What is homosexuality?

Asking the question nobody really wants to answer.

The scourge of monkeypox throughout the world has underscored, in an unanticipated sort of way, a timeless question that precisely nobody is interested in talking about: What, exactly, is homosexuality? What are the precise physiological progenitors of same-sex attraction? What exactly is happening there? We know why heterosexuality exists—because it propagates our species and we’ve been ordered towards it due to millions of years of evolution—but how do you explain the behaviors and desires of homosexuality given that they are quite obviously so plainly maladaptive to the dictates of evolution?

The standard explanation for several decades has been that homosexuality is a “normal” sexual orientation, and that gay people are experiencing nothing more than a “normal” variation along a “spectrum” of sexual desire. Nobody really seems able to explain what this means, and in any case it seems to me that this whole conceit of normality has been exposed as rather hollow in the wake of the monkeypox outbreak. This mini-pandemic, as you may be aware, is being driven almost entirely by gay male sex. Data in the New England Journal of Medicine last month, which is corroborated by international data, identified a whopping 98% of cases as occurring in “gay or bisexual men.” Among the identified cases, “the median number of sex partners in the previous 3 months was 5 partners,” which is to say that the median number of partners among the near-majority gay patients in this study was, over the course of 12 weeks, about as much as the average U.S. male has in a lifetime.

Plainly this outbreak could be very quickly suppressed if gay men simply stopped engaging in this kind of manically frenzied, very risky sexual behavior. And yet pretty much nobody seems to think they’re capable of that. The New York Times last month, in a lengthy report on the messaging around the monkeypox outbreak, quoted a longtime AIDS activist as saying: “Telling people not to have sex or not to have multiple sex partners or not to have anonymous sex is just a no-go, and it’s not going to work.” That’s incredible. Meanwhile, Joseph Osmundson, a “a queer health advocate and clinical assistant professor of biology at New York University,”suggested to Vox last week that gay sex was not the driver of this outbreak; rather it was “structures globally that have led to vaccines, tests, and treatment all existing for a virus and yet being almost entirely inaccessible.” As he put it: “Gay sex is a fact of life. Gay sex exists on planet Earth, you will never change that, whether you want to or not.” Which I think is his way of saying that gay men are not going to stop their dangerous and reckless sexual habits even when that behavior is plainly linked to the spread of a pustulant communicable disease. And California State Sen. Scott Weiner claimed last month that “lecturing people not to have sex isn’t a public health strategy,” that it “won’t stop monkeypox,” and that what gay men need is “vaccination, testing & education.”

This is truly remarkable stuff. Are we supposed to believe that gay men are simply, utterly incapable of not hooking up with a bunch of random people every week, even just temporarily? The messaging around this could very easily stipulate that this isn’t a permanent thing, it’s only until the outbreak is under control and/or a vaccine or whatever is in wider distribution. This is absolutely low-commitment, no-burden stuff, the kind of sexual discipline healthy, normal, functioning adults should be able to shoulder with virtually no issues whatsoever. So why are we expected to believe that this is simply not possible for gay men? What is going on here?

This just brings us back to our earlier, critical question: What is homosexuality? How do you qualify a “sexual orientation” the participants of which are apparently just completely incapable of regulating their own sexual desires even in the face of what is quite honestly a disgusting and repellant viral outbreak? There are a number of possible answers here, one of them being that gay advocates like those quoted above simply have a very low opinion of the gay men for which they’re nominally advocating. Maybe that’s true. But this seems to be a common theme throughout much of gay advocacy—that a critical feature of homosexuality is its rapaciousness and relentlessness and the incapacity of its people to really control their sexual appetites in any meaningful way. If that wasn’t clear before, it certainly seems clear in the wake of the monkeypox crisis.

So I ask again: What is homosexuality? Is it actually a “normal” “sexual orientation,” analogous to heterosexuality in every way but the one way? Or is it something different—does the condition of same-sex attraction, particularly in males, inevitably bring with it a set of behavioral pathologies that are radically different from heterosexuality? If so, why?

These are important, meaningful questions. Somehow I don’t expect our “public health” experts are going to be asking or answering them anytime soon. And in any event they’re probably going to have their hands busy with monkeypox cases for the foreseeable future.