James Howard Kunstler is one of my favorite commentators when he writes about things like the deleterious effects on American life of automobile-dependent suburbanization, destruction of pedestrian-scale neighborhoods, and ugly, soulless modern architecture – which covers most of his nonfiction. And his political views are generally very liberal. I was very surprised to find this comment in the March 8, 2004, issue of his online column, “The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle” (http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary10.html):
(Bolding added.) Whew! What do you all think about this?
Is it true that the gay community “will never persuade the non-gay majority that homosexual behavior is wholesome, in particular between males”?
Is the norm of male gay social behavior “extreme promiscuity with predatory overtones”?
Is gay marriage a radical feminist tactic to “get as many men as possible corralled into a gay ghetto with the priapic diversions of gay life” and to achieve “the complete marginalization of men”? If so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
This is most certainly true, however. For many people, it’s not about rights, it’s about recognition.
There is, certainly, a large promiscious subculture within the gay community. But many gays have deep reservations about it. Lots of gays, for example, are uncomfortable with the stereotypical gay pride parade and the image it portrays to the larger world. They don’t get much press, however. A bunch of gay people mowing their lawns on Saturday afternoon aren’t as good a story as a bunch of guys in leather thongs riding a penis float.
Pedophillia is more complicated than that. It’s not really a “gay” problem. Having said that, I do suspect that social pressures did drive a lot of gay men into the priesthood. If you’re deeply religious and not attracted to women, I can see how you might conclude that you have a calling to the priesthood rather than admitting to yourself that you’re gay.
Well, it’s certainly true that they haven’t done so yet. I don’t believe that you’ll ever get mainstream society to accept the stereotypical gay lifestyle. But I don’t think that’s necessary. All you have to do demonstrate that most gays accept the mainstream lifestyle. Which, I think, is already true.
“Never”? Well, “never” is a very long time. However, “not yet done it in 4,000 years, for the most part” seems to give us a clue that it’s probably not an easy task.
Couldn’t say. However, it does seem to be the face that the “subculture” spends the most time and money showing to the world. The thing is that I highly doubt that anybody has done a comprehensive study to show what percentage of homosexual men actualy frequent the gay dens of iniquity and what percentage would far rather go to an ice-cream social to meet a nice boy and settle down. How do you tell if two guys at a bar who are talking about which pitcher is the best of all time are two heterosexual buddies sharing some time or a long-term and devoted homosexual couple on a rather masculine date? I can’t think of a way to tell just by looking–unless some PDA breaks out, but I’ve seen plenty of devoted heterosexual couples who are quite bashful about affection in public.
It probably is. But there is no limit to the whacky-nutty-out-of-touch dogmas that the fringe can produce. Whether or not the current controversy is the product of loonfringe feminuts (as opposed to rational feminists) is a matter for amused consideration, I’d say.
Now, don’t get mad at me, but I’ve always thought that the male gay culture did have strongly promiscuous and predatory [althought NOT pedophilic] tendencies.
I thought this was a result of not having the healthy option of marriage.
[Well, so do young straight people, but straight kids seem to grow out of it sooner.]
And actually, the problems of the Catholic church result from a millenia or two of viewing women as a dirty subspecies, useful only for breeding.
And doesn’t “will never persuade the non-gay majority that homosexual behavior is wholesome, in particular between males” and “to get as many men as possible corralled into a gay ghetto with the priapic diversions of gay life” show what this guy is really afraid of?
The content of the OP’s quote is so grotesquely wrong, so continuously, as to be meaningless. The tinfoil is wrapped too tight, and around the wrong head.
I agree with everything stated above in response to the OP.
I want to add: just about the most crass mistake made is equating pedophilia with homosexuality. They are not related, they are not the same, they are not linked.
There is no reuptable science behind linking pedophilia and homosexuality.
Anyway, the article cited in the OP is so astonishingly full of crap, my best advice is: please disregard.
Unknown at the present time.
That is pure bigotry.
Man, does this guy have issues with feminism.
Look, lots of gay people just want to be married, for various and sundry reasons, most of them including being in love. They aren’t doing it further the paranoid ideology of some extremist fringe. :rolleyes:
Not exactly . . . Politically speaking, Kunstler is only an “icon” in the fields of New Urbanism, “smart growth”, anti-automobile and anti-suburbanization activism, and energy-crisis alarmism. He has a lot of distinguished company in these fields (check out Andres Duany, Peter Calthorpe, Jane Holtz Kay, the Congress for the New Urbanism (http://www.cnu.org/), and Smart Growth Online (http://smartgrowth.org/)). But the idea that our total dependency on the automobile is a bad thing for society is not really a “left” or “right” position. That is, the people who are concerned with it are generally concerned with protecting the environment, but otherwise they don’t appear to fall in any one area of the political map. (Duany himself is a refugee from Castro’s Cuba – I don’t think he’d be inclined toward a leftist position.) The only political pattern I have noticed is that the people who oppose “smart growth” and “New Urbanism” on principle all seem to be libertarians. See Randal O’Toole (http://i2i.org/Other/iv/otoole2002/) and Wendell Cox (http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=12350). (And here – The Town Paper: Wendell Cox -- Andrés Duany Debate – is a report on a public debate between Wendell Cox and Andres Duany.) All I can figure is that libertarians are against “smart growth” because all conceivable approaches to it would involve some kind of government action. Then again, maybe it’s all part of a broader anti-environmentalist backlash by libertarians and pro-business conservatives – we’ve had some GD threads on that already.
None of which has anything to do with gay marriage . . . which is the point, I guess. There’s no apparent connection between Kunstler’s views on homosexuality and his views on anything else.
He sounds like a full on nutbar to me. One of those rather sad people who have a persecution complex with regard to the opposite sex–I always think that is the most confusing kind of bigotry, because damn! the other sex makes up half the population! That’s an awful lot of people to utterly despise, whether it’s men or women.
Well, of course, that’s a matter of opinion. I don’t think it’s true, myself. Society has made huge strides in just a few decades, and I don’t see us sliding backwards, though it’s possible. There will always be plenty of bigots, but I do believe homophobia will eventually become as unacceptable as sexism or racism. Though I guess it does depend on your definition of “wholesome” and also “homosexual behavior.” I mean, if we’re talking about S&M leather bars, then probably not. If we’re talking about two totally non-threatening gayboy A&F models getting married and adopting a kid, that’s a totally different thing.
That’s another tricky question. I think it’s undeniable that, generally speaking, gay male culture is more promiscuous than straight male culture, but is that due to gayness or maleness? Since lesbians aren’t particularly known for promiscuity, I’d go with #2 myself. The same goes for the “predatory overtones” thing, whatever the hell that means exactly. I think it has more to do with this guy’s capital-I Issues than anything else.
Um. I–I don’t know what to say. Words fail me. How could anyone take that seriously? It sounds like something out of the Onion. Is this guy for real? I don’t know that there is a particular feminist movement to legalize gay marriages, first of all. It’s probably true that there’s a positive correlation between supporting gay rights and being a feminist (and that goes both ways) but it’s hardly surprising–we’re both fighting the same enemy (and I’m not talking about heterosexual men, for any paranoid guys who may be reading this.) Secondly, how the hell would legalizing gay marriage “corral” anyone into a “gay ghetto”? This argument really reminds me of those people who seem to believe that homosexuality is so damn fun that if you don’t run the immediate risk of being murdered/ostracized/discriminated against you’ll instantly turn to a life of gay lovin’. How are women going to make men into homosexuals? Again, this seems to be getting far deeper into this guy’s personal issues than I really want to deal with.
A woman I knew once told me the story of a gay male friend of hers (since dead of AIDS), who, living in New York in the early '80s, by his own account, had an average of 1,000 sex partners a year. She couldn’t believe it – she pointed out to him, that would be more than three a day, right? He thought about it a moment and said, yes, that’s about right. (Generally he picked them up in adult film arcades.) And then there are the “glory holes” – you ladies might not be familiar with them, but all us guys are. You might find one in any public men’s room: a small, waist-high perforation in the partition separating two toilet stalls. This hole was bored by somebody, with the intention of facilitating completely anonymous gay sex: One guy will insert his penis into the g-hole, and the other will suck it or whatever. Thus two men are able to have a kind of sexual contact without getting to know each other, without learning each other’s names, without even seeing each other’s faces.
I got to thinking about this, and I wondered: What if women were as urgently horny as men are? Would we straight guys conduct ourselves in such a disgusting, hedonistic, promiscuous fashion, if the world were full of straight or bi women who were willing to relate to us on exactly those terms? Would we fuck unseen women through opaque partitions? Would we make use of 1,000 or more female sex partners in a year? Would we go to highly charged mixed-gender clubs where everybody dances up a sweat, does lots of drugs, and has orgies of fornication in the dark corners?
Yes.
No question.
Without hesitation.
The male sex drive might not be any more powerful than the female sex drive, but it is definitely more urgent. Women, straight or gay, are not as horny as men, straight or gay. A great pity it is, and one of life’s little abominable cruelties – but if women were as horny as men, nobody would ever get any work done.
The gay lifestyle (at least, the extreme promiscuous version of it) is what you get when you take the urgent male sex drive, and synergize it with other urgent male sex drives.
Sometimes I wish I could work up an interest in gay sex. 1,000 partners a year! It makes me so fuckin’ jealous! But we are what we are . . .
None of my gay friends are promiscuous. There is one fairly well-known promiscuous gay guy on campus, but he’s shunned because he’s a shallow, obnoxious creep.
Dunno about that. If I were gay, I would want to marry the man I loved for the same reason that in real life I would want to marry the woman I love–as a form of locking him/her down and adding some sort of (if only perceived) binding between the two of us. So essentially it comes down to a matter of selfishness.
While I would admit that gays must be more politically conscience of such aspects of their life than must I, I would not doubt that for many the political angle may be their current chief concern. But, as I do not believe that the thought processes of gays to be all that particular alien to mine, were such political issues not so prevalent I am sure that the desire to get married upon finding that special someone would be just as strong in them.
I was never certain about this whole thing. I have always been told that men are wild, horny, pigs and such. Similarly, I have always been told that teenagers being “teenagers” was just a matter of their age and raging hormones and such.
Personally, I have never felt this immense sexual craving–at least not on any similar scale to what other men evidence. And so far as I have ever been able to tell, when I was a teen I acted no differently nor felt any particularly different urges than I had previous nor following that time period.
As such, I still feel that a lot of this is people expecting such behavior and as such not reprimanding the people for acting this way. And most people knowing they can get away with it, then proceed to act accordingly.
On top of this, then, I would suggest upbringing. Boys and girls are raised differently. It annoyed the heck of me once when my uncle chided his daughter for playing rough with her sister because “girls shouldn’t act that way.” Boys are encouraged to play games that emphasize the desire to compete and to win. Girls are encouraged to play house and look pretty.
So I would have to wonder if the male sex drive is less a product of actual physical impulses, and more with the desire to go out and enjoy the pillages of war (i.e. sex and sexual domination) as trained into us by our parents.
Or, it is simply a matter that I have less of the guy gene than most…?
I would never describe this person as politically liberal. I hate to see an articulate mind become so twisted. He appears to be both ignorant and paranoid.
Rule #1 in the Liberal’s Handbook: You are required to respect a majority of the people.
