Firstly, I beg that the impatient folk waiting for me to get to a point with which they can disagree might bother to lend me their ears rather than their fervent beliefs. The best way to understand anything about humans is to look at history, especially cultural history. Look at the views people had, look at all the other religions in the world, but before you start, put away your assumptions. Put away the idea that there is right and wrong. Put away any concepts you may have of a “natural order.” At the very least, it is important that you put away the idea that any assumptions or intuitive interpretations you make will be right. Now, please let me show you some history. Human history starts with where humanity started, which in turn has a story of its own. Even if one do not “believe” (a misuse of the word if ever there was one, but that’s a subject for another day) in evolution, one must recognize that humans share roughly 98.4% of their DNA structure with chimpanzees and bonobos, the latter of which it is often theorized actually possess even more shared DNA with us. Now, some may ask, what the hell is a bonobo and what does it have to do with San Francisco? The bonobo is a close cousin of the chimpanzee, and its relation to San Francisco is the significance of bonobos’ natural behavior to what is natural behavior for humans. Before delving too deeply into that behavior, let me stress my connection between bonobos and humans based purely on DNA. Behavioral Genetics, a branch of scientific study which has recently caught my interest via the book Born That Way by William Wright, has illustrated that no aspect of human behavior is without the influence of our DNA. Reared-apart twin studies even suggest that up to 60% of our behavior, preferences, and habits are strongly influenced by DNA. Now, humans can always rebel against their programming, but they are only as flexible as their genes can allow them to be. A certain form of a gene exists that increases likelihood of risk-taking, due to its effect on structures in the brain and their reaction to certain stress- , fear- , and excitement-inducing chemicals released when humans are exposed to high-risk situations. Without that form of the gene, it will at the very least be harder for an individual to work up the courage to partake in risky activities, but they might very well still partake; however, they cannot enjoy it like those with the increased risk-taking form of the gene because they cannot change the structure of their brain (so far as current modern technology and most current laws surrounding medical practice both currently decree). Because DNA is so ubiquitous in life-forms on earth, and has such profound effects on their behavior, we can easily deduce that DNA is at the core of what makes behaviors “natural” in the world. DNA is the blueprint off of which our brain structures are built, and off which various other structures in the body are built that interact with our environment and in turn dictate what chemicals and proteins reach our brain and are interpreted, sometime changing the brain in notable ways. Chemistry is thus the basis for our behavior, both in environmental effects on the brain and the hereditary behaviors that are less flexible. Now, with DNA that is 98.4% shared with bonobos, we can easily deduce that there are some serious similarities between both parties not just in physiology (which is why chimps and bonobos are used in medical research) but in behavior, intelligence, and awareness (which is why many animal rights people get so angry about that research). Natural behaviors for bonobos are very interesting. Rather than being violent like many other apes, including common chimpanzees, bonobos prefer to resolve conflict through sexual intercourse whether the conflict be between members of the same sex or the opposite sex. Sexual relations between bonobos occur in order to greet each other, bond, exchange favors such as sexual intercourse in exchange for food (prostitution is not only the oldest profession in the world, but perhaps the first to evolve in other species?) resolve conflict, and reconciliation after conflict. The sexual practices include: oral sex, masturbation (mutual and alone), frottage, tongue kissing, and face-to-face mating––and these practices are recorded to occur between not merely a male and a female, but also female and another female, and/or a male and another male. There are also no apparent taboos concerning incest, or age gaps. Bonobos are not unique in showing examples of homosexual/bisexual behavior. Elephants, chimpanzees, some species of whale and dolphin, and even penguins: all show instances of homosexuality and sometimes even monogamous homosexual relationships. These happen naturally all across the animal kingdom. Bonobos, however, with their close evolutionary and/or genetic relations to homo sapiens, provide a unique vantage point for understanding human sexual relations, and how truly natural the taboo truly is. Now I’ll really get to the point. Homosexuality is not only natural, but most likely due to a particular arrangement of genetic factors. I am not suggesting that there is any “gay gene” by any means. Recently in Scientific American: Mind’s article “The Character Code” a gene was discussed that influenced the ability of people to cope with tragic events in their lives. It has been discovered in two forms: a longer version with more nucleotides, and a shorter, less adequate one. People who inherit the longer both parents are best able to bounce back from tragic events, whereas those who inherit the shorter version of the gene from one or both parents are more likely to find tragic events harder to overcome, making them more susceptible to depression. Consider a gene or a collection of genes that may make people attracted to the pheromones of another person. A longer or shorter version of the gene may influence the degree to which a person prefers people of the male or female sex. This encourages the idea that people, as the (in)famous Dr. Kinsey wrote, “do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories... The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.” That’s why I prefer his continuum of sexual orientation which scales from zero (exclusively heterosexual) to six (exclusively homosexual) with an extra category “x” for people who are asexual. Most people, according to Kinsey, are somewhere in between, their preferances leaning more strongly toward one sex, but still attracted to the other to some extent. People who are not exclusively of one sexuality or the other, but are not exactly in the middle, are more likely to not recognize their attraction, deny their attraction, or simply never act upon their attractions because of personal beliefs and/or societal pressures. “But,” one might think, “the natural forms of sexual behavior of humans are not so taboo-free as those of bonobos! We are not apes who freely fornicate at every opportunity! We have civilized societies wherein that sort of stuff is not to be accepted.” Now, I move forward in my little drabble concerning history. Look at the history of human civilization and tell me that humans do not naturally have some predisposition to every form of sexual behavior enacted by bonobos, plus some unique variations of our own? That beloved icon of western civilization that was the Roman Empire practiced homosexuality, orgies, and pedophilia with gusto. The Kama Sutra discusses relationships in and out of wedlock between men and women, women and women, and we can only guess what has been lost over time to censorship and questionable copying practices. Japan has traditions of homosexuality far back into its history where a samurai would not have been considered terribly unusual for having a romantic tryst with a theater boy. Various tribes of Native Americans considered transgendered people holy and allowed them to marry whomever they might wish, and/or found same-sex relationships quite permissible. One might ask what purpose sexual attraction to members of the same sex might provide on an evolutionary basis. How are the demands of nature served by this quirk? Surely if people are not engaged with the opposite sex, they are not breeding, which is not beneficial to the creation of offspring, which in turn does not help the survival of the species, right? Wrong. According to the Kinsey report, few humans are exclusively homosexual, which means that many of those attracted to the same sex are also likely to have partners of the opposite sex some of the time, and since the majority of people seem to be primarily heterosexual with some degree of variation, they will most likely pick a long-term life parter of the opposite sex despite having a few homosexual trysts. In early human history, wherein condoms were not easily accessible, that the likelihood of offspring creation still was not bad. Also, there are simply times that one does not want to have a baby, and thus same-sex relations could ease sexual tension that might otherwise cause either inconvenient pregnancy or increased frustration between community members. The Greeks showed especial fondness for this, and despite being married to women (who, especially in Athens, for the longest time were thought of as not being human, but instead as animal-level-intelligence beings men copulated with in order to create children––no wonder their gods had a penchant for bestiality) had more romantic loving relationships of not-terribly-monogamous-or-commonly-very-long-term sorts with other men. Humanity put its own limitations in place by establishing monogamy, but even that practice is not ubiquitous in the population. There are those who never experience sex or sexual feelings, there are those who never settle down and have no need to, there are those who take a life-long partner but maintain an “open” relationship. Human sexuality is as natural as human emotion, and varies similarly from person to person. There are harmful and distorted varieties visible in pedophiles, rapists, and psychopaths, but science has already recognized such harmful/destructive variants to be the products of emotional disorders and or diseases of the mind. Homosexuality is not a disease or a symptom of mental/emotional disorder, as the academic and scientific communities of psychology now fully recognize (especially after the Kinsey Reports and more recent studies). Also, monogamy is a fairly recent evolution in humans, and mostly seems to be a matter of practicality meant to serve civilization’s need to be sure of an heir’s origin, rather than natural preference, otherwise why would adultery even be an issue? As long as there has been record of monogamy, there has been record of its voluntary violation. The strong emotions people feel in opposing homosexuality are in reaction to the idea that the actions carried out in relations between members of the same sex are if not “unnatural” than certainly “not normal,” but normalcy is even more of an illusion than “natural.” To quote Douglas Adams, “There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, at the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed out perspective tends to be.” Humanity itself is abnormal. The threat people see to their ideas of normality is the threat that there is something they do not believe in that is going to be forced upon them, and they are for whatever reason disgusted and/or deluded about the beliefs in general: “Because other people like people of the same sex, our people might begin to believe it to, but that does not fit in with our culture.” It is natural human xenophobia. It is as natural as the male chimpanzee fighting off a strange male. We are not bonobos, but I can hope we are more civilized than chimpanzees, and will not so violently reject those who are not like us. We don’t have to have sex with them, but we should not call them names either, especially not names that we ourselves do not contemplate the depth of. “unnatural” “wrong” “immoral” “not normal” “not right”: all of these things, with the exception of the first which I hope I dispelled before more directly combating the others, are illusion. It was normal in ancient Greece for men to love other men, or even for men to love young boys. It was similarly normal in Rome. There has always been quiet awareness of sexual relations between women, whether hinted at in such literature as works by Voltaire, or the Memoirs of Jaques Cassanova de Seingalt, or even the Kama Sutra; such asides were not completely outside the norm, and let us not forget the ancient Greek poet Sappho, the ilse of Lesbos, or the girls Artemis so jealously guarded from the hands of men, that she might have them herself and so that when Zeus disguised himself as Artemis and impregnated one of the girls, Artemis then flew into a jealous rage. The definition of “normal” is an inconstant one; it is in constant flux with the mind with which a person views the moment. As for calling anything abnormal wrong or immoral: it is simply slander used against an enemy who may not even want to be your enemy. I think I have said all that I can say. I hope you have enjoyed this bit of history.