IGF CultureWatch

Will gay marriage produce more homosexuals? For many who oppose gay marriage, the prospect that it will lead more people to homosexuality is a powerful (if often unstated) reason to oppose it. They need not fear: gay marriage is unlikely to have that effect, though it will probably make it seem as if there are more homosexuals. But even if gay marriage did have the effect of increasing the number of homosexuals in the population, that would not be reason by itself to oppose gay marriage.

Gay marriage will likely affect public attitudes about homosexuality. Gays will be seen in stable, committed, long-term relationships. Those relationships will enjoy as much respect as the law can provide because they will be accorded rights, privileges, and protections equal to heterosexual marriages. They will be called marriages, both in the law and in our culture. This will provide a language of ritual in which to speak about gay relationships that is familiar to straight Americans. Gay couples will no longer be "partners," but spouses or husbands or wives. Gay couples will have engagements, weddings, and honeymoons. These words will be used, for the first time, without winks and nods, without knowing exaggeration.

We can expect, therefore, that over time gay marriage will have the effect of softening opposition to homosexuality in general. It will help alleviate some of the stigma that attaches to homosexuality.

That is not the only, or even the primary, reason to support gay marriage. The better reasons to support it are:

• to encourage long-term coupling among gay men and women,
• to reduce the individual and social miseries often associated with being single,
• to protect existing gay couples from significant legal and social disadvantage, and
• to support the children raised in gay families.

But reducing the hatred of homosexuals will certainly be a welcome consequence of recognizing gay marriages.

For some, however, this positive byproduct of gay marriage carries a significant risk. Gay marriage, in this view, will be a subsidy for homosexuality. And everyone knows that when you subsidize something you get more of it. Similarly, stigma is now part of the cost of homosexuality. Reduce the cost of something and you get more demand for it. Presto, more homosexuals.

Everything we have learned about human sexual orientation in the past half century confounds this seemingly logical conclusion. Human sexual orientation appears to be both unchosen and unchangeable. Whether it is biologically or genetically determined, or simply set at a very young age, sexual orientation does not respond to social influences designed to lead it in a different direction. Efforts to "treat" or to "convert" homosexuals have a long history of failure and no reliable evidence of success.

Further, we have no good evidence for the existence of "waverers," people whose sexual orientation is on the line between homosexuality and heterosexuality and who may be led in one direction or the other by social and personal influences. Homosexuals are not created by seduction, recruitment, or propaganda.

As conservative legal scholar and federal judge Richard Posner has concluded, homosexuality appears "to be no more common in tolerant than in repressive societies." For example, there is no evidence that the relative acceptance of homosexuality in the Netherlands and Belgium, both of which recognize gay marriage, has caused an increase in the number of homosexuals.

So gay marriage will not likely increase the number of homosexuals; it will, however, increase levels of happiness among existing homosexuals. How could that be a bad thing?

By helping to reduce the stigma of homosexuality, gay marriage will also increase the proportion of homosexuals who are open and honest about their sexual orientation. That's because the potential costs of being out - like losing a job, alienating family members and friends, and risking hate violence - will be less likely. So after gay marriage is recognized, it may well seem there are more homosexuals than before.

Perhaps, however, even if gay marriage does not increase the number of homosexuals it will increase the amount of homosexual sexual activity. Again, this would count as a significant cost of gay marriage to many who oppose it.

Would gay marriage lead to an increase in homosexual sexual activity? It is hard to say. On the one hand, we could conjecture that the stigma-reducing effect of gay marriage may lead to more homosexual experimentation, and at a younger age, by homosexuals and even by heterosexuals.

On the other hand, gay marriage may reduce homosexual activity in other ways. As I have argued, gay marriage would not be a subsidy for homosexuality in general because sexual orientation is immune to a system of rewards and punishments. But gay marriage will be a subsidy for homosexual monogamy. And everyone knows that when you subsidize something you get more of it.

So the overall effect of gay marriage may be neither a net gain nor a net loss in homosexual activity.

All of this discussion is predicated on the assumption that there is something bad about homosexuality; otherwise, there would be nothing to fear from an increase in the number of homosexuals or homosexual activity.

And the judgment that homosexuality is somehow bad rests, in turn, on essentially religious grounds. Try as they might to resist this characterization of their position, religion is what opponents of gay marriage must ultimately base their case upon.

First published on April 14, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Universities used to be storehouses of knowledge. That may still be true. But lately they seem to have become storehouses of facile ideologies and ponderous rhetoric. Take this announcement about a recent university conference, "The Media Queered":

"Since the 1960s, queer people have become increasingly visible in the media. Queer identities in community life and politics may rely in the 21st century on the prevailing media landscape. The paradoxes of visibility are many: spurring tolerance through harmful stereotyping, diminishing isolation at the cost of activism, trading assimilation for equality, converting radicalism into a market niche. A day-long symposium will explore visibility and its discontents."

None of this seems very coherent. To the extent it is coherent it seems simply wrong.

To be sure, gays and lesbians have become ever more visible in the media - television, newspapers, films - the last 35 years. This is a good thing. It has helped promote familiarity and comfort with gays. But it is bizarre to think "our community life and politics" will be limited to (or by) what is presented in the media.

It can hardly limit our community life because we see real live gays and lesbians around us every day with a wide variety of identities and ways of living. And after all, the very limited range of gay identities the media presented early on - a simpering Liberace, a bitter, sarcastic Paul Lynde - did not limit the wide range of personalities or identities actual gays and lesbians developed.

In fact, it was growing awareness of the wide range of real gays and lesbians that forced (or permitted) the media to expand beyond the limited identities (or stereotypes) they initially presented. We can expect that expansion to continue - as the media offer an ever-wider range of gay people.

And media visibility can hardly limit our politics because as more and more gays come out, other people's perception of gays will increasingly be based on their familiarity with and observations of actual gays they come in contact with and not be limited to the gay identities presented in the media.

All this should be obvious. But, typically, the academic deconstructionists or so-called "critical theorists" make two errors here. They get cause and effect exactly reversed, and they assume that representations of the world ("the text") are more important, more influential, than the world itself.

To use their own language, they "mistake the ontological priority" and they wrongly "prioritize the text" - perhaps because academics exist to some extent apart from the world and "texts" (representations) are what they know how to study. Or often not even texts but theories about texts.

Paradoxes - about anything - are big in "critical theory." They supposedly demonstrate that there are paradoxes or contradictions somehow inherent in the structure of the real world. But contradictions don't exist in the structure of reality. The world just is.

The supposed paradoxes or contradictions are the result of confusions or inadequacies in people's theories or concepts about the world. Quantum mechanics has not been reconciled with general relativity, but physicists don't say the universe contains contradictions. They know the problem is with their theories.

You would think this increasing media visibility and public acceptance of gays would be welcomed. In fact, it could hardly be puzzling or exhibit "contradictions" except to people who assumed that American society was bad and feared the acceptance of gays and lesbians because that might reduce their sense of alienation from society. Consider:

• "Spurring tolerance through harmful stereotyping." This is not paradoxical, it is simply wrong. The old presentations of Liberace or the gay character who committed suicide or died of AIDS - or complete lesbian invisibility - those were the harmful stereotypes. But the implication of The L Word that lesbians might actually be attractive? How awful! How oppressive! Or the fascist stereotype on Queer Eye that gay men might have style or a sense of humor? Oh, the horror, the horror.
• "Diminishing isolation at the cost of activism." So we should preserve isolation in order to preserve activism? But what has all our activism been for if not to diminish the legal, social, psychological, and spiritual isolation gays and lesbians once faced. Nor need acceptance inhibit activism. This supposed "paradox" is based on a complete misunderstanding of human psychology.
• "Trading assimilation for equality." Deconstructionist writing is generally turgid, but this is uncommonly opaque. In any case, the tacit assumption here is false. There is no trade-off between acceptance and equality. The full social and legal inclusion of gays in society what equality means. Nor are gays likely to lose any inherent gay qualities in the process - if they are genuinely inherent and not merely artifacts of forced inequality.
• "Converting radicalism into a market niche." Again activism and commerce are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive. The two realms are synergistic. In fact much of recent gay progress has been in the corporate and economic realm. Only someone with an uninformed, knee-jerk hostility to capitalism and business could resent this progress.

First published on April 7, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Few artists before the present era have left so clear a record of their homosexuality as Michelangelo.

The great 16th century Italian sculptor, painter and poet - styled "Il Divino" by his contemporaries - is best known to us now for a famous Pieta, his 15-foot statue of David, and frescoes in Rome's Sistine Chapel depicting scenes from Genesis and "The Last Judgment."

We could even describe the statue of the naked David with its curiously large hands, and the chapel's "Creation of Adam" with its languorous Adam reaching out toward God, as "Michelangelo's Greatest Hits."

The best place to start, though, is an early (1503-4) painting of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus. While the holy family are at the center, in the background are five young men, four of them naked, obviously more interested in one another than in the holy family. One seems to be trying to pull the cloak off the youth still wearing one. They serve no obvious purpose in the painting and seem to be there because Michelangelo wanted them there.

Mary gazes up soulfully at Jesus' face but reaches out toward his genitals. It was common in Renaissance paintings to emphasize the infant Jesus' genitals by pointing to them or placing them at the center of a painting in order to assert Jesus' full humanity - and maleness - but here Mary seems about to grasp them. It was not Michelangelo's last depiction of female attention to male genitalia.

The enormous frescoes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-12) depict scenes from the Old Testament. But between the paintings at junctures in the ceiling are some 20 well-muscled naked young men, each carefully individuated. They play no role in the biblical scenes and seem off in their own worlds - bored, scowling, joking or gesturing playfully - although one man noticing the Creation of Adam seems surprised and one glancing back at the Flood behind him looks alarmed.

The Temptation scene is particularly interesting not only for its hunky, mature Adam and decidedly female serpent, but because Eve is placed sitting in front of a standing, naked Adam, her face inches away from his crotch, just turning away momentarily to take the fruit from the serpent as if she had been interrupted while doing something else.

Two decades later, Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint "The Last Judgment" above the altar. There are an enormous number of characters surrounding a quite healthy and heavily muscled Jesus. The saved, the condemned and various demons all have physiques that would do credit to the best of today's steroid-enhanced bodybuilders.

Here the risen St. Sebastian is no willowy, agonized martyr but an extremely handsome, well-muscled youth holding in his hand the arrows that killed him. Here too St. Catherine looks over her shoulder toward the crotch of an originally naked St. Blasius, one of several elements that contemporaries found obscene and "fit for a bordello." Two male figures hugging each other toward the upper right remain unidentified.

Michelangelo never married and was never linked romantically with any woman. To the contrary, his poems and letters contain expressions of fervent affection for young men such as Cecchino de Bracci, Febo di Poggio and especially the young nobleman Tommaso Cavalieri.

The one woman Michelangelo befriended - after he was 60 - was the widow Vittoria Colona, something of a spiritual friend, and no one will be surprised to read that she had a "severe, masculine face." In one of his poems, Michelangelo described her as "a man in a woman."

Without doubt, the great love of his life was the vibrantly handsome Tommaso Cavalieri, whom he met in 1532 when he was 57 and Tommaso 23. Michelangelo wrote love letters and ardent love poems to him and in 1533 sent him a series of erotic drawings, the most famous of which depicts Zeus disguised as an eagle abducting a young Ganymede. In Michelangelo's drawing, the eagle presses its body tightly against the back of the smiling, pliant Ganymede.

Michelangelo's poems to Cavalieri were extravagant. "Your name nourishes my heart and soul filing each with such sweetness ... If my eyes had their share of you, only think how happy I would be." In another he wishes his hairy skin to be made into a breastplate for Tommaso and "Were I two slippers he could own and use as base to his majestic weight, I would enjoy two snowy feet at least."

Michelangelo was born out of his time. He would have been far happier in fifth century Athens. But he must have felt that if the Greeks could portray their gods and heroes as handsome musclemen, Christianity could too. He did not completely persuade his contemporaries, nor ours, but it is a tribute to his art that he came so close.

Many opponents of gay marriage do so on the grounds that marriage exists primarily for raising children, and that gay couples cannot satisfy this purpose. A strong version of this point holds that gay parents are incompetent to raise children, and perhaps are even dangerous to them (the "competence argument"). A milder version claims that opposite-sex married couples are optimal for child-rearing (the "optimality argument"). The competence argument is factually unsupported and contravened by the laws of every state. The optimality argument may or may not be correct, but either way is irrelevant to the controversy over gay marriage.

The competence argument asserts that children raised by gay parents, as compared to those raised by heterosexual parents, are:

• at higher risk emotionally and cognitively;
• are more apt to be confused about their sexual and gender identity; and
• are more likely to be molested.

Gays, therefore, ought not to raise children.

Since marriage includes a presumptive right to have and raise children, either through conception or adoption, gays ought to be denied marriage. The happiness and needs of gay couples do not justify putting children at risk.

If the competence argument is correct, states should bar gays altogether from parenting. Yet while judges sometimes use homosexuality as one factor among many in making custody and visitation determinations, no state categorically bars gays from raising children. Only one state, Florida, prohibits gays from adopting children. However, even Florida permits gays to raise their own biological children, to obtain custody of children, and to be long-term foster parents. In short, no state has made the policy judgment embodied by the competence argument.

In fact, the strong trend in the country is toward the relaxation of rules disfavoring gay parenting. About half of the states now recognize two-parent adoptions in which same-sex partners both adopt a child. Gay parenting is common. More than one million children are now being raised by gay parents, singly or in couples, in this country. According to the 2000 census, about one-fourth of all same-sex-couple households include children.

The available studies on the effects of gay parenting, while not methodologically perfect, seriously undermine the competence argument. While the studies may not yet prove that gays are just as good as heterosexuals at raising children, they point strongly to the conclusion that gays are at least minimally competent parents.

In a review of 21 studies of gay parenting, sociologists Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz concluded that "every relevant study to date shows that parental sexual orientation per se has no measurable effect on the quality of parent-child relationships or on children's mental health or social adjustment." The minor observed differences between children raised by gay parents and those raised by straight parents "either favor children raised by lesbigay parents, are secondary effects of social prejudice, or represent "difference' of the sort democratic societies should respect and protect." While more work must be done to shore up these conclusions, a strong provisional judgment can be made that the competence argument is factually baseless.

A milder version of the child-rearing objection to gay marriage maintains that even if gays should not be completely barred from parenting, married heterosexual couples should be strongly preferred. This optimality argument holds that, all else being equal, children do best when raised by a married mother and father.

In contrast to the competence argument, there is at least some empirical basis for the optimality argument. There is substantial evidence that children raised in married households are on average happier, healthier, and wealthier than children raised by single parents or by unmarried cohabiting parents. This probably has something to do with the legal and social support marriage provides.

Still, this is shaky empirical support for the optimality argument. There is no good study comparing children raised in married households with children raised by same-sex couples. And, because gay marriage is forbidden, there is no study comparing children raised by opposite-sex married couples with children raised by same-sex married couples.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that opposite-sex married couples provide the optimal environment for child-rearing. That is still no argument against gay marriage. First, even if a primary purpose of marriage is to facilitate child-rearing, it is not an indispensable purpose, as the many childless married couples can attest.

Second, gay marriage won't take any children from mothers and fathers who want to raise them. Consider: there is no shortage of children in the country. There are not enough married couples to raise them all. That's why states allow sub-optimal parenting by singles (gay and straight) and unmarried couples (gay and straight). Almost everyone agrees these sub-optimal arrangements are better than orphanages or foster care, where the outcomes for children are often terrible.

No serious person advocates removing all children from gay parents. So whether or not gay marriage is allowed, children will continue to be raised by gay parents. The only question is, Will these children be raised in homes that may enjoy the protections and benefits of marriage? If it's better for children to be raised by a married opposite-sex couple than by an unmarried opposite-sex couple, it would surely be better for children to be raised by a married same-sex couple than by an unmarried same-sex couple. That's the relevant comparison, not the comparison of married straight couples to gay couples.

If it's really concern for children that's motivating opponents of gay marriage, they ought to rethink their conclusion. They should be pounding the table for gay marriage.