Once again, mommy is to blame. Or sometimes your auntie. Or both. Collective multiple orgasms convulsed the media this year worldwide, including some in South Africa, when the results of yet another scientific study into ”the cause of homosexuality” were unveiled. Male homosexuality, that is, not lesbianism. The choice of focus is wearily familiar, and significant. I’ll return to it.
This latest enrichment of human knowledge emanated from the University of Padua in Italy — an old and highly respected institution — and was published three months ago in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.
The Padua researchers interviewed about 100 ”straight” men and 100 ”gay” men, selected from Italy’s bars and clubs. Academic research is often lonely and laborious, but that part sounds thrilling — although the study does not divulge the sexual preferences of the researchers.
The men were asked about their closest relatives. Female relatives of the gay men had more children on average than the female relatives of the straight men, the study found. And the gay men had more fellow homosexuals in their maternal family.
”We have found that there might be a set of genes that, in males, influences homosexuality but in females increases fecundity,” research leader Andrea Camperio-Ciana announced. But he conceded that these findings, taken together, account for only 21% of male homosexuals, ”leaving 79% of the causation still a mystery”.
For some of us, the mystery has rather been why anyone should find the matter worth researching at all. Or, to pose the same conundrum differently, scientists have not quite so enthusiastically pursued an equivalent question: ”What is the cause of heterosexuality?” Nor have hot-shot investigative journalists delved into this.
But for decades now, sexual theorists (not scientists) have been arguing that sexuality is primarily a matter of what people do with each other. Hopefully they’re all consenting adults and of the same species. Whatever the case, the theorising I’m referring to amounts to saying that sexual acts are simply that; they are not also definitions of who you are (that is, of identity).
Quite why the work of these theorists — published, voluminous and easily available — remains by the fourth year of the 21st century unknown to most of the planet’s media I cannot guess. Nor do I know why the scientists who robustly investigate ”the cause of homosexuality” also appear oblivious of groundbreaking theorising on human sexuality that took off in the second half of the 20th century, especially in Britain, France, Italy and the United States.
It’s also been around in one way or another (writing and painting, for example) since about the time humankind got off all fours and started walking upright.
Beyond being what individuals do, sex — according to this work — is most helpfully understood as a political, social and cultural matter. Consider merely the vastly different understandings of marriage and heterosexuality through the centuries in different cultures.
In some places during certain periods, marriage was a way of ensuring wealth stayed (via inheritance) in the ”right” hands. It was also of great political importance. Who kings and queens married meant sex became a matter of power and politics.
But in different places at various times, who you have sex with, and how, and whether or not you get married, were and are entirely personal choices. They are not, even today, choices as free as we might wish, though.
Then there is the distinctly modern penchant for stigmatising those who prefer having sex with people of their own gender. The rulers of Sparta — not exactly sissies — thought it an excellent idea that their soldiers pair off sexually and romantically. This improved both loyalty within the army and mutual protection among soldiers (it’s not nice seeing your lover sliced to pieces in front of your eyes).
That’s just one example. In Turkey, Latin America and many other places today, two men engaging in consensual anal sex or fellatio are not necessarily labelled ”homosexual”. The penetrator or the one being sucked is often married and considered heterosexual (on solid foundations, given what he also does with his wife). The other male partner might be thought of as ”homosexual” or ”feminine”, but not always.
And, when you get right down to it, what’s going on when a penis is in a vagina or a mouth (male or female) or an anus (male or female) or anywhere else? Bill Clinton’s answer might well be that he’s doing the penetrating and is the active one; his partner passively receives his glorious manly energy.
I have never understood how anyone with the slightest first-hand experience of sex can think in terms of who’s active and who’s passive during sex, and then attribute fixed identities to people. Stereotyping tells us the active ones are the real men; the passive ones are women and some homosexuals.
But even hardcore porn — not celebrated for its realism — is more honest than that: the bucking and vociferous female broncos on celluloid come (so to speak) closer to the reality, which is that both partners are active, whether it’s vaginal intercourse or blow jobs or anything else consensual.
None of my examples is new. And you can find many others in writers such as Gore Vidal, Alan Sinfield, Jonathan Dollimore, Eve Sedgwick, Diana Fuss and, in South Africa, Mark Gevisser, Linda Ngcobo, Vera Vimbela, Gerrit Olivier … the list is very long.
But some media and scientists still think discovering a biological ”reason” for homosexuality would be a wonderful achievement.
I can’t comment on the science of the Padua study. But even to me a sample of 200 men in a strongly Catholic country seems astonishingly and dangerously small on which to base any sexual conclusions at all. The researchers don’t seem to have wondered if all the men they interviewed were telling them the truth, for example.
Certainly, if I were carousing in an Italian bar or nightclub and I saw a white-coated Camperio-Ciana heading my way, I’d either get out of the place pronto or, if he/she/it was sexy enough, I might say anything the creature wanted to hear.
Lesbians tend not to get the Camperio-Ciana sort of attention (no doubt to their relief). This is partly, I suspect, because women have usually been severely disempowered throughout history, and so men don’t always find them threatening.
Sue George’s Women and Bisexuality (1993). She uses the ”Klein Sexual Orientation Grid”, which (cultural theorist Alan Sinfield explains) asks you to say, on a scale of one to seven, regarding past, present and ideal, whether you are more straight or gay according to seven things: sexual attraction, sexual behaviour, fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, self-identification and lifestyle.
”I believe this gives thousands of possible variants,” Sinfield concludes. ”There are innumerable ways, some as yet undreamt, in which we might develop our sexualities.”
So my suggestion is: fuck the scientists (metaphorically only — unless you find any who really turn you on), and go out and jol (as safely as possible).