SEXING THE FUTURE

February is LGBT History Month in the UK, with hundreds of events taking place across the country to promote awareness of the contribution to society of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

In a culture that has, until recently, persecuted queers and suppressed us from public life, this reclamation of hidden LGBT history is a welcome and much-needed historical correction. But history is about the past. What about the future?

As we progress towards a post-homophobic society, how will this transition to understanding and acceptance affect the expression of human sexuality?

If we evolved into an enlightened society where the differences between hetero and homo no longer mattered, what would this mean for the future of same-sex desire and queer identity?

We already know, thanks to a host of sex surveys, that even in narrow-minded, homophobic cultures, many people are born with a sexuality that is, to varying degrees, capable of both heterosexual and homosexual attraction: witness how same-sex relations flourish in single-sex institutions like schools, prisons and the armed forces.

Research by Dr Alfred Kinsey in the USA during the 1940’s provided the first major statistical evidence that gay and straight are not watertight, irreconcilable sexual orientations. He found that sexuality is, in fact, a continuum of desires and behaviours, ranging from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. A substantial proportion of the population is somewhere in the middle, sharing an amalgam of same-sex and opposite-sex feelings.

In Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948), Kinsey recorded that 13% of the men he surveyed were either mostly or exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. Twenty-five per cent had more than incidental gay reactions or experience, amounting to clear and continuing same-sex desires. Altogether, 37% of the men Kinsey questioned had experienced sex with other males to the point of orgasm, and half – yes half! – had experienced mental attraction or erotic arousal towards other men (sometimes transient and not physically expressed).

The Kinsey research has since been criticised as out-of-date and unrepresentative. The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (2000) found that around 9% of UK men and women have had a sexual experience with a person of the same sex; although the survey authors admit this is probably an underestimate because many people are still reluctant to reveal their homosexuality.

The possibility that individuals could share a capacity for both hetero and homo feelings is an idea supported by the anthropologists Clellan Ford and Frank Beach.

In Patterns of Sexual Behaviour (1965), they noted that certain forms of homosexuality were considered normal and acceptable in nearly two-thirds of tribal societies (49 out of 76) surveyed from the 1920’s to the 1950s. They also recorded that in some aboriginal cultures, such as the Keraki and Sambia peoples of Papua New Guinea, all young men entered into a same-sex relationship with an unmarried male warrior, sometimes lasting several years, as part of their rites of passage into manhood.

Once completed, they ceased all homosexual contact and assumed sexual desires for women. If sexual orientation was totally biologically pre-programmed, these men would have never been able to switch to homosexuality and then to heterosexuality with such apparent ease.

“Gay identity is largely the product of anti-gay repression. It is a self-defence mechanism against homophobia…”

This led Ford and Beach to deduce that homosexuality is fundamental to the human species, and its practice is substantially influenced by social mores and expectations.

The evidence from these two research disciplines – sociology and anthropology – is that the incidence of heterosexuality and homosexuality is not fixed and universal, and that the two sexual orientations are not mutually exclusive. There is a good deal of fluidity and overlap.

What’s more, although sexuality may be significantly affected by biological predispositions – such as genes and hormones – other causal factors appear to include childhood experiences, social expectations, peer pressure and moral values. They channel erotic impulses in certain directions and not others. An individual’s sexual orientation is thus influenced culturally, as well as biologically.

We know that even in intensely homophobic cultures, like Nazi Germany and fundamentalist Iran, a sizeable proportion of the population experiences both same-sex and opposite-sex arousal. This evidence comes from research that records consciously recognised desires. At the level of unconscious feelings – where passions are often repressed, displaced, sublimated, projected and transferred – it seems probable that very few people are 100% straight or gay. Most are a mixture, even if they never physically express both sides of the sexual equation.

This picture of human sexuality is much more complex, diverse and blurred than the traditional simplistic binary image of hetero and homo, so loved by straight moralists and – more significantly – by many lesbians and gay men.

If sexual orientation has a culturally-influenced element of indeterminacy and flexibility, then the present forms of homosexuality and heterosexuality are unlikely to remain the same in perpetuity. As culture changes, so will expressions of sexuality.

In a future non-homophobic society, more people are likely to have gay sex but fewer people will identify as gay. This is because the absence of homophobia makes the need to assert and affirm gayness redundant.

Gay identity is largely the product of anti-gay repression. It is a self-defence mechanism against homophobia. Faced with persecution for having same-sex relations, the right to have those relationships had to be defended – hence gay identity and the gay rights movement.

But if one sexuality is not privileged over another, defining oneself as gay (or straight) will cease to be necessary and have no social relevance or significance. In plain Tatchell-speak: the need to maintain sexual differences, boundaries and identities disappears with the demise of straight supremacism.

Homosexuality as a separate, exclusive orientation and identity will begin to fade (as will its mirror opposite, heterosexuality), as we evolve into a sexually enlightened and accepting society. The vast majority of people will be open to the possibility of both opposite-sex and same-sex desires. They won’t feel the need to label themselves (or others) as gay or straight because, in a non-homophobic culture, no one will care who loves who.

This article first appeared in the Comment is Free section of the Guardian newspaper’s website on 14 February 2008. Click here to view the original.