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Gay Cosmos

Becoming Human

The indications of the place of human homosexuality in the cosmos are to be found in the material reality of human biology.

Although human beings evolved from animals in a slow step-by-step process that required millions of years, and although human beings clearly are animals, medium-sized, very long-lived mammals to be more precise, in many respects human beings are unique and in some respects very different from other forms of life. How very curious it is that, very often, the people who claim human beings resulted from a special act of creation, apart from other animals, are also the people who most often ascribe to human beings animallike attributes or who claim that human behavior should be modeled on animal behavior.

Such people often claim that gay sexuality is unnatural because gay sexuality does not follow the pattern of animal sexualness. In the past proponents of gay sexuality responded to this criticism by pointing to many examples of homosexuallike behaviors in lower animals. Indeed, some male apes will mount other males and so will male domestic animals, some seagulls seem to lead a lesbian lifestyle, and certain female amphibians actually reproduce after being mounted by another female even in the utter absence of males of the species or their sperm. Homosexuallike behaviors are common among the lower animals and can be found almost anywhere one will look for them. Pointing these behaviors out, however, is not the correct answer to those who criticize gay sexuality on this basis.

The correct answer is that human sexuality is not at all comparable to animal sexualness. Think what Sunday morning would be in the churches that criticize homosexuality as unnatural if human heterosexuality were natural to the same standard of animal sexualness, and women might go into heat at any moment or men might rut during communion. Human heterosexuality is no more like animal sexuality than human homosexuality is. Straight people do not behave sexually as animals do, and the criticism that gay people do not behave sexually as animals do must be based in ignorance or hypocrisy. Appealing to an animal model of sexual behavior does not provide evidence that gay sexuality is unnatural or inferior. Human sexuality in all its aspects is as different from animal sexualness as human language is from bird cries or monkey chatter.

Animal sexualness is a mechanism for animal sexual reproduction and nothing else.

Properly, the term "sexual reproduction" is an oxymoron. Only asexual beings can be said accurately to reproduce themselves. Human beings and other sexual animals cannot reproduce themselves. They can only produce a new individual. Unfortunately this expression, perhaps a bit of heterosexual vanity, has stuck. What gets reproduced in sexual reproduction are genes. The particular combination of genes which characterize an individual cannot be passed to the offspring in sexual reproduction.

Animal sexualness brings a fertile male and a fertile female of the same species together, and with awesome efficiency, brings sperm and ova together. Two mechanisms of animal sexualness are pheromones and so-called courtship behaviors.

Sexual pheromones are very powerful chemical substances which are emitted by individuals of one sex of a species and which are sensed, usually smelled or tasted, by individuals of the other sex of the same species. Just as hormones are chemical messages between the parts of an individual's body, pheromones are chemical messages between individuals of the same species. Other kinds of pheromones exist for other purposes such as raising alarms or marking trails.

Pheromones are imperatives. The individual exposed to the correct alarm pheromone cannot help but be alarmed. Pheromones are more than messages; they are chemical triggers. The individual cannot choose to ignore a pheromone any more than the individual's organs can choose to ignore a hormone message. When exposed to the correct sexual pheromone, a sexually competent individual cannot help but be sexually aroused and must attempt to mate.

Animal mating behaviors are sometimes called courtship behaviors, but this is example of projecting human characteristics inappropriately onto animals. Animals do not court as human beings do. The sexual behaviors of animals are wired into the animal mechanism. They include such things as calls and cries---in fireflies a particular pattern of flashes---and particular series of movements and postures. Some of these are called dances and rituals, but are of course unlike human dances and rituals.

Mating behaviors of animals usually involve an elaborate system of signs and countersigns to ensure that the individuals are of the same species, of opposite sexes, and of the age and condition required for fertility. If nothing intervenes, such as the appearance of a rival on the scene, copulation is the inevitable result of the completed courtship routine. Sometimes narrators of nature films will anthropomorphize and say something like: "With this gesture she invites the male . . . " This is nonsense. The motions of animal mating behaviors are not invitations, but commands from the body of one individual to the other.

In many species both pheromones and mating behaviors are involved in the sexual mechanism. In some species the female goes into heat and them emits pheromones and exhibits the female parts of the mating behaviors. In other species the presence of the male, his pheromones and his behaviors, induce heat in the female. Often the interaction between the sexes is complex. Barring some pathology or interference, copulation is impossible except when conception is likely. When conception is likely, copulation is virtually inevitable.

All of this may seem to be a brief for heterosexuality. Evolution has honed the sexual mechanisms of animals so near to perfection, that one must think, this is the way it was meant to be. Meant to be or not, animal sexualness serves the purpose of animal procreation very well. The point is, however, that human sexuality does not have the mechanisms of animal sexualness. It is not the force of human will nor human concepts of morality nor acts of legislatures which set human sexuality apart from animal sexualness, but the facts of human biology.

Human beings either emit no sexual pheromones or no longer respond to them. Anyone who discovers a true human sexual pheromone can count on perfume manufacturers to make him or her rich. Some perfumes are advertised as containing pheromones, but when they do, the pheromones they contain are animal pheromones. Virtually any product that the human user believes will make him or her more attractive may work. Of course the product itself does not make the person more attractive. The belief in the product, however, may give the user self-confidence and this quality may be perceived by others as attractive. This is the only way perfumes containing the pheromones of other animals can aid human romances. Pheromones are species specific. They only work on one kind of animal. If this were not so we might have mice trying to mount elephants.

Of course, some human beings do find certain smells erotic. But these are not pheromones. What smells erotic to one person may seem emetic to other persons of the same sex. A person who is not sexually aroused may emit smells that another person finds erotic. And some people are not aroused by smells at all. Those who are aroused by a smell they find erotic are perfectly capable, if they choose, of resisting the impulse to engage in sexual behaviors. Any one of these things would be sufficient to show that smells human beings find erotic are not pheromones. The smells that people find erotic are learned associations and not the chemical imperatives that animals experience.

Human beings do have courtship behaviors. But these are not the same as animal mating behaviors. Because courtship customs vary widely from culture to culture, having no common element, we know that no part of human courtship behavior is instinctive. Moreover, human beings can make mistakes in exhibiting courtship customs and yet succeed in their sexual objectives, but on the other hand may be refused by their partners even if they perform their parts accurately. Such occurrences are impossible in animal mating behaviors. Human courtship behaviors are learned and are not intrinsic parts of the human sexual mechanism.

Even if, for the moment, we restrict the discussion to heterosexual couples who practice only vaginal copulation without birth control, human heterosexuality is a very inefficient means of producing offspring in comparison to animal sexualness. If both members of the couple are in their fertile years, and even if the woman is not already pregnant, there is no way, short of modern scientific methods for a woman to know when she is fertile or for her body to convey that information to the body of her male partner. If a woman's fertile period is four out of twenty-eight days, then conception is unlikely six out of seven days that copulation may occur. Among animals, copulation occurs only when conception is possible.

But in fact, heterosexual activity occurs between human beings who are less likely to conceive than those we have just considered. Heterosexual activity occurs in human beings when one or both of the partners is too old or to young to be fertile, when pregnancy is sufficiently advanced that another conception is highly unlikely, when through misadventure or surgery or congenital defect some part of the sexual apparatus is missing or nonfunctional, when a couple deliberately employs some more or less effective method of birth control, and when the activity is other than that which results in sperm being introduced into the vagina.

Only a tiny fraction of human heterosexual activity could possibly result in conception. For this reason we will come to the conclusion that human sexuality serves some purpose that animal sexualness does not, and that this purpose is so important, is of such overriding value to the human species, that it outweighs the loss of animal reproductive efficiency.

The law of natural selection is usually stated in the forward direction: when new traits occur those that are useful (adaptive) are preserved while those which are less useful or are useless (maladaptive) are lost from the gene pool. But one can look at it the other way around: traits which are preserved and propagated in the gene pool must be more useful (adaptive) than the traits they replace. Or in other words, human sexuality replaced animal sexualness because aspects of human sexuality contribute more to the survival of the species than the sheer reproductive efficiency of animal sexualness could. Reproductive efficiency would seem to be a very valuable trait in the preservation of any species, so that it has been replaced in human beings by human sexuality indicates that human sexuality makes an extremely important contribution to human survival.

In the case of human sexuality, clearly not just one gene was changed and one trait altered, but the whole mechanism of animal sexualness was dismantled. This must have involved many changes over a long period of time. As human beings evolved we paid a high price in terms of reproductive efficiency, but the laws of evolution did not allow us to make a bad bargain. There is something in human sexuality that is more advantageous to human beings than mere reproductive efficiency.

What was it that we gained? What does human sexuality have that provides better for human survival and that animal sexualness lacks?

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