It’s “Pride Month,” as the reader is no doubt aware. Now a fixture of mainstream American life, it’s all but impossible to avoid the corporate-sponsored, state-sanctioned festivities that take place throughout the month of June. But with this commercialization, the original subversive intent of “Pride” has been lost in the sea of pop culture.
The destabilizing assumption of “Pride” is that homosexuality is not a choice; it’s an identity. It’s not what you do — decisions, behaviors, these can be shameful — it’s who you are. And that’s something you should always be proud of.
This was the moral force behind the original gay movement. What right does America have to judge an innate human feature that is beyond one’s control? Piggybacking off the black civil rights movement, gay agitators rode this “immutable characteristic” theory to a slew of legal victories. Pride anthems from the original “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used To It!” to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” have imbued even conservative America’s understanding of homosexuality as an anomalous, but ultimately inherent identity within human biodiversity.
The latest example comes from NBC’s “Queer Planet,” a new nature documentary showing the “rich diversity of animal sexuality.” Released in early June to capitalize off of “Pride,” the doc shows animals from penguins to lions to clownfish engaging in homosexual behavior.
“Everything you were told as a kid is wrong,” one of the “experts” slavishly claims.
“Queerness has always existed. It’s only in humans that we have such a stigma about it,” assures another.
The intent is clear.
The doc aims to reinforce the dominant narrative on homosexuality: it’s natural, it’s normal and see, even the animals are doing it. Unlike humans, animals are not free to choose “who they are” as individuals, so homosexuality cannot be a chosen behavior. It’s only human cultural, social and religious hang-ups that keep us from letting our inherent freak flags fly.
But we didn’t always think like this; homosexuality as a repressed, innate identity is an exceedingly modern cultural tendency. So it’s interesting that one of the most powerful rebuttals to this claim comes not from the traditionalist right, but from one of the left’s own leading, and most deviant, thinkers.
Michel Foucault was a sick individual. Even at the height of his fame, the mid-century French philosopher’s purported pederasty was always an open secret, but left-wing academia shielded him and expanded his influence. Despite being the most cited contemporary scholar in the humanities, you may have never heard his name — but you’ve certainly been acquainted with his radical ideas as they flowed downward in the stream of pop culture.
In “History of Sexuality,” Foucault’s feted four-volume exploration of sexuality in the West, he argues that all sexuality is a social construct. Contrary to today’s dominant view, this applied to homosexuality as well. To Foucault, homosexuality is not an identity suppressed through the ages by the Church or straight-male-patriarchy hellbent on domination. Published between the 1970s and 80s, it’s an interesting rejection of the mainline leftist view that had already taken root — but then he pulls a “hold my beer.”
Homosexuality, according to Foucault, was actually a social construct of the very powers that sought to suppress it. He traces its origins to the Victorian era chastity of 19th century Europe, where homosexuality was invented linguistically and then pathologized through institutional bottlenecks (medicine, psychology, academia etc). The purpose was supposedly to reinforce the existing power dynamic, ensuring social control with labels like “normal” and “deviant.”
Sure, whatever, fine — but the main point still holds: earlier societies did not think of homosexuality as a natural identity, They thought of it, rightly, as mere behavior. It’s something you did, not who you are.
Of course, the left knows this — but they purposefully subvert. “Queer Planet” is but the latest example.
The Obergefell catastrophe is perhaps the highest profile example. The Supreme Court ultimately decided that gay marriage fell within the bounds of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, originally intended to shield newly freed slaves from state-sanctioned discrimination based on their immutable characteristics of race. But the Court’s interpretation broadly expanded into the diversity leviathan we see today.
This was in no small part due to the arguments of scholars like Classics professor Martha Nussbaum, who long before Obergefell argued that gay marriage should become the court-mandated law of the land. In essence, Nussbaum argued that marriage distinctions were inherently discriminatory because of homosexuality in Ancient Greece. Since homosexuality was accepted there prior to Christianity, opposition today must stem from socially-conditioned religious bigotry. The argument, like the documentary, implies that homosexuality is just the natural state of things.
But the Greeks very obviously did not view “homosexuality” the way we do today. Gay relationships in the ancient world were about mentorship, passing down masculine virtues from one generation of the aristocracy to the next. They aimed to build camaraderie between soldiers, ensuring loyalty between men to the extent that they would fight and die for each other on the battlefield. As scholar Victoria Wohl argues, homosexuality in Athens was “democratic politics in sexual terms.”
In other words, homosexuality for the Greeks was something they did to preserve their way of life; it was not a natural identity. As such, it was far more regulated. Sodomy was deemed “unworthy of a free citizen,” both socially unacceptable and sometimes subject to legal punishment. Any respectable Greek scholar knows this, but will subvert it to forward a far more modern agenda.
The same goes for the left’s strange infatuation with Native American “two-spirits,” touted as the ancient precursor to the modern transgender movement. This is nothing but an updated picture of the “noble savage,” enlightened on gender diversity before the corruption of Western society took root.
“Traditionally, Native American two-spirit people were male, female, and sometimes intersexed individuals who combined activities of both men and women with traits unique to their status as two-spirit people,” an official government website inexplicably feels the need to explain. In other words, their sexual identity was defined by what they did.
This “status” itself was far different from the way we view so-called “non-binary” people today. It was a socially designated role that took on cultic significance in the tribal community. Believed to be gifted with “supernatural intervention,” their uniqueness came from the social roles this power prepared them to take on: “healers, shamans, and ceremonial leaders,” along with other “special religious roles.” Yet there’s no gender dysphoria at play, as the fundamental reality of the “male” and “female” binary still exist — as even the official page admits.
Calling this a pre-modern transgenderism would be like saying the mediums of 19th century Christian Spiritualism were in fact their own unique gender. It’s absurd, and obviously a far cry from the “trans women are women” line activists push today — but still, they push it.
The truth, as these flawed narratives clearly demonstrate, is that the spectrum of LBGTQ behavior is just that — an activity, not an immutable identity. But with “Queer Planet,” the left’s attempt to stretch the dominant narrative to ever wider frontiers gives away the game entirely.
Animals cannot formulate social identities like human beings; this much is correct — but it doesn’t prove what the left thinks it does. Rather, what it highlights is the simple fact that animals cannot inherently identify as gay anymore than they can identify as straight; they lack the human self-awareness necessary to do so.
There’s no mystical gay animal ideal uncorrupted by society. They are beasts biologically driven to certain behaviors. This may be a survivalist instinct like mating or eating, or it may be something that simply satisfies the pleasure principle. Either way, it’s a behavioral trait responding to base instinct. The ability to choose not to act on these impulses is precisely what separates us man from beast. This documentary projects an all too human social construct onto the rest of the animal kingdom.
Whatever truth there may have been to Foucault’s explanation of power dynamics a hundred years ago, it obviously doesn’t hold weight anymore. Homosexuality is a social construct, but it’s no longer meant to reinforce the norm — it’s meant to destroy it. With their corporate sponsors and government toadies, the gay movement reinforces the idea that there is no “normal,” heterosexual family formation is a patriarchal myth and that being gay is as morally acceptable as being straight. This has been the core function of the gay movement in the modern era.
It’s clear that they never wanted mere equal treatment from the powerful, as they said. What they wanted, and what they’ve increasingly achieved, is power to define what’s normal all for themselves.
