We should be tolerant and fair to LBGT persons.
I’m just saying that celebrating their lifestyle is not helpful, because they add no value to any culture.
Sure they do – they work just as hard as anyone else, they work as doctors and teachers and engineers, they contribute greatly to the creative arts, and they raise children and have families. They contribute to society and culture in pretty much the same ways as straight people do.
Were you under the impression that gay people do nothing but have gay sex?
I meant solely becausethey are gay. You don’t have to be gay to be a doctor, teacher or engineer.
For the sake of argument I’ll agree that gay is a genetic trait. What value does that trait, alone, add?
Yu don’t have to be straight, either. What value does that trait add to culture?
So? No one benefits society and culture solely by being straight, either. Reproducing doesn’t benefit society and culture unless the offspring is raised to be a contributing member of society.
The same as being straight – nothing on its own. When matched with hard work, compassion, honesty, and other positive straights, then both traits can add much to society.
And what value do homophobic bigots add to any culture?
The first I recall was Superman: The Animated Series. When the commissioner of Metropolis’ police force was injured, her girlfriend was at the hospital. I’m not sure a kid would have picked up on that, though.
You mean, between humans and extraterrestrials, right? 
you should find one, and ask her/him
Well, taking the question at face value, there’s a bunch of research on human evolution that suggests that low but nonzero prevalence of homosexuality in early human societies may have helped us survive as a species, because it provided a minority of adults who had close family ties with the offspring of other adults but were not diverting resources to support offspring of their own. So there’s that.
The more important underlying question, though, is Why should a particular trait have to “add value” in order to be represented in a TV show? There are cartoons that depict people with mustaches or sandals or glasses, for instance: what “value” does the trait of having a mustache or wearing sandals or wearing glasses add?
Homosexuals, like glasses-wearers and fat people and tall people and old people and beautiful people, should be represented in some subset of fictional characters merely because those people exist and are part of the world. A screenwriter doesn’t need any alleged “value” in any particular trait to justify simply depicting a diverse population of people the way they happen to be.
You can just as easily ask what value does opposite sex pair bonding add? These days scientists are finally starting to be a bit more honest and unbiased about reporting what they observe in nature, and it turns out scientists have been denying or censoring anything that didn’t conform to the idea that opposite sex pair bonding was somehow crucial to a species’ fitness. Sexual reproduction is one thing, pair bonding, in species the have it, is all over the place.
Here’s an interesting documentary I watched the other day on YouTube about it.
In nature, it’s perfectly acceptable for males and females to hate or ignore each other, get together once a year to bang out a kid, and go back to ignoring each other. Lots of species see no particular value in being straight, or forming mommy daddy pair bonds.
The human species could carry on just fine with no straights. Being straight doesn’t provide any intrinsic value to a species. Being gay or straight doesn’t determine your value, nor should it have to prove it does.
This ridiculous conspiracy theorizing really doesn’t add credibility to your view. It is a popular misconception that all traits must have some adaptive explanation. No scientist, even the most diehard adaptationist, thinks that. Were you under the impression that if evolutionary biologists acknowledged the existence of LGBT behaviors in humans or other animals, without being able to provide an adaptive account, that somehow the theory of evolution by natural selection would be in jeopardy? Or that the prevalence of anti-LGBT bigoty among scientists is higher than in the general population (it’s lower).
It’s certainly interesting if LGBT traits are or were adaptive. But nothing whatsoever hinges on that for our society. Ancestral evolutionary fitness is not our metric for what is good or bad, desirable or undesirable, acceptable or unacceptable.
I don’t think there’s any “conspiracy theory” element to it. It’s well known that early biological studies had a tendency to ignore or discount same-sex behavior in animals as a pointless aberration or unseemly irrelevance:
I think that’s all levdrakon meant by saying that scientific reporting on same-sex behavior nowadays is more “honest and unbiased” than earlier interpretations which were heavily influenced by preconceptions that such behavior was automatically “unnatural” or undesirable.
From the article that you cited,
So your point is well taken, but let’s be clear that we’re talking about the cognitive bias of scientists in prior centuries, up until maybe the 1950s. From the 1960s, the scientists themselves began to realize that they had been wrong to dismiss LGBT behavior in animals as a simple aberration. Think about where general social attitudes were in 1960 - it’s not as though evolutionary biologists were diehard reactionaries while the rest of the world embraced LGBT diversity!
Based on the timeframe of examples cited in your article it was extremely misleading for levdrakon to say:
I see. I keep forgetting that for you youngsters the last third of the twentieth century doesn’t count as part of “these days”.
People like to complain about “tokenism” and “pandering”, but they’re often complaints levied at the notion of representation at all. Like directors and writers need to do a survey of other media and get an exact tally of whether the characters in modern media adhere exactly to their country’s demographic breakdown.
Tokenism is far better than a group of people not being represented, even if it brings with it some stereotyping (i.e. the token gay is often a lisping, fashion obsessed, femmy guy of some flavor).
The pandering complaint that often goes with the “tokenism” one* is far worse, though, if for no other reason than entertainment media is pandering all the damn time. All those empty rom-coms? All those forgettable military movies you can’t remember the title of? All those gruff wish-fulfilment characters? Those are all pandering to common moviegoing demographics. And the thing is, outside of isolated genre-specific problems, these “pandering” characters aren’t really bad. The only problem with “pandering” to gay people is gatekeeping, it’s invisible to most of the complainers that they’ve seen plenty of stuff designed to pander to them.
Not to mention that there are plenty of LGBTQ+ identities and archetypes that aren’t represented at all, let alone positively or “tokened in”. I mean, I’m sure you can find most of them represented in a film that got a small debut to little acclaim at a queer film festival in Toronto or something, but not in anything anybody has ever heard of.
- I didn’t see anyone making this specific complaint in this thread, but it happens frequently enough I want to address it.
Oh no, I’m right there with you peering over my bifocals to monitor suspicious activity in the vicinity of my lawn.
1980s sitcoms definitely made widower-headed families appear much more common than it actually was.
And '60s sitcoms greatly exaggerated the number of witches, genies, martians and talking cars.
Childerns cartoons usually just have child characters. Homosexual relationships, at least obvious ones, would show couples kissing and such. So wouldnt work out.
They already show kids being close friends and anyone can guess about Peanuts Peppermint Patty and Darcy.