring on the side of child abusers?

I'm genuinely puzzled by the suggestion that without the blanket prohibition of certain consensual acts via the age of consent, little boys will be legally diddled. When I was an actual boy, I was aware of my penis but not in a sexual way. It was not until puberty that I desired sex or had the functioning equipment. I can't imagine why children would give consent to something they are not capable of. Are there hordes of prepubescent children who want sex anyways? Could they be coerced? Sure, but that's called rape. And what about Plato's "young boys," those early into pubescence? Don't older people get "fooled"? Why should the state be matchmaker? Why do we assume all young adults are clueless idiots? Is this a confession that the eight years of state-funded education for a fourteen-year-old have been wasted because it cannot provide even the most rudimentary interpersonal skills? Or is this a confession that parents are worthless and cannot instill virtue in their children since they lack it themselves? Given that rape is rape and there is no desire on the part of prepubescent children to have sex, the age of consent is a solution to a problem that simply does not exist. It's one more control in the busybody toolbox to break the emergent independence of young adults. If those teens get used to this freedom thing, they will be hard to rein in as adults! If they can bully you into submission now, they break you into accepting other coercive situations like taxes, mandatory school, state-approved licensing, and a plethora of hidden controls.[232]

NAMBLA has not helped the matters, to say the least. The pedophiles at the North American Man/Boy Love Association make the case that consent is all that matters, ignoring the question of how sexually immature children can give consent to something they are biologically not ready for! Upon closer inspection, we see what their agenda is. Just as the current system conflates many unrelated types of same-sex sex under homosexuality, NAMBLA conflates liking seven-year-olds with seventeen-year-olds. To them, "minor" is really anyone under 18 without any distinctions. Their goal is to confuse the attraction to young adults in full bloom with attraction to children obviously incapable of sex. For example, the picture on top of their "15 Famous Men Who Had Boy Lovers" shows Oscar Wilde with Lord Alfred Douglas.[233] The picture dates from 1893 when Wilde was 39 and Douglas, 23.[234] So NAMBLA's poster "boy" is in reality a man over the American legal drinking age. Where's the boy? Are they counting in dog years perhaps? NAMBLA wants to ride the coattails of the defensible only to sneak in the indefensible. They fail at the latter; just endanger the former. They hide their true intent of kiddy diddling behind a parade of consensual relationships with young and often unambiguously fully-grown men. All in all, NAMBLA is reprehensible.

The Greeks' ideal relationship was age-disparate, the younger partner was in his teens and the older in his twenties, generally before a later marriage in his thirties, not quite a creepy old man hunting down prepubescent children. There is nothing prescriptive though about this aspect of their culture that we must imitate or for that matter avoid. If equality includes some considered in the gray zone, so be it: they (the busybodies), not reality, be damned.

The Greeks themselves did not hold fast and furious to their idealized structure. This was implicitly acknowledged by arguing whether Achilles was older or younger than Patroclus or explicitly in Plato's Phaedrus: "'Youth delights youth' as the old proverb runs – because, I suppose, friendship grows from similarity, as boys of the same age go after the same pleasures."[235] As such, the Greeks themselves were open to same-age relationships.

But why did the Greeks idealize paiderastia? Greenberg explains the role of competitiveness:

Male competitiveness poses a further culture obstacle to an egalitarian relationship. The twelfth-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus makes this point when telling of two pirates who "were so careful to preserve temperance that they are supposed never to have resorted to intoxicating liquor, afraid that continence, a great bond between courageous men, might be forcibly shattered if they over-indulged." If men are accustomed to compete with one another for status, and conceive of sex in terms of domination, then egalitarian relations must be asexual if they are to continue.[236]

But that's not really male competitiveness, is it? It's just cultural inhibitions: whereas our society limits sex to between men and women, their society preferred sex to be between men and young men perhaps to add a pedagogical justification to signify that such relationships were more than just sex. (Also, note the assumption that "courageous men" have to force themselves to not fuck each other because they are irresistible to each other.) A simpler explanation may be aesthetics: have you seen Greek men? At sixteen, they turn into werewolves. Thus lamenting a young man's first beard is then perfectly understandable:

Just now as his beard appears, Ladon, beautiful and cruel to lovers,
Himself loves a boy. Nemesis is quick indeed.[237]

Though some relationships survived this traumatic metamorphosis, proving that such relationships were in fact more than just sexual:

Although your first down, turning to hair, springs from you,
And soft blond tendrils are upon your temples,
Not therefore do I abandon my beloved. Yet his beauty
Is my own, even bearded, even with hair.[238]

There are valid concerns about institutionalized pederasty, as distinct from mere individual age-disparate relationships. Groups and culture have a way of imposing their will on others, even if the force is subtle and not outright coercive. Namely, we know of hazing in fraternities and the fagging system in British schools. Both are hierarchical, dominant-submissive paradigms with same-sex sexual overtones in which the younger members serve the older ones. Neither are worthy of emulation.

Was the Cretan mock-kidnapping anything like the (heterosexual) bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan as documented by Vice News?[239] We do know that the Greeks, even before the Stoics, placed a great deal of emphasis on sexual self-restraint. Socrates is held up as virtuous when he refused the advances of a young man, for example. The Cretan tradition could very well have been just a symbolic cover against the charge of promiscuity. The question is whether the younger man could refuse? Greek plates show young men rejecting suitors and many poems by spurned lovers imply that rejection was a reality. These are then at least a few good reasons to think that Greek paiderastia was not necessarily coercive. And even if it was as bad as Kyrgyzstan's bridge kidnapping, we have three inescapable conclusions.

First: What to make of the heterosexist hypocrisy? Greek men married, in their thirties, young teenage girls. Why is it that none of the Christers today have outrage against that Greek practice? Well, because when the ancient Greek writings resurfaced during the Victorian era, the men routinely married young girls too. Nonetheless, individualistic self-respect is the vaccine against coercive relationships of whatever combination of genitalia.

Second: We are not re-enactors. Grero is masculine likes masculine, an inherent equality between partners and people.

Third: Whatever the ultimate nature of such relationships, they still unequivocally show male-male attraction. Only in our moron culture can we ask why men are attracted to other men, especially younger men. Why not? What's unattractive about them? Culture tells young men to be ashamed of themselves. Their dicks are too small and they should spend all their time pursuing unappreciative cunts who enjoy romantic comedies, shopping at the mall, and being insufferable. Their dicks are just fine and they'd be much better off with men like themselves instead of competing with each other denigrating themselves by currying for favor with the effeminate.

Chapter 12: 100 Years of Grerrors

The theoretical development of masculine liking masculine is modern but not completely new. In the recent past, many have reached similar conclusions to grero. For this we are indebted to them while it would behoove us to learn from the reasons of their failures.

Gemeinschaft der Eigenen and Der Eigene

The prevalent view of so-called homosexuality in early 20th century Germany mirrors today's two gay dogmas: men attracted to members of their own sex constitute not just a small but also gender-shifted minority. A group calling itself the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (or GdE; translated as the Community of Self-Owners) critiqued these conventional views, echoing much of grero in their refutations. There is no group past or present that has come so close to articulating the grero point of view. They are nothing short of our ideological predecessors. We missed the Greeks and Romans by almost two millennia; we missed our German colleagues by less than a century.

Our knowledge about the thoughts of the members of the GdE (at least in the English language) comes from a single book of translated excerpts from Der Eigene, a magazine founded by Adolf Brand in 1896 and named after the seminal work of the individualist anarchist Max Stirner. Brand billed the magazine as "a journal for male culture, art, and literature" and it served to satisfy a "thirst for a revival of Greek times and Hellenic standards of beauty after centuries of Christian barbarism." Adolf Brand led a colorful life as an activist: he was the first person to out hypocritical politicians and assaulted such a member of the Reichstag with a dog whip. Despite prison sentences under both imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic, his activism was only extinguished after the Nazi takeover of Germany and subsequent banning and confiscation of Der Eigene. He and his wife died during the Allied bombing of Germany in the waning months of World War II in 1945.[240]

Whereas we have the word grero, the GdE described much the same concept using two different words:

Now to the meaning of Lieblingminne. I point out that this word is a new coinage of mine; I had to find a word that – until now – had not been dirtied in the mouths of people. I selected a double title so as to indicate by Freundesliebe (love of friends) that in this collection is much that is less consciously characteristic of Minne (chivalric love), much in which this feeling perhaps unconsciously pulses under the surface.[241]

Like us, they drew inspiration from the Greeks and Romans. They also understood that exclusive heterosexuality repressed a genuine masculinity:

When man entered into the almost exclusive service of woman and her tastes, he lost his masculinity and retained only a sham dominion. Woman has gained personal rights for herself, also legally; good, let her have them, as far as her personal strengths reach. But it is also time that man think about himself and… we need an emancipation of man for the revival of a manly culture; and it is this that I am advocating here.[242]

Of course, if a genuine masculinity included love of other men, then culture must be the culprit for the lack of same-sex desires:

Allegedly a man can only have sexual feelings for a woman, and woman for a man…. The individual person from the beginning on has feelings to a certain extent for persons of the same and of the other sex. Mostly through public prejudices one feeling is reduced to traces.[243]

Situational homosexuality (or pseudo-homosexuality) was critiqued by the scientist Benedict Friedlaender:

Recently the most productive of the medical doctors who have been writing about things sexual have wanted to separate Hellenic paederesty, sanctified by national custom, as a "pseudo-homosexuality" connected with bisexuality from "genuine" homosexuality. That this national custom was based in much higher degree of bisexuality than on pure homosexuality is correct of course, as has been said, and this was long ago emphasized by us and others. But since it is a still a matter of true love among those truly of the same sex, it is simply incomprehensible what should be "pseudo" about it. [244]

Adolf Brand understood the purpose of indoctrinating young men against same-sex attractions (via criminal statues or insinuations of effeminacy) as a way to decrease the incidence of such attractions:

All opponents of our movement are still seeking today to be guardians of the male youth and to convince them that friend-love is a vice or a crime and that intimate relations with a friend are at least unmanly, so as to keep them away from cultivating such relations.[245]

The obviousness of a sexually-ready youth being sexual was acknowledged: "… I hold the close relationship of man to man, of man to youth, and youth to youth to be a strong element of the state and of culture…"[246] And not just acknowledged but even recommended as a public duty:

All should finally know that natural and moderate sexual satisfaction of young lads and men among themselves is no sin, but rather a clever outlet of nature in the time of puberty, which is a transition to a genuine sexual intercourse and which one may rationally neither hinder nor suppress, as the insanity of the medical charlatans and the sanctimoniousness of our current Reichstag demands. One should rather give this clever self-help of nature imaginable help and consideration and carefully guard against disturbing the sacred charm of such harmless joys of life through senseless prohibitions and interferences. Indeed, one should even follow the goal of regarding the general cultivation of such intimates services of friendship as a matter of public welfare and make the close joining to a friend a self-evident duty of every young man…[247]

Moderation was not just a slogan:

What is actually to be punished then? Absolutely every intercourse of a man with a boy under fourteen years.[248]

Their hope was the after laws were overturned, public opinion would soon change, allowing a blossoming of previously suppressed same-sex attractions:

The opponents of the repeal of Paragraph 175 have also already based their standpoint on the indication that, after the repeal, the number of homosexuals would increase. They are not entirely incorrect. To be sure, the repeal in and of itself would not change the situation very much. But when "public opinion" recognizes our love as having equal rights, when an arising new culture has again established the basis of esthetic feeling… then surely thousands will reflect on themselves and also bring to development their homosexual drive, which in addition to the "normal" one was asleep in them and which our contemporary culture has suppressed and destroyed with a hundred thousand influences.[249]

Again, this change in attitude was premised on the idea of innate but suppressed sexual flexibility among most men:

The GDE stand on the point of view of a bisexual tendency of all people, which we inherited from father and mother, and which is the primary form for all varieties of love…. The GDE is convinced that only this bisexual tendency of all people and its recognition in every individual can yield the new and powerful foundation on which mutual understanding in sexual questions is still possible at all, and on which alone the fight for the equal rights of love of friends in addition to woman-love can lead to victory. [250]

And:

But a homosexual feeling is found along with the heterosexual in almost every person. [251]

Their only flaw was to not call out the that the category "homosexual" itself creates the conflation of effeminate types and those we can now describe as grero. As "homosexuality" arises out of the focus on procreation, it is irredeemably tainted and should not be used.

On November 29, 1933, Adolf Brand sent a letter to complaining of the Nazi seizure and ban of his material:[252]

Ladies and gentlemen!

As an honorary member of your society, I feel obligated to give you a detailed report on the utter futility of continuing my life's work in the new Nazi Germany.

I am assuming here that you are sufficiently informed that the Nazi party expressed strongly against all the efforts of same-sex love, long before the seizure of power in January of this year. When the elimination of Paragraph 175 was proposed in 1929, the Nazi Party threatened to hang all the homosexuals and expel all the advocates of the abolition of Paragraph 175 from Germany, as soon as Hitler came to power.

Immediately after Hitler's seizure of power earlier this year, all sorts of strict measures suppressing the homosexual movement were enacted. Originally, these persecutions were directed only against the ugly excesses of the movement. They were limited at that time to the closing of whore houses that have always harmed the whole movement in the eyes of all decent people. There were police actions in the interest of cleanliness and, in the interest of the reputation of the movement, were welcomed by us. In addition, we thought correct the confiscations of writings and books that have actually been only trash, or those tabloids that by their unscrupulous sensationalism gave the movement the worst reputation. I only remind you of the awful cheesy magazine "Men for Sale," by Frederich Radszuweit, whose totally mindless rag was just base babble on the stupidest sensibility and literary pretension of the gay populace.

The confiscations took on an essentially different character with the destruction of the writings of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Because Hirschfeld was also a Jew, his persecution was also due to anti-Semitic tendencies and prejudices, and thus homosexual Jews view him as a martyr in mold of the Middle Ages. You know that I have fought Dr. Hirschfeld also. But not because he is a Jew, but because all of his pseudo-scientific work stood against our view of the widespread bisexual predisposition of men and narrowed the homosexual inclination in men to a unique feature of the so-called urning (effeminate gay minority), a catastrophic danger to our entire Movement. His false and ridiculous Urning Theory degraded the manliest men in world history to half women.

Hirschfeld's burning bust and books on the pyre of German students was the first realization of this threat.[253] On 3 May, a week before the bonfire, three detectives from Berlin came quite unexpectedly. More than 2,000 nude studies were seized by the officers and taken to Berlin. On September 2 and 4, the second and third major confiscation took place in my publishers. The first time, it was already dark, the uniformed police took about 3,000 copies from the last year of Der Eigene and picked up the second time picked up about 3,000 copies of the Eros. In the fourth confiscation on November 15 the criminals seized my most important and valuable books. In the fifth confiscation on November 24, the police confiscated the remaining copies of Der Eigene overlooked in September.

I was completely ransacked by these five confiscations, have nothing to sell, and am now ruined financially. My entire life's work is now ruined. And most of my followers do not even have the courage to even write a letter to me, and certainly not to support my work to provide me money. The loss caused by the many confiscations and prohibitions is about 10,000 marks.

This situation shows the very simple fact that a continuation of my work and further publication of my magazine on German soil is no longer possible. Further publication of my magazine Der Eigene can only happen in foreign countries, where the consequently necessary freedom of the press and legal certainty persists.[254]

First they came for the sleazy tabloids… An attack on gays is an attack on grero, if not out of principle, then out of self-preservation.

Gore Vidal

I was about twenty-three at the time and prone to theorizing. Also, I said very vaingloriously that it is possible to make any man. I may not be the person who can do it, but someone can make him. Dr. Kinsey agreed.[255]

More than anyone else in the modern era, Gore Vidal has cut through the bullshit of the hetero-homo dichotomy. Pointing to the Romans, Vidal recognized that culture, rather than biology, dictates our sexual norms regarding same-sex attraction:[256]

Of all the tribes, significantly, the Jews alone were consistently opposed not only to homosexuality but to any acknowledgement of the male as an erotic figure (cf. II Maccabees 4:7-15). But in the great world of pre-Christian cities, it never occurred to anyone that a homosexual act was less "natural" then a heterosexual one. It was simply a matter of taste. From Archilochus to Apuleius, this acceptance of the way people actually are is implicit in what the writers wrote. Suetonius records that of his twelve emperors, eleven went with equal ease from boys to girls and back again without Suetonius ever finding anything remarkable in their "polymorphous perverse" behavior. Since these twelve men were pretty tough cookies, rigorously trained as warriors, perhaps our sexual categories and stereotypes are – can it really be? – false.

If all-but-one masculine emperors liked other men, same-sex sex is not the hallmark of the stereotyped small minority, concludes again Vidal:[257]

Decter is in full cry. Fags are really imitation of women. Decter persists in thinking that same-sexers are effeminate, swishy, girlish. It is true that a small percentage of homosexualists are indeed effeminate, just as there are effeminate heterosexualists. I don't know why this is so. No one knows why.

But we do know from a previous chapter that gay is an effeminate gender minority. Such a curious species does in fact exist. I also have not met any significant number of effeminate men who style themselves as heterosexual. There may be an odd exception here and there, but nothing like the proportion of effeminate gay men in a gay bar. Vidal's conflation of feminine and masculine "homosexualists" is mooted though by his rejection of the label homosexual:[258]

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. These sexual acts are entirely natural; if they were not, no one would perform them… I have often thought that reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist… [Gay is] just a bad word. You see, I don't think you need a word for it. This is what you have to evolve. These words have go to wither away in a true Hegelian cycle.[259]

But his formulation that there are no homosexuals, only homosexual acts does not go far enough. A more precise variation: there are no homosexuals, no homosexual acts, and no homosexuality, per the conflation through procreation discussed previously. However, ridding ourselves entirely of a bad label does not obligate us to be rid of all labels, notwithstanding Vidal's skepticism about them. In fact, we know that the gays, despite Vidal's advice, have continued to assert their separateness by using their label with much pride. And while I am very happy, or shall I say gay, to see them flourish, their rise on the national stage and subsequent subsumation of the entire "homosexual" category has been disastrous for masculine men who like other men, just like in Adolf Brand's time. There is a correlation between the rise of the effeminate gay minority and the decrease of masculine men having sex with others like them: the more visible the effeminate gays became, the less likely masculine men would "mess around" with each other lest they be thought of as effeminate queens: "Between World War I and World War II, straight guys could have sex with other guys and still be perceived as straight as long as they acted masculine. Whether you were considered a 'fairy' or a 'queer' back then wasn't based on sexual acts so much as outward behavior."[260]

Gore Vidal's near-miss fly-by is even more maddening since he himself provides evidence that effeminate gay men's prominence has restricted the number of masculine men wishing to associate with same-sex sex:[261]

I have noticed a very interesting change in my own lifetime. And that has been the fact that the quality of trade has fallen off. When I was young there was a floating population of hetero males who wanted money or kicks or what have you and would sell their ass for a period of their lives. Later they would marry and end up as construction workers or firemen or in the police department. And that was that. Their phase was over. But these were really all-American types, masculine in the old sense. There has emerged a new physical type who seem feminine to me, and I use the term in its old sexist sense. Very schmoo, soft shoulders, flat muscles, broad hips, high voices.

Another author, Pierre J. Tremblay, recounts that during his adolescence he witnessed and participated in more same-sex acts than would be the norm in later decades:[262]

In 1960, I was 10-years-old and growing up in a working class environment where male homosexual activity was the rule, not the exception. Its predominant manifestation was "sex with equality," thus including mutual masturbation and oral sex, but not anal sex. The latter was not even thought about, except for eventually learning that passive anal sex was an activity engaged in by apparently degraded males who thought themselves to be like women, or were labeled as such because they were accepting the status of being anally penetrated. As for ourselves living in a world where effeminate males did not exist, our sexual activities with other males generally reflected our social relationships: most sex with one's best friend, and lesser sex with lesser friends. We also had girlfriends and knew what was to be done sexually with them as it was so well understood via having learned the word "fuck" and its clear meaning. This explains why even the thought of "fucking" one's best friend was precluded: the activity or related desires was in violation of our equality based male bonding friendships. Sexual activity was also only a small part of our daily activities, and it was not an everyday activity although, at times, it was enjoyed more than once a day.

So Gore Vidal was complaining about the lack of masculine prostitutes in 1974, but as late as 1960 we still had first-hand[263] experience of the predominance of same-sex sexuality among typical, non-gay youth. What happened in the intervening few years? The effeminate gays became visible. The Stonewall Riots were in 1969, the first time gays massively revolted against state-enforced discrimination against them. While the late sixties provided an increasing number of gays on TV, the dams burst after Stonewall. While there were a dozen gay-themed TV shows in the five years before Stonewall, there were almost three times as many in the five years after.[264]

Before gay prominence on television, "homosexuality" was just an amorphous evil but without the effeminacy stigma. It was strongly discouraged, if talked about at all, but just like drinking or smoking, boys will be boys. This also explains why Kinsey's same-sex numbers from the 1940's reached well into the double digits while today barely 5% of the male population admits to same-sex sex. Kinsey was not cooking the books: the repressive 1940's were actually more free because there was less open talk of the evil monster and no association with effeminacy. Same-sex sex was such a taboo, it wasn't. All that changed when the out-and-proud gays showed up with their feather boas and assless chaps. Tremblay on his later experiences with the gay community, around the same time Gore Vidal noticed an uptick in effeminate prostitutes:

When I ventured in gay communities in 1978, a major new experience involved the learning about so-called "gay-identified" males, many still being teenagers, and they often were gender nonconformable. As a rule, they had also grown up thinking themselves to be the only ones with homo-sex desires in their neighborhoods, their school, or even in their town or city. Their feelings of isolation had been extreme, resulting in their belief that male homosexuality was exceptionally rare, and many had grown up perceiving themselves to be "freaks."

And the culture through the media gladly played along to this gay cluelessness as a way of discouraging same-sex behavior among the masculine. Of course, there is nothing wrong with feather boas or assless chaps, but it's still improper to compliment ladies on their moustaches. What about those of us are not into that stuff? How can we be part of a group that is both effeminate and claims minority status when we are masculine and numbered 90% in better days? Without labels, we have disappeared even more than before. Hence the need for a label. Gays have theirs, we want ours. Grero allows masculine love without shame. As the Greeks said, "Open love is better than secret love…"[265]

But without a word to describe a concept that is mutually understandable, that open love cannot exist. The love that dare not even know its own name is one that remains inexpressible. We are animals barking at our own reflections at a longing that cannot be realized, at innate desires that quietly bubble and sometimes explode. This is what makes homophobes want to hurt gay men. Even if we realize what we are, we are mutes in a land where no one speaks our language anyways. Without a name, we are ghosts rematerializing only temporarily as the punching bags for moral panics.

However, Gore Vidal's greatest error was not his failure to recognize gays as effeminate and separate nor his rejection of necessary labels. Gore Vidal was a fatalist. What does his novel The City and the Pillar refer to? The story of Lot and his wife fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah. The wife looks back with fondness and turns into a pillar of salt. Don't look back on the past, move on. Gore Vidal realized at a young age that he would never find a love like Jimmie Trimble. But why not? Are a "thousand brief anonymous adhesions" any better? Nostalgia is counterproductive, but without grero as a theory, proto-grero feelings rear their heads only temporarily in the few crevices: a quick relationship behind everyone's back or a thousand anonymous blowjobs. In the novel, why does Bob reject Jim's advances? Culture. The culture that destroyed an open sexual ethic can itself be destroyed but not without the grero label or grero theory. Culture may only be destroyed by a solid theory which necessitates labels.

Postscript: Gore Vidal is dead. Virtually every obit mentioned him as a gay author. [266] And yet, "I have never allowed actively in my life the word 'gay' to pass my lips. I don't know why I hate that word… It is not definitive of character. And that was the movement of the Post-Stonewall folks. This was a new race that had been dropped down by heaven to make the world a better place. Pure nonsense."[267] So much for that. An online gossip rag makes the wild claim that The City and the Pillar featured "overtly gay characters." The New York Times misunderstood it as a "coming-out story." No! Gore Vidal's whole point was that Bob and Jim were "two 'normal' all-American boys of the sort that I had spent three years with in the wartime army would challenge every superstition about sex in my native land."[268] They were explicitly not gay, but two young men who escaped the gravitational pull of the passively acquired cultural trait called heteronormativity.[269] Too bad the difference is lost in today's homosexual conflation. By not formulating a label and theory, Gore Vidal shows us that if you don't have a name, people will make one up for you, even one that you have actively rejected for decades. But Vidal probably did not care, thinking himself as a Roman emperor without need for labels: "What do you think Julius Caesar would have done if you had asked him his sexual preference? He'd send you to have your head chopped off."[270]

Androphilia[271]

Before my foray into the gay world, my understanding of the gay was based solely on effeminate types I saw in the media. So how could it be universally true if I had not met many gays? "It's just stereotypes," I wanted to believe. Desperate to find others like me, I put aside my skepticism and plunged into the gay world. After a relationship left me thinking about why the gay world had none others like me, I found the book Androphilia. With the subtitle "rejecting the gay identity, reclaiming masculinity" and a pair of Spartan helmets on the cover, I had high hopes. Maybe there were others like me after all.

The author Jack Malebranche[272] promises a manifesto for "men who love men but who are sick to death of the gay community."[273] Androphilia is an attempt to "reclaim this rich male heritage for men who love men. It dismisses those who want to confine homosexual males to a clichéd effeminate stereotype" and suggests "a different way to perceive a homosexual desire and encourages homosexual and bisexual men to thrive unhindered by the limitations of the gay identity."[274] Furthermore:

Gay stands for the notion that sexuality engenders ethnicity and complete social identity. I have virtually nothing in common with most members of the gay community that includes lesbians, queens, transsexuals of all religions, nationalities, and races. They are not my family. They are not my people. Why should I identify more closely with a lesbian folk singer than with other men my age who share my interests? I strongly identify as a man. I value masculine qualities in myself and in the men around me. In my adult life, I've found that I am most comfortable among other men, regardless of their sexual proclivities.[275]

Gay culture embraces and promotes effeminacy. The phrase 'gay man' implies effeminacy. As a deterrent, opponents of homosexuality have attributed a stigma of innate femininity to all men who engage in sex acts with other men.[276]

All is good so far. However, trouble in paradise:

The insistence by essentialist gay advocates that homosexuality is absolutely innate and inflexible, combined with their celebration of effeminacy, has actually fostered the perception of a mutually exclusive relationships between masculinity and same-sex desire… The idea that homosexuality is "not a choice," that homosexuals are absolutely "born that way," seems always to have been more a matter of faith, and of political convenience, than of honest or objective analysis. [277]

Yes, gay men are wrong to associate all of same-sex with only their kind and effeminacy. But the problem is the conflation of homosexuality through procreation, i.e. the concept of homosexuality itself. But gay men are in fact born that way as shown by the ample material on the gay gender which needs no repetition here. Instead, Jack ignores the science as inconclusive and continues to assert that gays were made that way by their own gay culture, usually prefaced with dismissive harangues about discrimination that a more masculine Jack certainly never had to face:

You'd never know it from listening to many gays, but most homos today actually aren't harassed, beaten or arrested due to their sexuality, and they face minimal, if any, discrimination… Nevertheless, The Gay Party tells us that we homosexuals must band together to fight against high-school bullies, and to encourage kids to "come out" and ghettoize themselves into little gay support groups where they can become conversant in Party dogma and avoid every having to learn to deal effectively with their straight peers.

Homosexual males are males who have been robbed of a masculine ideal. Most are lost boys without a sense of what it means to be men – Peter Pans who never become men and leave the never-neverland of The Gay Party life. Homosexual males don't become men because they're never expected to, because they don't recognize themselves as "real" men; they regard straight men as MEN and regard themselves as something else. Because they've been stigmatized as being effeminate, they play at being womanlike; but they're simply not female. [278]

With exhortations to "Abandon Affected Gay Behaviors," "Surround Yourself with Men," and "Explore Male Culture," the confused reader may think he's perusing a pamphlet from an ex-gay ministry, except Preacher Jack accepts same-sex sex as long as both guys like to go fishing every once in a while.[279] Picking on gay men and attracting self-hating effeminate men feigning masculinity to your movement do not sound like good ideas.

Jack thinks that because he was part of gay culture (drag, go-go dancer, other hijinks) for a short while that for all others it must be a phase too. All the disadvantages of having a girlfriend with all the societally mandated disadvantages of having a boyfriend! Such a façade crumbles quickly though as neither Jack nor I bought it for much time, if any at all. [280] I doubt that either of us had to make a concerted effort to pull away from a culture that we felt was not us. But what about biological men for whom prancing about and faggotry do feel natural? Jack's empathy levels don't permit that thought:

Ice skating is a good sport for women. It's pretty and feminine. Only the male skating is offensive. If I wanted to see some f—ing queen in spandex gyrate like a f—ing whore I would go to a f—ing gay bar.

That's what I get from most men. It's embarrassing to watch because the skater is embarrassing himself. It's uncomfortable to watch a man dishonor himself. [281]

While I agree that "Masculinity is not 'whatever you believe it to be'" and that gay men have a mistaken view of masculinity, their nature is not masculine. Whereas grero seeks to be descriptive and describe men and gay men without the cultural noise, androphilia is decidedly prescriptive and bossy towards gay men. Grero says how things would be; androphilia says how things should be. Even from these few quotes, Jack's criticism of gay culture borders on bullying, especially when compared with straight men who receive the kid gloves treatment in an essay titled, "Why I Treat Straight Men Like Married Women":

While straight men would rather not discuss it because they don't want to be perceived as latent homosexuals, they do regularly admire one another's bodies at the gym or at sporting events. Straight men are not blind; those who are secure in their sexuality can and do appreciate a good-looking fella. I've even had private, frank discussions with straight men who spoke rather reverently about other men's cocks. I don't mean to suggest that this admiration is always sexual; it usually isn't. But admiring masculinity is other males is part of being male.[282]

Sure, some straight men are more "available" than others. Some would fumble around with another guy given the right situation and a few adult beverages. Some would go there for the right amount of money and the condition of relative anonymity, or under extremely extraordinary circumstances. Some guys would really not cross that line if they were totally plastered, offered a million dollars, and someone had a gun to their head. Given those choices, most heterosexual men will insist they are in the last category.

None of that matters. [283]

None of it! After spotting holes in the dam of heterosexuality, Jack investigates not even a little to gauge male sexual flexibility but instinctually stifles all debate on the matter. And what a double standard: whereas he argues in the beginning of the book that gay men merely prefer sex with men but could have sex with women because sex is sex after all, does he ever inform straight men that they'd choose cock over abstinence?[284] Nope! Straight men and their belief that they are free from the taint of homoeroticism, even when admiring other cocks, must be respected. We have to tiptoe around such emotionally fragile princesses so hitting on them is as wrong as adultery.[285] What if they like it and then have to ponder the implications? Oh, the horror: I'm a fag like everyone else!

Jack's definition of gay as a "whole cultural and political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics"[286] shows more of this dominant bully/submissive slave mentality. The gay men I've talked to are generally apolitical in anything but support for their right to be treated equally. Gay men for gay rights, shocking. I don't agree with the two-party system (or even any party system – though that'd be another book) but American gay men's rejection of the Republican Party (rather than a positive embracement of any particular ideology) is rather obvious: why support the people who explicitly hate them? Jack himself is a sort of unaffiliated right-winger who has written for AlternativeRight.com, "an online magazine of radical traditionalism" and the "new, independent intellectual Right," whatever any of that that means. That same magazine published an article by Richard Spencer arguing that so-called homosexuality is in fact an in-born trait but undesirable trait, meriting perhaps correction in the womb:

The Ethno-State, as envisioned by figures as various as Guillaume Faye and Wilmot Robertson, would not merely be an egalitarian state that happens to govern a White population (like Finland or the state of Maine)[287]; it would be "eugenic" in the sense of seeking greater human flourishing of the European people (as opposed to the actively dysgenic policies of the contemporary West, which seek to subsidize and import the dysfunctional, ugly, and unintelligent.)

A potential Ethno-State would view homosexuality as an unfortunate malady, for society as well as the homosexuals themselves. Simply "letting be" would be an option. But rational, preventative steps might also be taken to ensure that fetuses undergo normal, properly gendered brain formation, all of which is entirely possible with existing technology in prenatal testing.[288]

It would not be fair to connect Jack with another author just because both have written for the same publication; I don't believe in crime by irrelevant association. However, Jack accepted a review from Spencer for his new book, The Way of Men, so the link is deeper.[289] Where is Jack's rage against Spencer's disrespectful characterization of his love for other men as an "unfortunate malady… a birth defect, caused by a random abnormality in the womb"? With dozens of pages of analysis of what's wrong with gay culture (some of it spot on), where is the outrage against a man calling you an aberration who should have been fixed? Oh right, your straight betters can disrespect you and you must take it like a man (which in this case is a euphemism for a chump). This sort of pusillanimous masculinity is for men who want to be enslaved. And if that's the goal, why not go the traditional route via marriage?

So again, straight men are not to be disrespected by facts like their minority in Rome or Greece. Or evidence confirming that most homophobes like Spencer harbor same-sex desires. Self-proclaimed straight men have a right to be unencumbered by evidence of their non-existence. Fags have the right, nay duty, to shut their mouths and rid themselves of their feminine airs. After all, could straight men's weak hearts handle the news that they don't really exist? That would make the darlings uncomfortable. Token Homosexuals kept for the purpose of "… but I have a gay friend" should keep quiet lest their house faggot privileges be revoked.

Oftentimes, this androphile masculinity feels as superficial as junior putting on Daddy's suit and tie. (Better though than wearing Mommy's dress, I suppose.) With platitudes like self-reliance, achievement, personal responsibility, honor, respect, integrity, and independence littering the pages of the "Masculine Ideal" chapter,[290] I'm left wondering whether Jack wants to invent a new fake holiday like Kwanzaa. What about guys who just want to throw a ball around and maybe mess around in the showers afterwards[291] instead of lighting a candle for each virtue in Jack's candelabra? And do women not have these values? Do women strive to be disrespectful and dishonorable? Hint: it's not a distinctive masculine trait if the other sex shares it with men.

I tried to talk to Jack on his Androphilia Facebook page.[292] When he linked to a rather nasty article about Chaz Bono's sex reassignment surgery,[293] instead of pointing out the unnecessary rudeness, I tried to focus on the facts and find common ground on the innateness of masculinity:

ANDKON: Not sure why you're so down on the transgendered. Aren't they the ultimate proof that gender is innate and not culturally made up as most feminists would argue?

JACK: Nope. Feminists push transgender theory (isn't "Chaz" really just a lesbian feminist?) because it makes gender little more than a costume, which makes it harmless and inconsequential, which is exactly how they like it. Some of the key people involved in "redefining masculinity" are transgendered, specifically one Raewyn "Bob" Connell, author of the widely references gender studies text "Masculinities."

ANDKON: What I've read on the topic suggests that these people have had feelings of being the opposite of their biological sex they could remember. I don't see how it could be spun around to anything other than innate gender, regardless of who's doing the spinning. Surgeries and hormones seem more than a costume. Serious stuff.

JACK: Sex/gender (who writes the definitions, the transgendered like Connell or the general population?) is more than a "feeling," it's a reality and an experience. "Chaz" will never really know what it is or what it means to be a man, all she can do is have a feeling or an affinity for her idea of what being a man is, as a female.

Let's not confuse the words of children, or the memories of mentally ill people (memory is acknowledged to be easily manipulated and notoriously unreliable even among the sanest people) as "science" or some kind of Biblical truth.

Surgeries and hormones, in the world of Chaz Bono, are exactly a costume. Please, we're talking about someone who grew up in Hollywood. Plastic surgery is just a thing people do to make themselves look "better," and this falls in that category.

Jesus, Chaz's mother is probably still way ahead in terms of plastic surgery and prescription medication.

ANDKON: Given that all our feelings and experiences are brain states, why can't gender in the brain exist separately from biological sex, with an obvious overlap in almost all cases?

There's plenty of good evidence from intersex people that normal development gets interrupted by perhaps untimely hormones altering the set plan. Why can't this happen not to genitals but to the brain, especially when thousands personally complain about this phenomenon?

The whole "they're just confused" sounds too much like the ex-gay stuff.

JACK: I don't really care what it "sounds like." My goal in life is not worrying about not sounding like people that gay people have decided they officially disagree with.

Gay people and trans people always want this cut and dry biological magic bullet that renders them sane, albeit magically handicapped.

That may or may not be true in extreme circumstances, but I think for a lot of people, psychology is far more complex and messy than people would like it to be, and the answer that gets you off the hook and absolves you of responsibility for your own actions and choices is not necessarily the truth.

The other thing is that, while it is popular to do so, I find it backwards to assume that common sense is wrong and restructure society based on completely unsettled science and hypotheses of convenience. The "let's change our basic understanding of human nature and human sexuality so that no one ever feels bad" mentality is nutty at best.

ANDKON: "Gay people and trans people always want this cut and dry biological magic bullet"... that's not quite true. David Halperin is gay yet he doesn't believe in the biological explanation at all.

"My goal in life is not worrying about not sounding like people that gay people have decided they officially disagree with." It seems though that your goal is to be a contrarian and to disagree with *anything* that may be a gay or gay-associated position. Take the intersex comment. You ignored it.

Do you doubt that hormones or DNA errors can influence the external genitalia? Do you want to see the pictures? There's dozens of intersex conditions.

So based on what we can obviously see from the intersexed, why is your position that the "internal" brain mapping cannot be reversed or mixed for a very small number of people, like it can be for external genitalia?

And with that I was unceremoniously blocked. The conversation sums up the Jack Experience quite well: as with straight men and their flexibility, none of that matters, screw the evidence, screw the questions. And there was that lack of empathy again. If Chaz will never know what it's like to have been born a "real" man, how does Jack know what it's like to be Chaz, born biologically female but who has insisted that she is no more and should have been a he to begin with? Why do Jack's personal feelings about others override their own personal feelings about themselves, especially when the others' personal testimony supports the science?

The major flaw of Androphilia is a lack of self-awareness. The criticism of culture is absent and self-harming masculinity promoted. Jack interviewed a musician who gave an autobiographical sketch:

As a boy growing up in a working class area of Chicago, there was little tolerance for the weak and fearful. The pecking order was fierce. My friends and I spent most of our time playing games like ringolevio, which was a violent game of tag, essentially. No bars hold. One could punch, kick, and wrestle down, or by whatever means to capture an opponent. The chase went on over roof tops, jumping from one roof top to another, two or three stories high. That was just one of the violent games we played. We spent lots of time flipping freight trains, bare-fisted boxing matches and gang warfare. Such endeavors build up courage and confidence and toughness. I don't think many feminists would have survived playing with us. So, we all knew the difference between a girl and a boy. It was axiomatic. Our goal was always adventure to break the boredom. We raised a lot of hell as they say. But that is what a normal teenager should do, short of serious crime. If young men don't get that out of their system, it may arise later in life and be of a very unsavory nature.[294]

Or rather, if young men get that into their system... This is just rationalizing child abuse, your own abuse. Pecking order? This is just kowtowing to unjustified hierarchy. What's masculine about cowering? This is the fundamental problem with many men: they excuse their abuse at the hands of their parents, siblings, teachers, and peers under the guise of masculine toughness. If science is to be believed, masculinity is systemized thinking.[295] Your nerdy Silicon Valley entrepreneur fits that better than neglected ragamuffins beating the shit out of each other because no one loves them. This perverse inoculation (the beatings made me tougher!) is not earning one's masculine stripes, but defensive scar tissue over childhood trauma.[296] I'm reminded of an exchange between Stalin and his mother:

'Why did you beat me so hard?'
'That's why you turned out so well.'[297]

Later in life with his paranoia in full bloom, Stalin gave the following orders to extract confessions from his own doctors: "beat, beat, and beat again."[298] A very unsavory nature may arise, indeed. The interviewee subscribes to Ásatrú which is an "Ancestoral religion."[299] The links below the short introduction are to ancestry websites where you can "Find your family tree" or "Start your FREE family tree." Why are (immediate) ancestors (called parents) who allowed their sons to beat others worthy of worship? Presumably for the same reason that Stalin externalized his childhood trauma onto others but treated his own mother well and even wrote favorably of his old Siberian prison guard.[300]

Jack does not comment about flipping freight trains and the other signs of obvious abuse of his interviewee. Quite the opposite, the interviewer bemoans the softness of culture as the price of civilization and physical security. First, there is nothing wrong per se with "softness." That we don't wipe our asses with cactus any more is not a problem. Second, the abuse that is parental neglect through video games is not cured by the abuse that is parental neglect that results in vandalism and brute violence.

In Androphilia, Jack downplays "only routine harassment" he's experienced by dismissing it as "the kind that any kid who is different experiences in high school" while he lashes out against gays who manufacture "the illusion of oppression and victimization."[301] Downplay and internalize the bad as not a big deal, then externalize the poison onto others by demanding their silence. If others shut up about their pain, I won't be reminded about mine! Stiff upper lip, chaps! He assures us though that he has a "truly fulfilling relationship with my immediate family."[302]

This macho bullshit masculinity is about keeping abusers in power and above criticism. If you reveal the abuse, you're a pussy! There's little tolerance for weakness! Well, guess what? Not only are women told that staying quiet about abuse is ladylike but the lack of grero is the product of abuse: threats of death, threats of Hell, threats of prison, threats of abandonment of parental love.

Man2Man Alliance

The Man2Man Alliance is a coalition of men who practice frot (phallus-against-phallus) sex who reject anal penetration, promiscuity, and effeminacy among men who have sex with men and who put forth the truth that one man should love another through the celebration of their mutual masculinity and the exaltation of their mutual manhood.[303]

The Beatific story about Luke and Stephen comes from the Man2Man Alliance (M2M). I remember reading it in high school; it was one of the few pieces of evidence that there were others like me, at least until reading Gore Vidal and Androphilia. However, the overall M2M material leaves much to be desired. The above quoted self-description of the M2M is incoherent. Not helping much is its presentation in red 100-point font, accompanied by gratuitous amount of nude men on every page. Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with lots of nude men. But was I supposed to show this website to anyone? "Hey Mom, good news! I'm not looking to get anally penetrated, I just want to rub cocks with half the guys at school. Some man on the Internet tells me it's okay." And am I really expected to call myself a "Cockrub Warrior"? I understand the need to be frank and grero has in no way shied away from that, but the marketing department needs go back to the drawing board. This idolatry of a specific sex act (no matter how wonderful) goes well beyond even the gay identity's fixation on sex.

While neither huge headings nor bizarre, idiosyncratic syntax were helpful, the M2M theory offers not much beyond the many short declarative sentences that dot the material as such:

…we don't encourage Men to identify as "gay" -- or as "straight."

But we do encourage men to be open and honest about their affectional and sexual interest in other Men.

To not do that is to encourage two lies:

1. The heterosexist lie that "real" men aren't attracted to "real" men.

2. The analist lie that only "gay" males are attracted to other males; and that all of those males -- do anal.

 And are promiscuous and effeminate.

Both heterosexism and analism are lies.

Both are by-products of heterosexualization;

And both are lies.[304]

If we squint, we can see grero ideas in all these fleeting thoughts. The heterosexism and analism resemble roughly two central ideas discussed thus far: role of culture and gay effeminacy. Heterosexism corresponds to the grero idea that culture is:

A societal tyranny, and a product of the forces of heterosexualization, which confuses "heterosexuality" with masculinity, and teaches that "real men" don't have sex with other men.

[Heterosexualization is the] process by which a false masculinity is imposed upon masculine-identified men, a pseudo-masculinity which forces them into the denial of their same-sex feelings and an exclusively "heterosexual" expression of sexuality.

Heterosexualization is most widespread in the industrialized and post-industrialized West -- the US, UK, EU, Canada and Australia; and is accomplished through the destruction of all-male spaces; the forced mixing of the sexes, particularly in adolescence; and the identifying of masculinity with exclusive "heterosexuality."

In reality, it is both normal and natural for masculine-identified men to have sex with other masculine-identified men.[305]

Unfortunately, the idea is not fleshed out orderly or in great detail. On the other hand, the author confuses many different concepts about effeminate gay men under "analism:"

Gay-identified men today live under a dominant culture of anal penetration.

That culture is defined by three behaviors:

1. Anal penetration: Anal penetration is regarded as the necessary and culminating act of any sexual encounter and the highest sexual expression of love, lust, and intimacy between men. Men who do not participate in anal penetration are considered psychologically and sexually immature, and are otherwise belittled while their sexual choices are denigrated.

2. Promiscuity: Promiscuity, called by its academic proponents "multipartnering" and/or "polypartnering," is also a core value of the culture. Men who aren't promiscuous are chided for missing out on life's principal pleasure, while those who don't participate in sexual experimentation are viewed as timid and their sexual tastes characterized as "vanilla."

3. Effeminacy: While on the surface the culture would appear to be at best ambivalent about this behavior, in reality effeminacy is supported and rewarded. That's because the prevailing ideology within the culture views all human beings as being intergendered, and encourages men to "get in touch with their feminine side." [306]

As with Androphilia, M2M treats gay effeminacy both as negative and a choice. One can easily see where the anger against anal sex comes from: the author of M2M, Bill Weintraub, lost his lover to AIDS.[307] But personal biases should not detract from presentability or coherence. As M2M did not fully dissect culture, it's a broken knife stabbing wildly in the dark at the wrong enemy.

G0ys.org

For MEN who love Masculinity, but don't identify with the term "Gay"![308]

G0ys are masculine men who like other masculine men, but are not gay (hence the zero instead of the A). The identification of gay with effeminate is correct but the anti-label screams of "doth protest too much." A proper identity cannot arise around not being something. As with Androphilia and M2M Alliance, the anti-gay stance comes across as Sisyphean bullying, seeking to cure the incurable, paradoxically attracting self-hating gays who tone down their own effeminacy. Some good points are to be found for sure but apart from Kinsey's old numbers, the material is light on facts, evidence, and theory.

Chapter 13: Selected Musings

Bisexuality

I think I've always been bisexual. I mean, it's something that I've always been interested in. I think everybody kind of fantasizes about the same sex. I think people are born bisexual, and it's just that our parents and society kind of veer us off into this feeling of Oh, I can't. They say it's taboo. It's ingrained in our heads that it's bad, when it's not bad at all. It's a very beautiful thing.[309]

I like the pole and the hole.[310]

Grero is not "masculine only likes masculine" but rather "masculine likes masculine." In the Greco-Roman past, most men liked men and women. Grero (the book, this!) does not focus on the women part because that's taken for granted. I would expect the vast majority of greros to like women. As such, why not just say that most men are bisexual? The central problem with the label bisexuality (as within the hetero-homo framework) is that it legitimizes the very false framework that bisexuality the reality (sexual flexibility that is grero[311]) destroys. Let's see what that means.

Many bisexuals say that unlike alleged monosexuals, they are attracted to people not genitals. Bisexuality is then not a preference for both sexes but an attraction regardless of sex. This may seem like semantics but it's very important. It's not "I like men and I like women" (contrary to the funny opening quote) but rather "the genitals of the person does not matter." Bisexuals may have a measurable preference for certain qualities that may be found more in one sex over another, but the preference is not for biological sex nonetheless.

The Kinsey scale places bisexuals in the middle of the conventional penis-to-vagina preference scale. But why? If bisexuals are attracted to people, not genitalia, shouldn't bisexuality be outside the framework? The variable that's measured is the variable explicitly rejected by bisexuals! Suppose if I said that I don't care whether I eat chocolate or vanilla ice cream. Why should I be placed in the middle of the chocolate-vanilla divide? My lack of preference for either indicates that I don't have a preference period. The all-subsuming hetero-homo system does not allow lacking the preference for the variable (penis-vagina or chocolate-vanilla) or preference for other, if related, variables. The Kinsey scale (and therefore the hetero-homo system) can't graph the nonchalance of nonpreference for the variable genitalia. It also cannot graph the dislike of heteronormative ideals (prom, dating, marriage). Where do I fit on the Kinsey scale if I don't want to date women not because I'm not sexually attracted to them but because I don't want to hold in my farts during the romantic comedy I didn't want to watch in the first place, Meredith?

The Kinsey scale cannot graph other nuances either. Suppose the following six men:

  1. A male who strongly prefers masculine over feminine who does not prefer gay men for the same reason he does not prefer women. As the preference is for gender, a sex-based system cannot graph this. If the masculine-to-feminine ratio is 9:1, this person would be ranked with the gays despite not being one of them and not preferring them.
  2. A transgendered male who was born a woman but has always felt like he should have been born a man. Sex is sex, he says.
  3. A male who has only had sex with women but has fantasized about men. The guy might be entirely "homosexual" as his homophobic environment does not allow for same-sex outlets. Or entirely straight via George Duroy's cop out that his "straight" performers have sex with men because they are just overly horny/heterosexual whereby having sex with men is an attribute of a supercharged heterosexuality.
  4. A male who has had sex with 10 masculine men and 90 women. Does he rate at Kinsey 1? By percentage, sure. So is he almost exclusively heterosexual? As much as anyone with ten cocks in his mouth can be heterosexual.
  5. A male who has sex with 4 men and 1 woman. Is he more bisexual than #4 above? By percentage, yes. And yet, he still needs six cocks up his ass to catch up. And do we measure by sex acts or total partners?
  6. A male who has had sex with 10 masculine and 10 feminine. 50-50, so he's as bisexual as it gets, right? What if half the feminine are gay men? But why should genitalia take precedence over gender? In the Kinsey scale, this man may be a 4 or 5, but in reality there may be no active preference expressed whatsoever.

 

The great thing about grero is that it includes all of them. If you are masculine and you are attracted to masculine, in whatever proportion or manner, then you're grero. The point is that all of these men could be graphed on the Kinsey scale and assigned a number from 0 to 6. But who gets to decide that genitalia is the all-important variable especially when some explicitly reject this often-unspoken bias? [312] Why don't we measure the Kinsey scale according to race? We certainly could graph that: most are racially homosexual since most couples are of the same general race or ethnicity. Or other variables like preferred body parts or hair color.

Bisexuality (or pansexuality) has not made much of an impact because it is a claim on oneself ("I am bisexual") whereas grero is a claim on culture or others ("You are grero"). Bisexuality itself does not question the framework in which it exists.

Lawrence v. Texas

But a lot of this bigotry is the past, so I hear. Despite the anti-grero propaganda inherent in today's allegedly civilized Western world, we are told to rejoice because those evil laws are in the past. Consensual relationships are legal now. After all, it was in the far-off year of 2003 that the Supreme Court affirmed the right to privacy in sexual matters if conducted in a private home, just two years after the United States removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan who treated their subjects so poorly. Never mind that both the sitting president and the governor from whose state the Lawrence vs. Texas case hailed opposed the ruling. Never mind that politicians like Rick Santorum continued to rail against it for the next decade, suggesting that states should be allowed to criminalize sex between adults.[313]

Never mind that the same year, Republicans started a campaign to ban same-sex marriage for electoral gain in the 2004 election. And never mind that to this day, certain jurisdictions refuse to obey the 2003 Supreme Court ruling:[314]

Nearly a decade after Lawrence, many states have continued to enforce laws prohibiting private, consensual sex between same-sex adults.

In Michigan, the practice of charging and convicting gay men under the state's "Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature" or "Gross Indecency" laws still exists, with violators facing the risk of having to register as sex offenders and prison sentences of up to 15 years. According to Rudy Serra, attorney and Chairman of the Executive Clemency Council for the State of Michigan, police officers continue to aggressively prosecute LGBT people without legal challenge…

Specifically, Rudy Serra writes that:[315]

LGBT people in Michigan continue to be charged with crimes for public speech, in which they let another person know they are interested in private, unpaid sex with another adult. Bag-A-Fag (undercover decoy cop) operations, where police officers pretend to be gay men cruising for unpaid, consensual sex continue in Michigan. LGBT people are still at risk of spending 15 years in state prison for acts that are perfectly legal in most other states.

So the act of asking someone out can be a criminal act in Michigan, all paid by your tax dollars to give useless guttersnipes jobs arresting people for inquiring others about consensual acts. But hey, that's the point of the whole of War on Drugs sham, so why should the War on Fags be any different?

Jurisdictions with even more lead in the water treat their faggots even worse:[316]

In 2008, Nelson Sloan and Ryan Flynn were arrested by the Raleigh Police Department under North Carolina's "crime against nature" statue for engaging in private, consensual, homosexual sex. The charge is considered a Class I felony in the state and carried a punishment of up to two years in prison. "I have never been so humiliated in all my life," Sloan said. "It's just awful."

The Raleigh police Captain at the time, T.D. Hardy, explained that, even though the state's law against sodomy had been struck down by Lawrence, his department's actions were still valid: "The law is still on the books. …What the D.A.'s office will do with it, I don't know."

You see, the state laws are still on the books against certain sex acts so the SS has to jail the victims. If they don't, they may be expelled from the Klan. And like good little Nazis, they're just following orders. Mind you, not the Supreme Court's orders but Grand Wizard Hardy's. Then, the prosecutor, possibly the only person in the state with a double digit IQ, remembers from his middle school civics class that Supreme Court rulings supersede bigoted laws inspired by a dead Jew. Problem solved, only a few nights spent in jail! I would call them primitive, but most primitive cultures were okay with same-sex acts. So I'll just call them Christers.

But Texas still takes home the gold in the joint Moron-Bigot Olympics. Concerning the host city:[317]

El Paso police cited the "homosexual conduct" wording when the two men were kicked out of a Chico's Tacos restaurant. The men refused to leave and called the police, assuming the restaurant staff was out of line with a city ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. Instead, an officer told the men it was illegal for two men to kiss in public and said they could be cited for "homosexual conduct."

The excuse was that the officers were "relatively inexperienced." While not disputing the cops' severe intellectual disabilities, can you imagine the outrage if inexperienced cops issued citations for "Jew conduct" or any leftovers from past eras? Or maybe not. Texas is the same state where a law against dildos landed a Lubbock store clerk in jail in 2007, who had to later register as a sex offender.[318] Now the punchline: "For ten years running, Lubbock has recorded the highest number of chlamydia and gonorrhea infections in the nation,"[319] three to four times the national average.[320] Whereas mother tells you not to sit down on public toilets, you probably should not even sit down on a park bench in Lubbock, the STD capital of America.

But you know what? Let's pretend that those old laws punishing consensual acts between adults are no longer enforced. The love between masculine men is still culturally taboo. The very difference in our numbers and the Roman numbers proves that. Now, you may not go to jail for breaking these unwritten laws (except in Michigan, North Carolina, Texas and eleven other states), but the consequences are just as real. Remember Dusty the porn star turned MTV star? His girlfriend screamed at him, just for the mere suggestion that in the past he sucked a couple dicks. Who cares? And yet your future pussy supply is threatened. That's real punishment, no?

The Three Stooges

When the enemy spits in your face, that's to be expected. But what of those self-proclaimed friends who shit in your mouth and call it a hot fudge sundae? Along these lines, the most traitorous of recent gay allies has been Bill Clinton. There has to be a special place reserved in Hell for this unmitigated asshole of epic proportions.

After a strong gay turnout that put him in the Oval Office in 1992, Clinton realized the fags would vote for him anyways but needed the bigot vote for his re-election. With Hawaii on cusp of legalizing gay marriage in 1996, the Republican-controlled American Reichstag deemed the most pressing issue to prevent future gay marriages in that state from being recognized in all other states, as required by the Constitution's Full Faith and Credit Clause. However the clause grants Congress the power to "prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved." [321] To that end, a bipartisan majority in both chambers of the Reichstag passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA):[322]

No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.

What did our friend Bill Clinton do? As president, he could have vetoed the law. At which point, it would have gone back to the House and Senate to override the president's veto. Given that the bill did pass by veto-proof margins,[323] a veto may have been a mere formality easily overridden by that congress of cunts. Now, if he had any principles, Clinton could have pleaded with Congress to not take away people's rights. It may not have halted DOMA's passage, but it's the thought that counts, right? The point is that Clinton did not have to sign and endorse it. But he sold out proudly for political gain: he even ran ads in the South touting his signing of DOMA in an effort to neutralize Bob Dole, his Republican opponent. A report from the Associated Press at the time: [324]

After angry complaints from gay-rights advocates, the Clinton campaign on Wednesday replaced an ad running on religious radio stations that boasted of the president's signature on a bill banning gay marriages…

The Clinton spot also touted his signing of the Defense of Marriage Act, in spite of earlier White House complaints that the Republicans' use of the issue amounted to "gay baiting."

Clinton and others' excuse was that if they did not pass DOMA, then the Republicans would have passed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage:[325]

We were attempting at the time, in a very reactionary Congress, to head off an attempt to send a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to the states. And if you look at the 11 referenda much later — in 2004, in the election — which the Republicans put on the ballot to try to get the base vote for President Bush up, I think it's obvious that something had to be done to try to keep the Republican Congress from presenting that.

It appears these excuses are ex post facto inventions from a proven liar. Those in the fight against DOMA's passage at the time disagree with Clinton's lesser-of-two-evils waffling:[326]

That's complete nonsense. There was no conversation about something 'worse' until eight years later. There was no talk of a constitutional amendment, and no one even thought it was possible — and, of course, it turned out it wasn't really possible to happen. So, the idea that people were swallowing DOMA in order to prevent a constitutional amendment is really just historic revisionism and not true. That was never an argument made in the '90s.

I don't want to get married to a man or a woman, but DOMA and its subsequent results left an indelible mark on me. The day before signing DOMA into law, Clinton issued a statement assuring everyone that despite codifying into law the second-class citizenship of those attracted to members of their own sex, the law would not be discriminatory:[327]

I also want to make clear to all that the enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination, violence or intimidation against any person on the basis of sexual orientation. Discrimination, violence and intimidation for that reason, as well as others, violate the principle of equal protection under the law and have no place in American society.

But a little over two years later, Matt Shepard was robbed, beaten, and left for dead tied to a fence post in Wyoming, whose state motto since 1869 has been "Equal Rights."[328] The leader of the country could have stood up. At the time, the attack was denounced by most but a nasty undercurrent blamed the victim. He was probably flaunting it or somehow deserved it, after all. I knew then that liking other guys was something off-limits and wrong. My feelings needed to be contained in my head, or so I passively acquired that cultural trait. Where was Bill Clinton? He issued a statement:[329]

I was deeply grieved by the act of violence perpetuated against Matthew Shepard. There is nothing more important to the future of this country than our standing together against intolerance, prejudice, and violent bigotry. It is not too late for Congress to take action before they adjourn and pass the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. By doing so, they will help make all Americans more safe and secure.

Again, Clinton could have not signed the hate fostering bill that was DOMA. And yet, the gays say they still love him, including Lane Hudson the gay blogger whose question at a conference prompted Bill Clinton to make up the above quoted excuse that DOMA avoided a constitutional amendment from passing.[330] In that excuse, Clinton specifically referred to 2004 when Republicans put same-sex marriage up for a vote in the states and Congress. To recap, the Republican strategy to re-elect George W. Bush was to distract voters from the failing Iraq War by howling about the spectre of gay marriage, which the Massachusetts Supreme Court made into a reality in late 2003. By putting state constitutional amendments on the ballot, Republicans hoped to draw out bigots who'd merrily vote against equal rights for their neighbors and then pull the presidential lever for their fellow moron-in-arms who supported the federal constitutional ban on gay marriage.[331]

So wait, what's Clinton got to do with this? Well, despite his claims that DOMA prevented a more comprehensive federal ban on all gay marriages in any state, we now know that Clinton privately recommended just exactly that ban to the 2004 Democratic nominee, John Kerry, to neutralize Bush just as Clinton did to Dole in 1996. The source for this is Kerry campaign consultant, Bob Shrum:[332]

Kerry, Clinton ventured, should consider defying Democratic interest groups by endorsing the Bush proposal for a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The notion was also a replay of a Clinton tactic in his second presidential race in 1996, when he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, providing that no state had to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another. At the time, Kerry had been the only Democrat running for reelection in the Senate who'd voted against the bill; he'd denounced it as "gay-bashing on the floor of the United States Senate." Clinton, Kerry told me, had advised him that maybe he could now disarm his opponent on an issue that Karl Rove was exploiting to mobilize the religious right.

In other words, Clinton had no compunction about throwing gays under the bus again by recommending to John Kerry the very total ban on gay marriage that he falsely claims his signing of DOMA prevented.

But how was what Bush did any worse than what Clinton did? Bush merely followed the Clintonian lead that you could shit on gays for political gain. The federal amendment had no chance of passing in 2004 and was merely a political tool to drum up votes by keeping the issue in the national headlines. While the state amendments against gay marriage codified what had been common practice before, Clinton's signing of DOMA prevented a more gay-friendly administration (possibly Gore or Kerry's) from recognizing same-sex marriages. Why don't gays hate Clinton at least as much as Bush? What's with the personality cult? Maybe they haven't read the whole history as I just outlined. Or maybe a lot of gays love hot fudge sundaes. Yum, yum!

And you can't have a sundae without a cherry on top. For Clinton, it was that his valiant defense of marriage fell in between the Monica porking sessions: Clinton had sex with Monica eight times before and twice after signing Defense of Marriage Act,[333] an affair about which the pathological psychopath lied effortlessly to the entire country:[334]

But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.

The current crackhead in office is not much better than either of his two predecessors. Who knew change was only literally skin deep? "Ah, but he's done quite a lot," shriek the re-electioneers.[335] Congress passed the Matthew Shepard Act! The consequential bit of hate crimes legislation prohibits yelling "Fag!" at fags while beating them to death. No doubt, a great deterrent. Obama's pro-LGBT resume mentions recording an "It Gets Better" video which would make even the most shameless college application inflator blush. We would be remiss though if we forgot about the repeal of DADT, the policy that restricted homosexuals from openly proclaiming their deviancy in the military. It shows the militaristic priorities of Obama: fags are good as cannon fodder, but not as spouses. If he genuinely believed his rhetoric about equal rights for the so-called LGBT crowd, he could have supported same-sex marriage, or at the very least supported the repeal of DOMA.

I say "could have" because as we're reminded so often by the pro-Obama crowd, Dear Leader cannot act alone. It's not a dictatorship. Oh no, he needs Congress and those mean-old obstructionist Republicans block everything. That amnesia fails to remember that the 111th Congress during Obama's first two years was the perfect opportunity: an unprecedented majority in both the House and Senate could have at the very least expunged DOMA. What Obama says now is wasted because nothing will pass through the Republican-dominated House.

We're also forgetting that Obama has acted decisively without consulting Congress many times before. When it came to attacking Colonel Gaddafi, Obama didn't even bother lying to Congress like the last guy. Bush coaxed Congress, the American people, and the world for months prepping his attack on Iraq. The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate took a weekend to sharpen his sabre. When Obama wants something, he gets it. When Obama doesn't really want something but doesn't want to upset his supporters, he gets his spokesperson to spew Orwellian doublethink, just like his protégé Clinton:[336]

The president does oppose same-sex marriage, but he supports equality for gay and lesbian couples, and benefits and other issues, and that has been effectuated in federal agencies under his control.

Equality to Obama is throwing some crumbs of equality at federal employees while throwing everyone else under the bus. This 2010 statement reaffirmed candidate Obama's 2008 views at Rick Warren's Saddleback Forum:[337]

I believe that marriage, uh, is the union between a man and a woman. Now for me, as a Christian… [applause]For me… For me as a Christian, it's also a sacred union. Uh, you know, God's in the mix… Uh, I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage but I do believe in civil unions. I do believe that we should not, uh, that for a gay partners to want to visit each other in a hospital for the state to say, "You know, what? That's alright." Uh, I don't think that in anyway inhibits my core beliefs about what marriage are. Uh, I think my faith is strong enough and my marriage is strong enough that I can afford those civil rights to others even if I have a different perspective or a different view .[338]

Thank you, Massa. The rights of millions of people should hinge on the strength of a single man's faith and marriage. And since Obama is only on second base towards gay marriage with his support for civil unions, is that an indication that there is some marital discord? We should wildly speculate. After all, if his marriage is strong enough for gay civil unions what would put him over the edge towards gay marriage? If only Madam Shovelface gave more blow jobs, at least to her husband.

But Barry wasn't always so theological. When running for the Illinois Senate in 1996, he favored legalizing same-sex marriage.[339] "So maybe he does support marriage-equality," hope the deluded. Or maybe he's willing to say anything to get elected. Or maybe he was getting more blow jobs back then. But Barry did not even try to get civil unions through Congress when he had the votes, so what are his words worth? Even now that he punted the DOMA matter to the courts; indecisive, empty rhetoric. If only DOMA was a Muslim country with oil!

But Barry has ultimately evolved, as the politicians say. Apparently, God changed his mind just in time to turn out the base for the 2012 election. What's the excuse? In 1888, not 1988, Benjamin Tucker wrote: "Even in so delicate a matter as that of the relations of the sexes the Anarchists do not shrink from the application of their principle. They acknowledge and defend the right of any man and woman, or any men and women, to love each other for as long or as short a time as they can, will, or may."[340] Even more remarkable, this endorsement of same-sex relationships came before the word "homosexual" made its conflated way into the English language in 1892 by a translator of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis.[341] So, Obama is now up to the standards of political commentators of two centuries ago. Is Obama ready to endorse the repeal of Separate But Equal too? But seriously, what's his excuse? That gays have absolutely no self-respect. For two years, Obama had a majority in both houses of Congress to get rid of DOMA. What did the gays do? The doormats made excuses for Obama when he did nothing and now they clap like circus seals to such meaningless pandering that cannot legislatively repeal DOMA. Tucker's next sentence: "To them legal marriage and legal divorce are equal absurdities." Why? If you ask permission, you create for yourself a master who can immediately ignore your needs.

Plato's Symposium

Some have claimed that Plato's Symposium provides for a proto-sexual orientation similar to our own homosexual and heterosexual divisions. They are all wrong and I have yet to read a single commentary that shows even the slightest reading comprehension. I am very disappointed in everyone. Simon LeVay, our neuroscientist from chapters past, explains Aristophanes' allegedly homosexual/heterosexual creatures:

Yet even in ancient Greece there was awareness that some men and women did have an authentic preference for same-sex partners. This comes across most clearly in Plato's Symposium, in which one of the participants extemporized a creation myth to explain the existence of homosexual and heterosexual men and women. Plato's account could be interpreted as the first genetic theory of sexual orientation.

Plato put the account into the mouth of the comic playwright Aristophanes. He described how humanity originally existed as double creatures, like pairs of present-day humans stuck together. Some of these pairs consisted of two males, some of two females, and some were male-female hybrids. In punishment for their transgressions, an angry god cut them all into halves. Sexual attraction is the desire to be reunited with the one's ancestral other half. Thus, the three kinds of original creatures gave rise to gay men, gay women, and heterosexual men and women, respectively.

Today Aristophanes (as Plato represented him) would be considered an "essentialist": his account implies that a person's sexual orientation is an objective, inborn characteristic.[342]

LeVay's summary in the second quoted paragraph above is good enough, so we won't need to quote the actual lines from the Symposium. But to summarize: dual male-male pairs and male-female hermaphrodite pairs were sliced in half: each then looks for its original matching pair, sort of like socks in a dryer. Males looking for males are homosexuals; males looking for females are heterosexuals, allegedly. However, this hasty conclusion ignores the context of the Symposium. A symposium is a literal dinner party. In this particular one, each guest was encouraged to make a speech about Eros (or love) so quoting only one guest while ignoring the rest risks ignoring the overarching theme. Aristophanes' speech cannot be understood without a speech before (by Pausanias) and one after (by Alcibiades). These two speeches are crucial to understanding just how far the Greeks were from defining an inborn proto-homosexuality. Rather, the speeches show a blasé flexibility that contradicts sexual orientation itself. So with that, thus spake Pausanias:

It is, in general, true of any activity that, simply in itself, it is neither good nor bad. Take what we're doing now, for example – that is to say, drinking, or singing, or talking. None of these is good or bad in itself, but each becomes so, depending on the way it is done. Well and rightly done, it is good; wrongly done, it is bad. And it's just the same with loving, and Eros. It's not all good and doesn't all deserve praise. The Eros we should praise is the one which encourages people to love in the right way.

The Eros associated with Common Aphrodite is, in all senses of the word, common, and quite haphazard in his operation. This is the love of the man in the street. For a start, he is as likely to fall in love with the women as with boys. Secondly, he falls in love with their bodies rather than their minds. Thirdly, he picks the most unintelligent people he can find, since all he's interested in is the sexual act. He doesn't care whether it's done in the right way or not. That is why the effect of this Eros is haphazard – sometimes good, sometimes the reverse. This love derives its existence from the much younger Aphrodite, the one composed equally of the female and male elements.

The other Eros springs from Heavenly Aphrodite, and in the first place is composed solely of the male element, with none of the female (so it is the love of boys we are talking about), and in the second place is older, and hence free from lust. In consequence, those inspired by this love turn to the male, attracted by what is naturally stronger and of superior intelligence. And even among those who love boys you can tell the ones whose love is purely heavenly. They only fall in love with boys old enough to think for themselves – in other words, with boys who are nearly grown up.[343]

Female and male elements? Male-only element? The sloppy reader may take that as further evidence of the homo-hetero dichotomy, just as Justin Raimondo has:

Pausanias, in Plato's Symposium, answers that homosexuality is the "heavenly love" precisely because it is divorced from earthly carnality and centered around an idealized conception of beauty. It is purely aesthetic, and not at all procreative, that is, completely unnatural and artificial. To Pausanias, and his classical Greek comrades, this made it superior to the crassness of "the meaner sort of men," exclusive heterosexuals, who lacked the "higher" capacity to appreciate beauty in all its forms, including the male form.[344]

If the man in the street falls in love with women as easily as with other men, then how are such commoners heterosexuals, much less exclusive heterosexuals? The problem with the common man was that "he falls in love with their bodies rather than their minds," unlike those pure philosophers attending the symposium patting each other on the back. But then why is Heavenly Love male-only? The Greeks were quite misogynistic. The Greeks thought women were too stupid to be loved in the proper, intellectual manner. Take Socrates, reassuring a group of men with a backhanded compliment towards women: "… a woman's nature is in no way inferior to a man's, but lacks only good sense and strength. So, if any of you has a wife, be confident that you can teach her whatever you want her to know for your purposes."[345] Clearly, such trainable servants were good around the house but not good enough to be proper lovers.

The distinction between Heavenly Love and Common Love is whether or not the sole focus is on the sexual act, not the genitalia of the sexual act. Aristophanes' double creatures are a stronger version of Pausanias speech. To Pausanias, Heavenly Love is solely of the male element because male is code for "naturally stronger" and "superior intelligence." Compare with Aristophanes' description of his double creatures:

Men who are a fragment of the common sex (the one called hermaphrodite) are womanizers, and most adulterers are to be found in this category. Similarly, women of this type are nymphomaniacs and adulteresses… And those who are part of a male pursue what is male. As boys, because they are slices of the male, they are fond of men, and enjoy going to bed with men and embracing them. These are the best of the boys and young men, since they are by nature the most manly.[346]

If Aristophanes is to be believed literally through sexual orientation tinted goggles, then he thinks all "heterosexuals" are womanizers and only "homosexuals" are any good and genuinely masculine. Was Aristophanes a gay supremacist? Unlikely: both Aristophanes and Pausanias speech claim that the common sex is just lust (incidentally for both men and women) while Heavenly Love goes beyond the physical. And since women were not considered intelligent, they could not be loved intellectually. Aside from the misogyny, there's an element of thou protest too much. These snobby elitists were better than the man of the street but aren't holy philosophers supposed to remain untempted by all worldly desires? If they could wrap their sexual desires in an intellectual pursuit then they could justify the carnal aspects as merely the means to the end of intellectualism. So for Aristophanes too, male is code for better: "most manly." As the common man has the choice of loving women or men, why would he love inferior women so much if he himself is not flawed and not manly?

The philosophers' arrogance reached towards explaining their superiority as inborn traits for the same reason any person convinces himself that he is better by virtue of birth. If you are born that way, your superiority cannot be ever taken away. However, the last speech of the Symposium deals the coup de grâce on the sexual orienteering or literal inborn traits. Alcibiades tells the story of his unsuccessful seduction the virtuous and older (!) Socrates:

In short, I promise you faithfully, I fell asleep, and when I woke up in the morning I'd slept with Socrates all night, but absolutely nothing had happened. It was just like sleeping with one's father or elder brother. Imagine how I felt after that. I was humiliated and yet full of admiration for Socrates' character – his restraint and strength of mind . I'd met a man whose equal, in intelligence and control, I didn't think I should ever meet again.[347]

Socrates is an exemplary role model: he restrains from physical pleasure for its own sake. And that self-control separates the real Philosopher from the rabble proletariat who'll fuck anything with a hole (again: anything, female or male). The Symposium's compromise is that the honorable man can have sex like a dirty commoner, but he must make pretensions about loving someone's mind and intellect first: The Symposium has absolutely nothing to do with innate sexual orientation but that self-control is desirable and only a few of the elect can attain it.

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Licensing

Grero: The Masculine Gender and Cure For Heterosexuality (or: Did You Know You're Not Straight?) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. There is no need to attribute the work though.

As with many open source projects,[348] the name (grero) and logo (a lowercase gamma [γ] enclosed within the circle of the Mars symbol []) are trademarked though. They may – and should – be used for personal use and to whatever extent permitted by fair use.


[1] (Murray 34)

[2] (Hubbard 70)

[3] (Hubbard 71)

[4] (Hubbard 74)

[5] Undoubtedly, his "pathological intoxication" may have contributed to his heart problems as well: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12751970

[6] (Hubbard 53-56, 60-61)

[7] For dozens of sources see: http://www.theoi.com/Ouranios/Ganymedes.html

[8] (Homer 20) or see: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2199/2199-h/2199-h.htm#chap20

[9] (Dover R833) or see: http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/O24.5.html

[10] Plato, Laws: (Hubbard 252)

[11] (Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality 107)

[12] (Murray 35) quoting (Strabo, Geography, 10.21, 4)

[13] (Hubbard 49-53) quoting Pindar's First Olympian Ode

[14] (Homer 17) or see: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2199/2199-h/2199-h.htm#chap17

[15] (Homer 18) or see: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2199/2199-h/2199-h.htm#chap18

[16] (Homer 18) Incidentally, Hercules too had "too many boyfriends to count:" http://www.gay-art-history.org/gay-history/gay-literature/gay-mythology-folktales/homosexual-greek-mythology/homosexual-greek-mythology.html

[17] (Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality 90)

[18] (Hubbard 76, 183)

[19] (Neill 142)

[20] (Hubbard 207-221) quoting Xenophon's Symposium

[21] Or more correctly, "the first twenty Caesars" as Julius Caesar was never crowned emperor but subsequent emperors styled themselves after him.

[22] (Suetonius 2, 32, 47) or see: http://books.google.com/books?id=oTQNAAAAIAAJ The hawk-eyed but uninitiated reader may think the third quote containing "catamite" contradicts the second quote that Nicomedes was "only stain upon his chastity." Such a reader is instructed to keep reading.

[23] (Suetonius 121)

[24] (Suetonius 219-220)

[25] (Suetonius 277)

[26] (Gibbon) or see: http://books.google.com/books?id=26cMAAAAYAAJ

[27] (Suetonius 357-358)

[28] (Suetonius 414)

[29] (Suetonius 417)

[30] (Suetonius 430)

[31] (Suetonius 443)

[32] (Suetonius 468-469)

[33] (Suetonius 479)

[34] (Suetonius 479)

[35] (Dio 68) or see: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/68*.html

[36] (Historia Augusta Hadrian: 14.5-7) or see: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Hadrian/1*.html

[37] (Aurelius 1.16) or see: http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.1.one.html and http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/V3-THE_JULIO_CLAUDIANS.rtf

[38] (Haines 31) or see: http://www.archive.org/stream/correspondencem00auregoog#page/n86/mode/2up/search/love

[39] (Aurelius 1.17) or see: http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.1.one.html

[40] (Historia Augusta Lucius Verus: 4.4) or see: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Lucius_Verus*.html

[41] (Historia Augusta Commodus: 5.4) or see: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Commodus*.html The translation uses the euphemism "minions" for the Latin "puberibus exoletis" which was a term for male prostitutes.

[42] (Historia Augusta Pertinax: 7.8) or see: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Pertinax*.html

[43] (Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality 34), (Halperin, How to do the History of Homosexuality 90)

[44] Excerpts: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/entertainment/james-franco-addresses-gay-rumors-playboy

Full: http://www.playboy.com/playground/interviews/james-franco-interview

[45] Charlie Hunnam in the UK version of Queer as Folk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtullfEkcBg

[46] For one such debate see the CNN article <http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/06/26/sexuality/index.html>in which standing in for a preacher is a professor affiliated with NARTH, the most prominent cure-the-gays group <http://www.narth.com/docs/080307Abbott_NARTH_article.pdf>.

[47] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTIOLZjx-6U&t=0m7s

[48] Think serial killers influenced by genes or early childhood.

[49] http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2002029585_gaymarriage08m.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspect_classification, http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/what-constitutes-a-suspect-class/, http://wakingupnow.com/blog/suspect-class

[50] The trickster god, who had male lovers: http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/HermesLoves.html "Hermes accidentally killed his lover Krokos in a game of discus, and transformed his body into the scarlet crocus flower. The myth is similar to that of Apollon and Hyakinthos." Ultimate Frisbee, indeed.

[51] (Mondimore 19-20)

[52] The high 10% figure was arrived at by the misquoting the research of biologist Alfred Kinsey, against his explicit wishes. Read on for the full details.

[53] (LeVay, Queer Science 56-57)

[54] Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first openly gay man, in 1864, on the childhood characteristics of today's pre-gay children: (Ulrichs 59)

[55] The easiest way to distinguish between the non-interchangeable sex and gender: Sex is between your legs (male or female); gender is between your ears in your brain (masculine or feminine).

[56] (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 125)

[57] (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 63)

[58] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/09/60minutes/main1385230.shtml Full Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3pvAk7Zz5U and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS6J_gg89ms

[59] (Rieger, Linsenmeier and Bailey)

[60] (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 89-92)

[61] (G. Rieger, J. Linsenmeier and S. Garcia)

[62] (Rule and Ambady)

[63] (Johnson, Gill and Reichman)

[64] (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 195-201)

[65] (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 49-56, 197)

[66] (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 107-120)

[67] (Ulrichs 47, 36) Ulrichs was German and to this day German does not have a word for gender thus his usage of third sex instead of third gender.

[68] (Ulrichs 58)

[69] (Lombardi-Nash 19)

[70] (Ulrichs 58)

[71] (Ulrichs 59)

[72] (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 76) and Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes: http://www.courageunfettered.com/xtra/cooties.gif

[73] (Lombardi-Nash 9)

[74] (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 38, 76)

[75] (Bray 86)

[76] (Murray 255, 262-263)

[77] (Greenberg, Why Was the Berdache Ridiculed?) & (Williams)

[78] http://www.logotv.com/shows/one_girl_five_gays/series.jhtml (USA) & http://www.mtv.ca/shows/1-girl-5-gays (Canada)

[79] (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 60)

[80] http://borngaybornthisway.blogspot.com/

[81] http://www.npr.org/2011/03/23/134628750/dan-savage-for-gay-teens-life-gets-better

[82] Not sources for obvious reasons.

[83] http://www.justusboys.com/forum/showthread.php?t=321857

[84] http://www.justusboys.com/forum/showthread.php?p=6726787#post6726787

[85] Brian Moylan, Gay Pride: don't rain on my parade: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/08/gay-pride-rain-parade

[86] (Ulrichs 61)

[87] Read on for more details.

[88] Holden Caulfield in (Salinger 143)

[89] (Percy and Lauritsen): http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/MAGNUS.HTM and Louis Virtel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVU7WcNO06Q

[90] (Chandra 30 [Table 13], 22 [Table 6]): http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr036.pdf

[91] Probability mass function:  or =BINOMDIST(18,20,2.8%,FALSE) in a spreadsheet

[92] Adams, Wright Jr, Lohr, "Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8772014 or full PDF: https://my.psychologytoday.com/files/u47/Henry_et_al.pdf

[93] Jesse Bering, Single, Angry, Straight Male... Seeks Same?: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=single-angry-straight-male

[94] Kevin Bacon's character to Colin Firth's after the latter tries to fuck the former, in Where the Truth Lies: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373450/

[95] (Licata and Petersen 85-101)

[96] (Moore): http://katharinesweb.net/Ancestors/Withers/TJWithers.htm

[97] Highly, highly recommended: http://man2manalliance.org/crw/warriorspeak/beatific.html

[98] (Vidal, Gore Vidal: Sexual Speaking 220)

[99] http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/vidal_su95.html

[100] The same New York Times that refused to review Vidal has now graciously put an excerpt of the book online, including the campfire scene: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/v/vidal-essential.html or (Vidal, The City and The Pillar 22-31)

[101] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/gore-vidal-literary-feuds-his-vicious-mother-and-rumours-of-a-secret-love-child-832525.html

[102] (Vidal, Palimpsest 24)

[103] (Vidal, Palimpsest 34)

[104] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clef6y2oZ64

[105] http://www.harmony-korine.com/paper/int/oth/butt.html

[106] http://aleka.org/phoenix/zines/phoenix7.htm

[107] (C. Hitchens 76-78)

[108] (Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality 49) on the Sambia, a tribe in which all boys fellate older boys and young men to inoculate themselves against childhood feminine maternal influences. There, our so-called "homosexuality" is a requirement for masculinity. If you don't suck dick, how can you become a real man? You'll stay a faggot without sucking cock.

[109] (Murray 97-99)

[110] (Murray 365)

[111] (Murray 371-372)

[112] Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historia, 5.32.7 http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/5B*.html

[113] (Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality 162)

[114] (Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality 440-441)

[115] GALCK, Homosexuality is African, http://galck.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=159:homosexuality-is-african&catid=34:news&Itemid=108

[116] Rammstein, Amerika, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yydlX7c8HbY

[117] (Bagemihl 269-275)

[118] Kay Prüfer et al, The bonobo genome compared with the chimpanzee and human genomes: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11128.html

[119] (Bagemihl 276-279)

[120] Aylwyn Scally et al, Insights into hominid evolution from the gorilla genome sequence: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7388/full/nature10842.html#/supplementary-information

[121] (Bagemihl 280-284)

[122] Aylwyn Scally et al, Insights into hominid evolution from the gorilla genome sequence: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7388/full/nature10842.html#/supplementary-information

[123] (Bagemihl 284-288)

[124] Aylwyn Scally et al, Insights into hominid evolution from the gorilla genome sequence: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7388/full/nature10842.html#/supplementary-information

[125] Gore Vidal presenting the arboreal model of homosexuality: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gore-vidals-united-states-of-fury-1798601.html

[126] (Murray 62-65)

[127] (Hamilton 36)

[128] (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 20-21)

[129] (Dover B51, B53, B634, CE33, CE34, R55, R82, R303, R543, R545, R577, R712, R970, R1127)

[130] It only goes downhill from there, kids.

[131] (Mondimore 6)

[132] … albeit not without framework issues. Read on for details.

[133] (Mondimore 99)

[134] To which I was subjected.

[135] (Frost 103)

[136] (Frost 104)

[137] Gore Vidal on sexual and theological self-delusion: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gore-vidals-united-states-of-fury-1798601.html

[138] Read on for details.

[139] http://www.sptimesrussia.com/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=35439

[140] http://gawker.com/5504032/christopher-hitchens-gay-prep-school-sex-a-window-into-horny-teenage-bicuriosity

[141] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P04-ccuRXs http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/stonewall-transcript/

[142] Snickers 2007 Superbowl Ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8XbTsbkwII

[143] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20119218-504083.html

[144] Children of Glory (2006): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486219/

[145] For other delightful euphemisms: http://www.lyn.lowenstein.eu/projects/homo/euphemism.htm

[146] (Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality 45)

[147] CBS 60 Minutes interview: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7358652n

[148] Tyra Banks Show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c642dSeSm8A

[149] Tyra Banks Shows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt6iSRDFom0

[150] http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jmo/m/m/iv-manshots.html

[151] Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes: http://www.courageunfettered.com/xtra/calvinandhobbes.png

[152] http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3r0c20/

[153] http://cdn.fratpad.com/fratpad/tour.html

[154] Video and other quotes: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/04/27/the-real-worlds-dustin-zito-on-his-gay-porn-past.html
Other video: http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/644722/porn-past.jhtml#id=1662350

[155] http://thesword.com/the-top-ten-gay-porn-gifs-of-dustin-zito-fratmens-spencer-having-gay-sex.html

[156] (Reinisch 252)

[157] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt6iSRDFom0&t=1m41s

[158] Interview with George Duroy in 2010 by Matthew Rettenmund for the gay blog Towleroad: http://www.towleroad.com/2010/07/an-interview-with-bel-amis-george-duroy.html

[159] Interview with Lukas Ridgeston appeared in Manshots, June 1995, available on Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20010806145722/http://www.belamionline.com/belamisite/pages/fans/interviews/iv-lukas.htm

[160] Interview with Lukas Ridgeston, 2006: http://www.jumponmarkslist.com/gio/2006/interviews/lukas_ridgeston.htm

[161] (Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 616)

[162] (Ulrichs 35)

[163] (Hirchfeld 529-561)

[164] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/04/rick-santorum-homophobic-frothing

[165] Note the use androgynes indicating a feminine self-perception and pathetic servile attitude: http://simontoncr0607.wikispaces.com/Sarah-+Harry+Hay

[166] (Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 639)

[167] (Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 651)

[168] (Ulrichs 131)

[169] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2XU2Elah0s

[170] Compliment? Dish! Scott Thompson in conversation with Elvira Kurt Part I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjojfQz8zUE

[171] (Pezzote 143)

[172] Perez Hilton: http://imustbedreaming.wordpress.com/2008/01/04/from-straight-acting-to-screaming-queen/

[173] (Pezzote 13)

[174] (Pezzote 17)

[175] (Pezzote 90, 107, 111)

[176] Vito Russo talks with Harry Hay and Barbara Gittings, 2/2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nRJhce0xe0 In the first part of the interview, Harry Hay mentions that gays were originally called "temperamental," or emotional and feminine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSO5Y8fGac4

[177] (Pezzote 27)

[178] (Pezzote 30)

[179] (Pezzote 31)

[180] (Pezzote 33)

[181] (Baron-Cohen 93)

[182] (Baron-Cohen)

[183] http://womeninbusiness.about.com/b/2009/11/13/statistics-on-the-number-of-women-surgeons-in-the-united-states.htm

[184] (Hines 84)

[185] (Pezzote 193)

[186] (Ramakers 64)

[187] (Ramakers 58)

[188] (Pezzote 161)

[189] (Pezzote 179)

[190] Genesis 9:7 (NIV): http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%209:6-7&version=NIV

[191] (McNeill 89)

[192] Musonius Rufus, Lecture XII: https://sites.google.com/site/thestoiclife/the_teachers/musonius-rufus/lectures/12

[193] Plato, Laws, 838-839: (Hubbard 256): ... though I bet his boyfriends were more receptive to same-sex relationships.

[194] Deuteronomy 22:28–29 (NIV): http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2022:28%E2%80%9329&version=NIV

[195] Leviticus 18:22: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2018:22&version=KJV

[196] Leviticus 20:13: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2020:13&version=KJV

[197] John Lauritsen, "Culpa Ecclesiae: Boswell's Dilemma": http://pinktriangle.org.uk/lib/hic/lauritsen.html#ref11

[198] John Lauritsen, "Culpa Ecclesiae: Boswell's Dilemma": http://pinktriangle.org.uk/lib/hic/lauritsen.html#ref14 Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_persecution_of_paganism_under_Theodosius_I

[199] (Foucalt 43): "We must not forget that that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized – Westphal's famous article of 1870 on "contrary sexual sensations" can stand as its date of birth – less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species." First, Ulrichs wrote his letters to his family and pamphlets in the 1860's before Westphal, however, the medical establishment did not credit him. Second, that is not the only date Foucault gets wrong: homosexuality was created by the focus on procreation long before the 19th century that made all same-sex sex into a suspect and thus into a category. Foucault quibble about acts vs. personages is irrelevant. The very act of distinguishing procreation/non-procreative acts creates the foundation for personages.

[200] Yes, it was Kertbeny though the hetero-bi-homo system is entirely Ulrichs' (though as discussed above merely putting on paper what was assumed): "Kertbeny coined a new word, 'homosexual,' and did not use 'Urning,' coined by Ulrichs in 1862, out of jealousy, according to Ulrich..." See: (Lombardi-Nash 47-48).

[201] Like Foucault, see footnote or two above.

[202] http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%201:27

[203] (Lombardi-Nash 561)

[204] (Lombardi-Nash 561) Re: self-abuse: every guy who masturbates likes cock and therefore may like men. Exactly. Also note that the first gay man thought "straight" men could have sex with other men by choice but should not because of Biblical prohibitions.

[205] Ulrichs did later come up with masculine and feminine varieties of the Urning, but he himself admitted that he had never met a genuinly masculine gay man.

[206] Krafft-Ebbing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 1: http://books.google.com/books/about/Psychopathia_Sexualis.html?id=9SYKAAAAIAAJ

[207] (Malebranche 18-19)

[208] Leviticus 11:13-19: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2011:13-19&version=NIV

[209] Homologies and Analogies: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIC1Homologies.shtml

[210] Earth, Wind, Fire, Water, and Captain Planet

[211] All from Psychopathia Sexualis: http://books.google.com/books/about/Psychopathia_Sexualis.html?id=9SYKAAAAIAAJ

[212] Five points if you :-)

[213] (Vidal, Palimpsest 36)

[214] I have no doubt that the vast majority who have come to accuse priests were in fact molested against their will. But, why did they let themselves be diddled? Were they drugged? No, not in the traditional way. It's as if they froze. They did nothing to help themselves out of the situation in which they were not comfortable in. Why? The authoritarian culture that crushes natural desires like grero must do so by teaching obedience against the desires of the self and to align one's actions with the desires of others, so what is the skinny little kid going to say? While sex is always plusbad, disobeying Father So-and-so is doubleplusbad. So grit your teeth and bend over, son. If we had had a peaceful, non-fascist culture, those molested could have simply said, "No, thanks, old man." Or had sex without regrets if consensual.

[215] http://www.towleroad.com/2010/03/catholic-leagues-bill-donohue-takes-out-nyt-ad-defending-pope-claims-most-priests-who-did-molesting-.html

[216] Catechism of the Catholic Church § 2357 http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a6.htm

[217] Does anyone not think the Fox News priest isn't gay? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK6tzT39o_Q

[218] (P. Hitchens 204) http://www.scribd.com/doc/62646636/Rage-Against-God-Peter-Hitchens

[219] The Holy War on Gays, Rolling Stones, March 18, 1999: http://www.pflagdetroit.org/Holy_War_OnGays.htm Fun Fact: Mark McGrath appears shirtless on the cover of the issue: http://backissues.com/issue/Rolling-Stone-March-18-1999----Issue-808

[220] While there were plenty of opportunities, I was neither molested by priest nor laity in my teenage years. However, I remember the feeling of possible victimhood whenever entering the men's room or public toilets. These were the places where men would assault me, or so I had been warned. And that warning was not for my personal safety as the fear instilled makes for more helpless victims. The warning was for the preservation of the fascist heterosexual orthodoxy. If I had actually been molested or raped: good, great, fantastic! as I would have known firsthand how horrible these so-called homosexuals were. And if by fear I refuse to have sex with other men? Fantastic just the same: the hetero-bubble remains unpenetrated.

[221] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P04-ccuRXs Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/stonewall-transcript/

[222] Boys Beware (1961) http://archive.org/details/BoysBewarecolorizedVersion Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/stonewall-transcript/

[223] The O'Reilly Factor, April 19, 2012: http://mediamatters.org/blog/201204200008

[224] Val Holley, author of James Dean, The Biography: "I named no new names among Dean's male sex partners. What I did was to make perfectly clear the interventions at critical junctures in Dean's career by gay male mentors (some of whom were sex partners)." http://open.salon.com/blog/kathy_riordan/2010/05/31/an_interview_with_james_dean_biographer_val_holley

[225] (Naphy 96)

[226] (Naphy 108)

[227] Corporal punishment in US schools: http://www.corpun.com/counuss.htm
Thousands of students still take their licks in Texas schools: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/03/05/2899317/thousands-of-students-still-take.html

[228] Texas Penal Code Section 21.11: http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/PE/htm/PE.21.htm#21.11

[229] Why was he so shy? (Ovid) and as quoted in The Fluffer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245115/

[230] (Epstein)'s book makes The Case Against Adolescence. Interviews and reviews: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200703/trashing-teens and http://mises.org/daily/3289

[231] Pausanias in Plato's Symposium in (Hubbard 184)

[232] Volume forthcoming.

[233] http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.nambla.org/famousmen.html (The real website rarely is available to me, I've used the archive.org version.)

[234] The relationship began in 1891.

[235] Plato's Phaedrus in (Hubbard 235)

[236] (Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality 72) Note the assumption that "normal" men have to restrain themselves from same-sex attractions.

[237] (Hubbard 296)

[238] Strato in (Hubbard 301)

[239] Vice News: http://www.vice.com/vice-news/bride-kidnapping-in-kyrgyzstan-part-1

[240] (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 2-8)

[241] Elisarion von Kupffer in (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 40)

[242] Elisarion von Kupffer in (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 35)

[243] Edwin Bab in (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 55)

[244] (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 75)

[245] (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 145)

[246] Elisarion von Kupffer in (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 39)

[247] Adolf Brand in (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 153)

[248] Edwin Bab in (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 58)

[249] Gotamo in (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 132)

[250] Adolf Brand in (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 156)

[251] Edwin Bab in (Oosterhuis and Kennedy 55)

[252] Excerpt (loosely) translated by author (with great help from Google Translate) from: http://glbt-news.israel-live.de/ns-zeit/adolf-brand.htm

[253] The well-known picture of the Nazi book burnings took place on May 10, 1933 and centered on burning Hirschfeld's books: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1933-may-10-berlin-book-burning.JPG

[254] My intention is to resurrect Der Eigene as the grero blog.

[255] (Vidal, Gore Vidal: Sexual Speaking 227)

[256] (Vidal, Gore Vidal: Sexual Speaking 39,117) For a 1959 essay regarding the Caesars: http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/desolation/gore-vidal.html

[257] (Vidal, Gore Vidal: Sexual Speaking 125, 52)

[258] (Vidal, Gore Vidal: Sexual Speaking 110)

[259] (Vidal, Gore Vidal: Sexual Speaking 110,196)

[260] Not entirely right, James Franco referencing (Chauncey). Their sexuality surely would not be advertised to the general public, but point taken: there was not yet an association of same-sex sex as effeminate so much as merely sinful. http://www.playboy.com/playground/view/james-franco-interview?page=2

[261] (Vidal, Gore Vidal: Sexual Speaking 225-226)

[262] http://people.ucalgary.ca/~ptrembla/homosexuality-suicide/construction/a2-homosexuality-common-to-rare.htm

[263] LOL

[264] Compare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre-Stonewall_riots_American_television_episodes_with_LGBT_themes vs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1970s_American_television_episodes_with_LGBT_themes

[265] Pausanias as quoted in Plato's Symposium (182) as quoted in (Hubbard 185)

[266] http://gawker.com/5930733/iconic-gay-author-gore-vidal-dies-at-86 "Iconic Gay Author Gore Vidal Dies at 86"
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/01/showbiz/gore-vidal-death/index.html?hpt=hp_c1 "…he joined the Navy at 17 before shocking the world by writing one of the first novels to include an openly gay character…"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/books/gore-vidal-elegant-writer-dies-at-86.html?hp "[The City and the Pillar] is what we would now call a coming-out story, about a handsome, athletic young Virginia man who gradually discovers that he is homosexual." Though to be fair, the NYT did preface it partially right: "Mr. Vidal tended toward what he called 'same-sex sex,' but frequently declared that human beings were inherently bisexual, and that labels like gay (a term he particularly disliked) or straight were arbitrary and unhelpful."

[267] (Vidal, Gore Vidal: Sexual Speaking 196) and Vidal on Sexuality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxE0ay0kgkg

[268] http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/vidal_su95.html

[269] An even worse caption adorns an obit picture: "Vidal at home in an undated picture. Vidal's 1948 work, 'The City and the Pillar,' featuring an openly gay character, brought him notoriety at a time when homosexuality was still considered immoral." Ah, a single openly gay character. You see, Jim was the gay one because he did not want to get married. Bob was just experimenting and thus he redeems himself of earlier faggotry: http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/01/opinion/kaplan-gore-vidal/index.html

[270] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxE0ay0kgkg

[271] Grero began as a book review for Androphilia. Wanting the review to be top quality, I started reading other books to bolster my criticism of Androphilia (see below). Apparently, it consumed me.

[272] Malebranche was a pseudonym; Donovan is his real last name that he also now uses publicly. To avoid confusion, I just use his first name.

[273] (Malebranche x)

[274] (Malebranche xii)

[275] (Malebranche 18-19)

[276] (Malebranche 19)

[277] (Malebranche 19, 37)

[278] (Malebranche 39, 78)

[279] (Malebranche 111-113)

[280] I consoled myself that having a gay boyfriend was like having a girlfriend. What's the difference between gay men and women? But then what's the point?

[281] Jack Donovan, Delusions of Masculinity: http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/02/25/delusions-of-masculinity-2/

[282] (Malebranche 22)

[283] Jack Donovan, "Why I Treat Straight Men Like Married Women." http://web.archive.org/web/20100414003003/http://www.jack-donovan.com/androphilia/essays/why-i-treat-straight-men-like-married-women/

[284] (Malebranche 17)

[285] As if that's a problem? How bourgeois.

[286] (Malebranche 18)

[287] Another innocuous White Ethno-State would be Nazi Germany. Wouldn't Jack rather be around masculine black guys than white lesbian folk singers?

[288] Richard Spencer, "Born That Way: Eugenics and the Homosexual Question." http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/hbd-human-biodiversity/born-that-way/

[289] http://www.kevinislaughter.com/2012/the-way-of-men-jack-donovan/

[290] (Malebranche 78)

[291] "Happy the lover who has a workout when he gets home / Sleeping all day with a beautiful boy." from Theognis quoted in (Hubbard 45)

[292] http://www.facebook.com/pages/Androphilia/39632351928

[293] Jim Goad, "The Emperor's New Body." http://takimag.com/article/the_emperors_new_body/print: "Although she recently opted to surgically guillotine her bazooms, the stubbly tattooed blobfish born Chastity Sun Bono has no penis and has yet to fill and pave over her vagina with cement, so I refuse to refer to that mortally confused woman as 'he.'"

[294] Jack Donovan, "Waiting For the Fall, An Interview with Robert Taylor of Changes:" http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/waiting-for-the-fall/ and http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2011/02/interview-robert-n-taylor/

[295] (Baron-Cohen)

[296] Stefan Molyneux, "The Bomb in the Brain: The True Roots of Human Violence": http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB3F2CF45EEB95C80

[297] (Montefiore 187)

[298] Nikita Khrushchev, "Speech to 20th Congress of the CPSU": http://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm

[299] http://www.asatru.org/heritage.php

[300] (Montefiore 156)

[301] (Malebranche 32, 33)

[302] (Malebranche 33)

[303] http://man2manalliance.org/ (The rejection of penetration is quite Roman, even if the construction is quite Ciceronian.)

[304] http://man2manalliance.org/crw/warriorspeak/out.html

[305] http://man2manalliance.org/crw/defhetero.html

[306] http://man2manalliance.org/crw/defdcap.html (Concise text edited from original.)

[307] http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/interview/120400in.htm

[308] http://g0ys.org/

[309] Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day: http://www.nndb.com/people/968/000084716/ apparently from The Advocate, 24th January 1995

[310] Jerri Blank on Strangers with Candy: http://jerriblank.com/swcep107.html Audio: http://jerriblank.com/pole.wav

[311] … though not limited to grero. Women can be bisexual too and one needs not to be masculine to be attracted to both sexes.

[312] To be fair to Kinsey, he "intended the scale to reflect the heterosexual-homosexual balance in people's sexual activities and responses. It was not meant to be a tool for rating people per se. In fact, Kinsey was adamantly opposed to the use of the terms heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual to refer to people, in part because he thought it implied a biological basis for homosexuality, which he thought was an extremely silly theory" (Jordan-Young 152). Gore Vidal has thought so too: "It's always true in high schools, as I remember. In my youth, if the handsomest athlete was queer every boy was going to bed with every other boy; but if he wasn't, they'd all imitate him and go to bed with girls. Quite extraordinary how one or two idols would always set the tone. Dr. Kinsey noticed the same thing. He could never understand it; he was very square. There could be two high schools about thirty miles apart in the same region and consisting of students from the same economic class. One would indulge in unrestrained homosexuality, yet at the other there was almost none. He couldn't understand that. So I evolved this theory that most of the students tend to mimic the sexual tastes of the school hero" (Vidal, Gore Vidal: Sexual Speaking 226-227).

[313] "Do the Santorum" http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=14422 for the original offense and subsequent coinage of santorum, the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. Also, "Santorum To Beck: States Should Be Allowed To Criminalize Gay Sex" http://equalitymatters.org/blog/201104140009

[314] "State Sodomy Laws Continue To Target LGBT Americans" http://equalitymatters.org/print/blog/201108080012

[315] "Viewpoint: Keep crying, Corvino - Michigan remains far behind" http://www.pridesource.com/article.html?article=35659

[316] "State Sodomy Laws Continue To Target LGBT Americans" http://equalitymatters.org/print/blog/201108080012

[317] "Bills would take Texas' illegal sodomy ban off books" http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-politics/bills-would-take-texas-illegal-sodomy-ban-off-1349429.html

[318] http://web.archive.org/web/20070525044229/http://www.klbk13.tv/news/default.asp?mode=shownews&id=2259

[319] http://www.siecus.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Feature.showFeature&featureID=1326

[320] http://www.lubbockprogressives.com/pdf/Board_of_Health_Review.pdf

[321] Article IV, Section 1 of the United States Constitution http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiv

[322] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c104:H.R.3396.ENR

[323] Senate vote: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=104&session=2&vote=00280 House vote: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/1996/roll316.xml

[324] http://www.americablog.com/2007/06/bill-clinton-reportedly-told-john-kerry.html

[325] The video embedded in the article is worth watching to see a gay rights activist booed by Democrats, prompting Clinton to make up his cited excuses: http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2009/08/14/nn09-updates-clinton-says-repeal-dadt-and-doma-at-keynote-i-was-on-ron-reagans-show/

[326] Evan Wolfson, of National Freedom to Marry Coalition and Lambda Legal, as quoted in http://metroweekly.com/feature/?ak=6613

[327] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/scotts/ftp/wpaf2mc/clinton.html

[328] I shit you not.

[329] http://uwacadweb.uwyo.edu/spectrum/mattnews.htm

[330] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lane-hudson/why-i-interrupted-bill-cl_b_259347.html

[331] http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/08/karl-rove-says-he-didnt-engine.html

[332] (Shrum 443-444)

[333] http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2008-03-19-852575883_x.htm

[334] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIP_KDQmXs

[335] http://www.towleroad.com/2012/04/obama-summarizes-progress-toward-lgbt-equality.html
https://my.barackobama.com/page/share/progress-for-lgbt-americans?source=ProgressForLgbtAmericans-02-20120423-misc-HQB&icn=20120423-ProgressForLgbtAmericans-02-misc-HQB

[336] http://www.americablog.com/2010/08/president-does-oppose-same-sex-marriage.html

[337] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbIurm5ou84

[338] [sics] included

[339] http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=20229

[340] (Chartier and Johnson 32): http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/state-socialism-and-anarchism

[341] (Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality 15)

[342] First, second paragraph: (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation 21-22) Third paragraph: (LeVay, Queer Science 1)

[343] Pausanias in Plato's Symposium in (Hubbard 184)

[344] Justin Raimondo, "Gay Marriage Sucks!" http://takimag.com/article/gay_marriage_sucks/

[345] Socrates in Xenophon's Symposium (Hubbard 211)

[346] (Hubbard 190)

[347] (Hubbard 207)

[348] "Why trademarks are important in open source" http://communityovercode.com/2011/01/trademarks-in-open-source/

"Mozilla Foundation Trademark Policy" http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/