What Made Me Bisexual

I always sort of thought that most women watched porn and just didn't disclose that fact, but A Billion Wicked Thoughts has not only clarified that issue, but has explained why I would have guessed as I did:

Only a minority of women watch porn, they say, but "One particular group of women reported higher amounts of porn viewing, larger porn stashes, greater comfort with their partner watching porn, greater enjoyment of bondage, and more interest in using the Internet for porn.  Who were these women?  Self-identified bisexuals."


Oh.  I see.

And then, "On OKCupid, the pattern of bisexual women's responses to questions was distinct from straight women and lesbians- but quite similar to the responses of heterosexual men, as shown in the figure below."  In fact, their chart displays bisexual women's answers as almost the perfect midpoint between those of straight men and those of straight women.  In addition, "Among registered users on the visual porn site Fantasti.cc, 38% of the women identify as bisexual."  Actually, it looks like bisexual women are more into lesbian porn than lesbians; and, all women are WAY more into GAY PORN than anyone has ever suggested ("In Japan, almost anything homosexual can attract an all-female audience," for example) - why is this?

The authors suggest that (1) the fact that women like gay porn is not really surprising because it removes the gender dynamics that women can find distasteful and therefore that turn women off from porn; it keeps the power dynamics and hot male bodies they like; and (2) bisexual women may watch porn more like straight men because their brains are more like "straight" men's than "straight" women's brains.

Let's unpack this, because this last bit is what I draw from what they wrote rather than an explicit claim the authors make.  They talk a lot about the physical difference between the stereotypical male brain and the stereotypical female brain, but they also explain that brain structure is determined in large part by pregnancy hormone balances; while your sex organs are determined early, the bulk of brain development that might give one a taste for masculinity or femininity, as well as a toppy nature or a bottomy nature, happen later - and may happen at slightly different times.  Hormones called androgyns course through our veins during pregnancy (ultimately we're talking about estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, but depending on how much we have of each one hormone might be automatically converted by the mother's body into another).  You might have already guessed the implication of this claim: these hormones vary with every single pregnancy, so no two sexualities are ever going to be completely alike!

A fetal boy, therefore, can be subject to androgyns that trigger the development of aggressive brain structures popularly associated with men OR, at a certain point, androgyns that develop communicative, perhaps more passive brain structures - the type we find most commonly in males who identify as "gay."  They might be subject to both types, too, along the way (maybe ending up as a gay top).  The authors don't talk about women here much (they have less evidence on women because of the smaller sample set of porn-watching and searching women).


But it can be easily extended, I think, and I'll use myself as an example.  After my first trimester I had my little vagina just growing along already, but somewhere in the next 6 months I got a heavy dose of testosterone at the precise moment it would make me slightly toppy and more aggressive than your average gal.  As a byproduct of this process I am more willing than the average woman to watch porn (I got me some brain structures that react to visuals alone without as much female-associated contextual need for a story).  The fact that I respond to the sight of either kind of sex organ doesn't appear dependent on this process, though - it turns out women have a physiological reaction to graphic imagery of members of either gender even when it turns them off psychologically - what's changes is what actually has the capacity to turn me off psychologically.

The combination of my male-like search for more partners over quality partners (experience has definitely borne this one out) and my indifference to sex organs makes me closer to the hypersexual pole of my graph.  I retain more of my ability to STAY turned on psychologically by sex images of any kind, which causes me to fall right in the middle of the hetero-homo axis.  My cocktail of androgyns building up aggressive brain centers makes me more toppy. 

Now let's take the graph of my character Jackson from No Church in the Wild - a self-identified gay man who says he's grossed out by pussy. 
 

Jackson is equally interested in topping and bottoming (the authors make a point that a bottomy nature may be the result of the greatest influx of testosterone during gestation, interestingly, perhaps converted to estrogen to explain the development of female-like reward cycles).  He's not particularly hypersexual or asexual, but he is a great communicator.  In fact, as teens, I talked on the phone with the man who inspired this character almost every day (the authors note that this is very common among young girlfriends, but almost no young men talk to friends on the phone for fun).  So, it seems that an influx of feminine-making androgyns hit him later in development, enough to make him communicate in a more "feminine" way, but not so much that he came to be stimulated entirely by passivity.

None of the axes can be determined with just the development circumstances that affected the other; you need a different calculus for each one.  But it does work if you split the analysis up...and the logical conclusion would be that MOST people actually get a little bit of hormones that trigger the development of male-like AND female-like brain characteristics.

Cue lifetime obsession with the effect of androgyns on fetal development!

Hard Evidence: "Straight" Men Like Dick

At long last, Ogi Ogan and Sai Gaddam have written up a study of sexuality that takes into account anonymous online viewing habits - and, low and behold, they have confirmed that men who identify as "straight" actually look at a whole bunch of dick, but they won't admit to it without even more anonymity.

Here's the full HuffPost video on the study.

The study reviews searches and click throughs and various other means through which folks view sex online.

Men and women's tastes are ever more different that we thought, but gay and straight men's sexual tastes are ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME.  They focus heavily on images, anatomy, etc - and little/no narrative to get to the money shot.  The gender may differ.

Coming up:  what Ogan and Gaddam told me that supports the flexible sexuality theory of No Church in the Wild.

The Brave New Literary World

The writing game ain’t what it used to be.

In the old world, you wrote and hoped to dig up an agent and a publisher who’d spread what you wrote to the world.  In the new world, you can publish your random thoughts instantly from a cell phone.  And, in the new world, content isn’t just there – Rap Genius proves that.  There’s always more to say about art on the web, and there are always more people talking.

So when I wrote, it was mostly to hear what other people said about it.  I wrote because I wanted to hear from the people in the world whose sexuality flexed the same way mine did.

I wrote, briefly, a story of flexible sexuality afoot at the festivals of San Francisco.  I used real scientific studies as the basis for the characters’ discussions about sexuality.  Fifty years ago, I couldn’t have published or sold fiction with footnotes.  But my fiction is enhanced by the footnotes, I daresay – my story has oodles more color if you get the references.  And the relevance of my story is directly proportional to how accurate my readers think the book’s claims about flexible sexuality are – including AFTER they’ve looked at the original sources for my theories.

This is why Rap Genius is positioned to be the new literary frontier.  They’ve already changed how hip-hop artists display their work to the world; now it’s time for novelists to join that game.

I can give people an enhanced free preview of my work and give them the chance to decide whether they like it enough to buy the whole novel.  I never have to feel like I’ve tricked anyone into buying.

I can explain plainly what’s fiction and what’s real in my book; more than that, I can show my readers the real science and the real history I’m talking about and let them judge it for themselves.  Before Rap Genius, that would have required no less than an interactive e-book I paid someone else thousands of dollars to help me build.  Now it’s simple JavaScript, and I can crowdsource YouTube videos of the shows that are settings from the book from the actual show I attended before I wrote it - so my readers can experience more of what I experienced and wrote about.

This sets my devislish imagination aflurry – ye gods, what of a world where every book I read gave me direct links to their sources so I could tickle any tangential interest with a simple click?  What if we could know whether those sources were accurately interpreted because the source authors had commented “yay” or “nay”?  What if my readers actually managed to update my imagery with the latest and greatest photos they’d taken themselves? 

I mean, when I failed to initially explain the meaning of the world “furries” in No Church in the Wild, a generous RG editor provided a hilarious photo for me.  Wow.

Despite the many glorious fantasies I had about where this novel could go when I wrote it, I never even imagined asking for a platform to get precisely the kind of involvement and feedback I’d craved, much less get it for free.

I make a lot of bold statements and my book is only a small collection of those, but here’s one more: Rap Genius can change the art of writing books forever.  For me, it already has.

Bisexual Stats and Circumstance: Part 1

Thanks to my discovery of the BiNet USA network, I've found a new slew of evidence supporting the No Church in the Wild theory that most people are actually "bisexual"/"pansexual," like my girl Frida...



Here are the big, fun points from a San Francisco Human Rights Council report:

"According to several studies, self-identified bisexuals make up the largest single population within the LGBT community in the United States. In each study, more women identified as bisexual than

lesbian, and fewer men identified as bisexual than gay."

Consistent with my assertions that (1) there are more bisexuals than gays or lesbians in this world and (2) that women are much more likely to admit bisexuality than men.

"In 2010, a study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, based on a nationally representative probability sample of women and men in the U.S., found that among adults (5,042 respondents), 3.1% self-identified as bisexual, compared to 2.5% as gay/lesbian."  When they focused on teens, 4.9% identified as bisexual."

As the national perception of queer communities modernizes, the next generation becomes more comfortable identifying as bisexual... and the bi population *appears* to grow.

"A 2007 survey of 768 self-identified lesbians, gays, and bisexuals drawn from a nationally

representative sample of respondents found similar proportions: approximately half of LGB people self-identified as bisexual, including about one-third of the men and two-thirds of the women."

Again, women are more likely to report bisexuality than men - it's become more socially acceptable.  Given all the impediments that remain for bisexuals' coming out, that about half of "LGB" folks identify as bi tells me that the "invisible bi" population is just bloody massive.

"While bisexuality has often been considered merely a 'phase' en route to a stable gay or lesbian orientation, it is also a stable sexual orientation in itself. A longitudinal study of sexual minority women (lesbian, bisexual, or unlabeled) found that over 10 years, 'more women adopted bisexual/unlabeled identities than relinquished them.'” 

Yep, cause "bi" isn't a transition, it's a circumstance - appreciate the data backing this one up; it says to me "the longer we think about it, the more likely we are to think of ourselves as "bi." 

"Many famous people - such as Marlene Dietrich, June Jordan, Freddie Mercury, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Walt Whitman - have been labeled as lesbian or gay for their same-sex relationships, yet their long-term relationships with different-sex partners are ignored or their importance minimized."

We need icons.  The queer community needs them too.  Over the past 100 years, exclusively homosexual people needed icons and advocacy most; they are unable to find any happiness without acceptance of their "orientation" - and maybe that's why these figures came to be identified as "gay."  Yet today, gay rights movements' strides leave bisexuals in the dust.  Perhaps its time to take a hard look at history and start acknowledging the prevalence of flexible sexuality.  If we can do this, if we can establish flexible sexuality as the norm of human existence, "straight" people will lack the ability to point to differences from the "gay" community in order to discriminate against them.  We're really  all the same.

More stats to come! 

High School Gets a "Rape Culture"

As much as I thought high school sucked, I never had to deal with even a whisper of rape happening at parties around me.  Of course, I can't be sure whether that's because no one talked about being raped or because girls weren't really getting raped.

Well, just down the Peninsula at Palo Alto High School, a group of female journalism students have taken the bull by the proverbial horns - their latest publication, Verde magazine, exposes the "rape culture" that persists at "Pali":

Aside from the rude awakening that results generally from becoming aware that there is so much rape and grey rape happening at this relatively affluent high school,  it's painful to consider the numerous girls who are now scarred, but it becomes even more painful as you hear what the journalism class' follow-up surveys of students reveal.  Among other shocking findings: 

-57% of Palo Alto High School students surveyed - FIFTY SEVEN PERCENT - believed that certain women are more likely to be raped than other women because of their "promiscuous" behavior

- 26% thought if a woman gets drunk and is raped, she is responsible for what happened.

Those stats were not separated by gender.  But, ye gods, is this mentality truly the result of growing up in one of the most technologically progressive, affluent, and liberal areas in the country?  How could this happen?  How could a clear majority of students believe that promiscuity in one circumstances is a free pass for sexual assault in another?

I have one answer, and it's a sad one: These kids are spouting the exact same worldviews of Renaissance Italian nobility, of the Spanish Inquisition, of Roman Empire ideals of masculinity and gender responsibility.  The same cultures that decided it wasn't a crime to rape one's wife, even in a world of arranged marriages between strangers.  The same cultures that couldn't fathom allowing women to own property.  So, while we've managed to change SOME of the laws that supported gender discrimination in this way, we have not managed, after 2000 or so years, to correct the misconceptions about sexual responsibility that created those laws in the first place.

If I have any high school readers, please take note:  Your attire or your past behavior, sexy or boring, is never a free pass for someone to rape you.  Boys have the responsibility to control their urges no matter how you are dressed and no matter how drunk either of you is.  We can all stem the tide of unfortunate happenings in our lives with slightly less rambunctious drunkenness, it's true.  But the fact that you're drunk isn't a license to take advantage of you either.  When men respect women as equals and humans, this idea that women must take the first blow for anything that happens simply because they are one of two drunk persons evaporates.  It's important for you to recognize that you're not responsible or this, because if you think you are responsible you are demonstrably less likely to report the crime against you.  If you don't report the crime, the offender and his friends will continue to think they can freely rape all over your school.  If you don't speak up, other girls suffer - so many already have, it seems -, and that in itself should be sufficient to show you that what's happened before is not your fault.

It's a sad day in Palo Alto.

Dinah Shore and the mystery of Mariah

It's 4AM Sunday morning, and I'm walking the halls of the Hilton with four lesbians I've never met before.  Looking around, it seemed the common thing to be doing in that Palm Springs Hilton - so much so that my random group was beckoned into at least three different parties.

"Mariah"

Earlier on Saturday, I'd bitten the bullet and paid the hefty price of admission to the Hilton's "official Dinah Shore" pool party.  This was a party San Francisco would have if it were warm enough - predominantly nude queers dancing the day drinking away, almost.  From my perch at the edge of the pool, I enjoyed an excellent view of girls dancing in bathing suits, girls making out in the pool, and a slightly older new friend named Denise just letting it all hang out.  By the way, we love you, Denise.  My dear shy friend (#3 in my ages-old list of flexible sexuality fiends) even managed to make out with a random girl in front of her girlfriend.

A very kind PE teacher sitting beside me explained that a woman name "Mariah" had hooked her up...

After all that, a fruitless quest for a dispensary open at 7PM, and a nap, Shy #3 and I ventured out to meet a hot tattoo girl we'd engaged earlier at the pool at the evening's party.  By midnight the party had clearly begun to dwindle (continuing drunken lez booty dancing notwithstanding), leaving copious space for Shy #3 to scope out (but fail to game on) a "hot basketball player chick" she was into.  We followed the tattoo girl back to the Hilton to begin wandering the halls.

To find who, what? Mariah! Tattoo girl knew her too.  At 4AM, some rather annoying lez details how she's avoiding Mariah because she "wasn't working this year." This Mariah seemed to be the key to getting into anything Dinah at a reasonable price.  Google suggests this is Mariah Hanson of Club Skirts.  One of the random rooms we walked into had her in it; I know because I kept hearing people whisper "Mariah."  But I still don't know what she looks like.

Anybody know where this mystery Mariah can be found? Fifty dollar reward...

Big Gay Jesus?

The blogosphere has produced a particularly entertaining viral piece asserting that one scholar reads a fourth-century gospel to indicate that Jesus was gay.

credit: Kersplebedeb.com

So, I took it upon myself to look up the Gospel of Judas Iscariot itself and have a look-see.  Now, I can turn almost anything into a gay metaphor, but I'll be damned if I could find one even indirect suggestion in this text of any Messianic homosexual behaviors.  Still, I love the idea of Big Gay Jesus so much I've decided to explore reasons why we might suppose Jesus was gay.

1. We know Jesus lived in a Roman province, and that means the laws of his home country would not have addressed homosexual behaviors at all.  Many, if not most, Romans would be termed "bisexual" under our modern definition of the term.  You know the saying, "When in Rome..."

2. Jesus died unmarried at 32 (roughly).  Well, if you're the prophet of a religion that so strongly encourages marital procreation (ahem), how could you not be married?  There is of course the argument that he really was married to Mary Magdalene (cite: Dan Brown).  Well, you can't have it both ways, Christians!  Was he a nice married boy whose relationship was rejected by you for some unknown reason, or did he just not fancy the ladies so much?  We only hear about one woman in his life...

3. Disciples, twelve of them, all dudes.  Sounds a lot like Peter Thiel.  Did Jesus also buy an island off the coast to play with his boys?

4. The Last Supper.  Thesis: ya'll eat my body!  Frankly, that sounds like a Saturday night show in the Castro.

5. But no, seriously, there's even shit in the Bible Constantine chose for us that can be read this way.  John 21:20: Then Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus loved following; which also leaned on his breast at supper, and said, Lord, which is he that betrayeth thee?  Sounds mighty loving, there, Christ.

6.  The best excluded Gospel for our purposes, according to  US Biblical scholar Morton Smith, is a fragment of manuscript he found at the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem in 1958. What he found said in Chapter 10 of Mark (Verses 34-35):

And the youth, looking upon him (Jesus), loved him and beseeched that he might remain with him. And going out of the tomb, they went into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days, Jesus instructed him and, at evening, the youth came to him wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God.

So, Jesus was "gay" with a twink fetish?  There seems to be as much biblical suggestion that Jesus was intimate with men as with women.  I'm pegging him at a 4.5 on the Kinsey scale, cause we don't see the intimacy of the Gospel of Mark with any ladies anywhere in the Good Book, do we...?

SCOTUS Prop 8 Liveblog

On Tuesday, SCOTUS heard oral arguments on the California Prop 8 case.  Along the way, justices and counsel made some amusing points, but also made some gross misstatements of historical reality or the availability of evidence about gay marriage in practice.  Here I’ve debunked those points…

Once the justices made their way to the merits of the case (Prop 8 proponent’s standing to sue was heavily questioned), the liberals had at Cooper, the attorney defending Prop 8.

Kagan dug early into the “harms” of same-sex marriage:

KAGAN: Is -- is there -- so you have sort of a reason for not including same-sex  couples. Is there any reason that you have for excluding them? In other words, you're saying, well, if we allow same-sex couples to marry, it doesn't serve the State's interest. But do you go further and say that it harms any State interest?

Cooper’s answer was that “normal” procreation is harmed and noted that he feared some ethereal eventual harm to the “traditional” institution of marriage.

Let’s talk about “traditional” marriage, or lack thereof, for a moment.  In Ancient Persia thousands of years ago, rich men had a harem and multiple wives. (In case you hadn’t noticed, polygamy is now illegal in the US).  In Ancient Greece and Rome, marriages were arranged to solidify patronage relationships or family alliances, not loving procreation.  Romans regularly had sexual exploits outside of marriage with same-sex partners, and there was no inherent stigma in having a same-sex partner.  Romans could also divorce relatively easily, an aspect of marriage that disappeared for the next 1900 years before we led the charge on bringing divorce back.  In medieval Christian households, a married man was entitled to order his wife to do basically anything and have a court enforce it; he could also permissibly beat her with a stick up to the width of his thumb and rape her at will.  Most of the time, it was not love, but a gift from the bride's father of several cows, bushels of grain, or wads of cash (remember a "dowry") that sealed the marriage.  Meanwhile, in North America, native American cultures were permitting spiritual unions between same-sex couples (I've blogged on his before).  So, Mr. Cooper, unless your idea of marriage includes obligatory extramatrial affairs to achieve sexual satisfaction, payment by the bride's father, domestic abuse, intra-marriage rape, and grossly uneven gender rights, there’s no kind of “traditional” marriage of the last 2000 years that is actually legal in the United States.

The justices eventually moved on to the idea of kids in gay households.  Not shockingly, Scalia set this ball rolling:

SCALIA: Mr. Cooper, let me -- let me give you one -- one concrete thing. I don't know why you don't mention some concrete things. If you redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, you must -- you must permit adoption by same-sex couples, and there's -­there's considerable disagreement among -- among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a -- in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not. Some States do not -- do not permit adoption by same-sex couples for that reason.

[Ginsburg lays hammer down and points out that gay couples can adopt in CA so it doesn’t matter...]

JUSTICE KENNEDY: I -- I think there's -­there's substantial -- that there's substance to the point that sociological information is new. We have five years of information to weigh against 2,000 years of history or more. On the other hand, there is an immediate legal injury or legal -- what could be a legal injury, and that's the voice of these children. There are some 40,000 children in California, according to the Red Brief, that live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and full status. The voice of those children is important in this case, don't you think?

MR. COOPER: Yes, Your Honor. The concern is that redefining marriage as a genderless institution will sever its abiding connection to its historic traditional procreative purposes, and it will refocus, refocus the purpose of marriage and the definition of marriage away from the raising of children and to the emotional needs and desires of adults, of adult couples.

Oops.  The definition of marriage is not, and has never been, limited to those raising children.  It’s unclear how “the emotional needs and desires of adults” are not satisfied by gay marriage.  But let’s talk about the kids.  Are the kids alright?  Despite consistent citation by the justices and counsel that there was not much evidence to answer the question (Julianne Moore movies notwithstanding), there are numerous studies that have been published showing that kids of gay couples benefit when parents marry, kids of gay couples have equal academic performance metrics and equal health metrics as those of straight couples.  In fact, there’s a study out there suggesting kids of lesbian couples are actually BETTER OFF than those of straight couples.  I suppose we’re just going to ignore these.

So, Cooper is off on his rant about how marriage is an institution traditionally tied to procreation.  Kagan immediately began to tear this ridiculous over-simplification apart by pointing out that an old straight couple can’t procreate either:

KAGAN: No, really, because if the couple -- I can just assure you, if both the woman and the man are over the age of 55, there are not a lot of children coming out of that marriage.

[LOL]  This question became a debate about the importance of fertility in marriage, which resulted in a Scalia zinger:

JUSTICE SCALIA: I suppose we could have a questionnaire at the marriage desk when people come in to get the marriage -- you know, Are you fertile or are you not fertile?... I suspect this Court would hold that to be an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, don't you think?

Coopers response was like a flashback to 1918: “[But sir, one partner must always be fertile in an opposite-sex because men never go infertile!  Go men!  So, straight marriage is never totally non-procreative.]”  Cooper did not explain how procreating with someone when your wife was infertile was a “traditional marriage,” though frankly that’s closer to the historical nature of marriage than anything else he said about “traditional” marriages.

Finally, the opponents of Prop 8 stood up, and the conservative justices fired away…

ROBERTS: I'm not sure, counsel, that it makes -- I'm not sure that it's right to view [prohibiting gay marriage] as excluding a particular group. When the institution of marriage developed historically, people didn't get around and say let's have this institution, but let's keep out homosexuals. The institution developed to serve purposes that, by their nature, didn't include homosexual couples.

Touché, Justice Roberts.  But, smart as you may be, no one had the chance to explicitly exclude homosexuals from marriage 200 years ago, or even 200 years ago.  Why?  There was no such thing as “gay” or “homosexual” then.   As I've discussed in No Church in the Wild, the very word "homosexual" only came to exist after an 1869 German pamphlet AGAINST sodomy laws. You can’t exclude a group that doesn’t exist.  There was definitely same-sex sex, though – I’ve researched this at length. The other problem, of course, is that Roberts implicitly equates marriage and a union of love – marriage was rarely related to love over the last several millennial.

Scalia asks, when did prohibiting gay marriage become unconstitutional?

Oh, Scalia, you trickster.  You’d probably argue that interracial marriage prohibitions aren’t unconstitutional because they were left intact when the 14^th amendment passed (oh, you kinda did).  My lawyer answer: as soon as a person identified himself or herself as “gay” in America.  At that point, a minority category was created and discrimination could exist, which is prohibited by the 14th Amendment in the 1860s at the absolute latest.

KENNEDY: The problem -- the problem with the case is that you're really asking, particularly because of the sociological evidence you cite, for us to go into uncharted waters, and you can play with that metaphor, there's a wonderful destination, it is a cliff. Whatever that was.

This is after excessive discussion about how there’s no evidence of how kids fare in gay households.  Kennedy thinks kids in gay households are still a mystery, and this is bad for our community, cause he’s our swing vote.  Send him all the studies you find about how well kids in gay households are doing, please.

Alito: Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years. Same-sex marriage is very new. I think it was first adopted in The Netherlands in 2000. So there isn't a lot of data about its effect. And it may turn out to be a -- a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing, as the supporters of Proposition 8 apparently believe. But you want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cell phones or the Internet? I mean we -- we are not -- we do not have the ability to see the future. On a question like that, of such fundamental importance, why should it not be left for the people, either acting through initiatives and referendums or through their elected public officials?

Well, now there is one thing gay love equivocally is not, and that is newer than the Internet.  As Oscar Wilde, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dinah Shore, or Harvey Milk.  They all probably wished to spend their life with someone of the same sex at one time or another.  Society at large just didn't recognize their love.  So, Alito, you, as you sit on the Supreme Court, really subscribe to the logic that gay love started when gay marriage was legalized in the Netherlands?  Really?  In the meantime, could you assess the institution of child marriages?  I’m pretty sure a 14 year old can still marry in Alabama.  That’s not new either.  Also, I think the Internet was partly invented in order to distribute gay porn, so that works against you too…

VERRILLI: And the fourth point I would make, and I do think this is significant, is that the principal argument in 1967 with respect to Loving and that the Commonwealth of Virginia advanced was: Well, the social science is still uncertain about how biracial children will fare in this world, and so you ought to apply rational basis scrutiny and wait. And I think the Court recognized that there is a cost to waiting and that that has got to be part of the equal protection calculus. And so -- so I do think that's quite fundamental.

Ah, thank you, Mr. Verrilli for the government.  Remember when we as a country seriously asked whether interracial children would be okay?  How are Josh Freeman and Russel Wilson doing with it?  Yeah, that was always a stupid question to ask, and now the conservative justices are asking the same questions about kids in gay families.

COOPER: If, in fact, it is true, as the people of California believe that it still is true, that the natural procreative capacity of opposite-sex couples continues to pose vitally important benefits and risks to society, and that's why marriage itself is the institution that society has always used to regulate those heterosexual, procreative -- procreative relationships.

Oh shit, I didn’t realize marriage certificates were regulating procreation!!!  Does this mean we can stop sending welfare checks to single mothers?  Are teenage pregnant girls actually married without knowing it? I mean, under this logic, they must have been because marriage is absolutely proportional and germane to the birthing of babies.

Are You Really Gayer than Anyone Else?

A friend aware of my endless quest to teach the world that things are not so simple as "gay" and "straight" alerted me to this blog post by OKCupid. Several of its findings support the ideas of flexible sexuality in No Church in the Wild, so naturally I must write excitedly about them.

Image from OKCupid

This is the breakdown of answers across all OKCupid users.  About 30% of users answer openly that that have or would like to engage in a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex.  When separated by biological gender, we find that about HALF of women on the site have or would like to try women. That the number is about 25% for male users utterly supports the position taken by the narrator in No Church in the Wild - women are more likely to talk about this desire if they have it than men are.

I'll pause for a moment to consider this sample set.  OKCupid users are characteristically younger than those of, say, Match.com.  It may simply be that people who are more open to experimentation tend to do their online dating on OKCupid in disproportionate numbers.  But, given the geographic distribution of this graphic:

Image from OKCupid

it seems that OKCupid isn't seeing a real difference between Miami, Austin, and San Francisco - not to mention that rural Texas and the state next to big, gay DC appear about the same color - so it's not just (young) Californians saying they'd like to try both - it's users located virtually everywhere.  In this map, as you get redder, people identify as "more gay curious," and blue is "less gay curious."  Oh, Canada.  I also love how they have so effectively show the correlation of policital environment to expressed sexual desires.




But, folks, that's not all.  Take a look at these data points:

1. Only .1% or less of people who identify as gay even look for "straight" matches, debunking the notion that queers are always trying to recruit (clearly I am the exception to this statistic).
2. People who identify as gay have the same median number of sexual partners as those who identify as straight.
3. 1 in 3 "straight" women have hooked up with another woman and another 1 in 4 say they'd like to.
4. Of "straight"-identifying men, 13% have had a same-sex experience, and another 5% haven't yet but would like to.

There are lots of other interesting data points on gender and sexuality difference, so check out the whole OKCupid post for more.  There's certainly a lot to take away.  For my purposes, there's key insight into the updated Kinsey scale I have been trying to produce.

Kinsey had only one axis on his scale: same sex attraction to opposite-sex attraction.  OKCupid also tried to map "personality traits by orientation," and that graphic speaks to the need for two more axes:  Active/Top and Passive/Bottom, plus Hypersexual to Asexual (anecdotally, 2% of the gay men in OKCupid's study seemed to have 25% of all gay male sex).  Note that none of my axes is tagged to gender.  Gender is a concept divorced from biological sex (ask Cassandra Gorgeous) that varies, like the other items, over time.  But gender isn't relevant to where a person lands on this scale at any given time.

Once we build these X, Y, and Z axes, and identify a point in the cube that correlates to all three, we have an accurate picture of a sexual being.  The shape of the composite graph for all of humanity may look something like a sphere with six tiny points at each corner - the result of a standard bell curve extended over each axis and then cross-referenced. Alternately, there could be an equal distribution of the population along each axis.  Based on the OKCupid stats, however, the idea that the population is mostly at the edges of the axis is totally debunked.  Please feel free to comment with your spot on the map so we can see...

To demonstrate, the first image shows my spot on this graph; the second image shows the position of Jackson (co-conspirator of No Church in the Wild):


Me (4.5/6 active, 5 of 6 hypersexual, 3 of 6 same-sex attracted):

Jackson (3/6 active, 3.5 of 6 hypersexual, 5.5 of 6 same-sex attracted):

This graphical difference is more illustrative of the difference between my personality and Jackson's than the words "gay" and "bisexual" could ever convey.  I am always after it, happy with both sexes as partners, somewhat active.  He is not predominately active or passive, after it an average amount, and pretty much happy only with same sex partners. 

With the two additional axes of information we can get a clearer picture of the sexual compatibility of any two people.  Along the hypersexuality axis, I likely need someone mapped in about the same spot so we want to get down a comparable amount of the time.  Along the same-sex attraction scale, I'll likely be suited to someone (intellectually) who falls between my spot and the reciprocal spot on the other side of the axis (they have to be attracted to me, too, but might not like my flexible attractions as much in everyday conversation).  The ideal match with respect to the active scale, however, is precisely on the mirrored point on the other edge of the graph (if I am ideally active /on top 70% of the time, my ideal mate wants to be active only about 30% of the time).

Perhaps I should submit this graph to OKCupid to help them improve their algorithm :)

Two Gay Cocks in a Box

When I got a text message around 2pm on Saturday from a (hot) friend looking to barhop in Chinatown, I was intrigued.  After all, it doesn't seem like a spot with much non-stripper nightlife.

Well, I'll be damned, we hit all seven dive bars along the border of Chinatown and North Beach in three hours.  By 1:30 AM, I had only half of our original group still at it, all of us several drinks in, hot girl looking hotter all the time.  That meant it was time for the obligatory visit to a North Beach strip club.

Say what you will about strip clubs, strippers.  The ones I've met have been nice folks.  But we can certainly say that they do the sort of performance one thinks it will be a good idea to observe around 1:30 AM, drunk.  It was in this manner that my group of two gay men, my hypersexual self, a "straight girl" and two ladies purportedly of flexible sexuality made our way into this unionized 24-hour peep show at The Lusty Lady.  We'd resolved to make a night of it, having traveled so far from home for Chinatown exploits...

I paid a five dollar cover.  I take issue with covers from women at strip clubs - we're merely bringing more male customers in to spend money.  Still, I paid it, and walked into decor reminiscent of a Tenderloin motel to find that there were no strippers at all.  At least, there was no open stage, and at this moment the only entertainment available was a $1 peep show, which one could access by occupying any of the ten port-a-pottie sized booths.  Hot girl and the other women packed into the first available show, squealing all the way.  I waited with the gay boys for another to open up.

And yet, as we packed in, sardine-esque, and paid our dollar, we were permitted the vision of a Eastern European waif with pockets of cellulite and a repellent, sparsly-haired pussy for but a moment before she stopped and pointed at our window.

"Oh no, not two you!  Only one cock!  One cock only at a time!"

We looked at each other in the dark, then back at her.  "But we already paid," my friend said innocently.

"NO TWO COCKS IN THE BOX!"

I looked at her, falling into laughter, as she covered herself with some sort of green flowery scarf. "No, don't worry," I said, "They're both gay..."  I flailed my wrists to accentuate the point.

"NO TWO COCKS IN THE BOX!  NO TWO COCKS IN THE BOX!"

And out we went.  Thank you, San Francisco.

Could We "Stop Acting in a Gay Way"?

The National Organization for Marriage’s Jennifer Roback Morse has been talking her little Christian lips off about the difference between immutable race and "mutable" homosexuality in a truly infuriating manner.

I too have said that "gay" references a behavior rather than a personality, and a result some of my readers have asked how I am any better than this Morse bitch. So, I want to reply to them and to Mrs. Morse, being as intimately familiar as I am with one's capacity to switch between sexual behaviors.

I think "gay" is a word that helps Morse because it labels a personality based on a behavior - it assumes that homosexual attraction is perfectly correlated with homosexual activity.  I can attest from personal experience that it is not.  Mrs. Morse assumes, however, that because one can "switch off" the activity, one can also switch of the attraction and consequently be perfectly happy in this new, "switched" state.  Whether we act on our attractions is always a choice, whether we'd identify as queer or straight.  Ask the two wanks convicted last this week of raping an unconscious drunk girl - they made a choice to act on their attraction to her, and they paid the price they deserved to pay.

But, while I must make a conscious choice to have sex with a man or a woman, there is one thing I cannot choose: who I find myself naturally attracted to.  I can't help that I am attracted to women.  I also can't help whether that attraction is so strong that I cannot be fulfilled as a person without expressing it through sexual activity and lifetime companionship with women.  This is where Morse and the whole "gay is a choice" camp and I part ways.  You can turn off your attractions such that you don't act on them, true, but you can't necessarily be truly happy after you do.  This is why I instead advocate a new definition for "queer" that contemplates the majority of the population having SOME attraction going both ways.  At that point, we'd be talking about denying 80% of the population the right to marry as they choose rather than the 10% or so that fall into the "totally homosexual" category, and our fight gets much easier.

By the way, Morse, have you ever tasted a pussy?