THE GAY MALE PARADOX

I am growing very annoyed with the references to LGBTQI anything in the media. There is no actual united LGBTQI anything on the planet. The most essential characteristic of homosexuals, who are the core of the Gay Rights Movement, is nonconformity. Our creativity and our drive to survive draw on our differences, not our sameness. And thank goodness for that!

Heterosexuals have trouble understanding this, even if they get over their aversion to the concept of same-sex acts. After all, conformity is the natural state of the vast majority of heterosexuals. Their social structures revolve around sameness. Marriage, children, grandchildren, etc.. 

A heterosexual isn't bothered much by mass migration because they are not worried about being beheaded or thrown off buildings. Simple as that. In their hearts they believe that they can whip out their smartphone and scroll through pictures of their children like a weapon against ISIS radicals or Central American gangsters. "We are all the same." That delusion is what comforts frightened heterosexuals into being pro-migration, for instance.

Anyone who has spent time in the gay male culture knows that being the same gets you nowhere. We are a culture of striving to succeed against prejudice. We have never had automatic acceptance, let alone approval, anywhere at any time throughout history. Each of us has had to earn whatever social respect we can gain in the conformist heterosexual world.

This is lost on many young homosexual men. They have been cajoled into mimicking heterosexual life under the mistaken idea that scrolling through their pictures of their children makes them just like everyone else. It does not. And it most likely never will. This probably explains in part the high divorce rate among married homosexual males. It was predictable.

The acceptance of the perverse notion that becoming "legal" would automatically enhance or elevate gay male culture was an understandable reaction in the post-AIDS world. That kick to the collective head of gay men which has lasted decades has not decimated gay men as a group. It has scattered them. This is perhaps an intentional or accidental victory of "family values" evangelists. But it is temporary, like all things.

The simple fact is that we have survived. Stronger and more determined to survive than ever, even in our separate political camps. We are brothers when it comes to any threat to our survival. The AIDS epidemic proved that without question. 

A resurgence of a determined gay male identity beyond having children behind picket fences is bubbling up among the young gay men of this post-AIDS era. Religious fundamentalism has had its day. The middle ground of heterosexual society no longer raises banners to gods over human beings. Muslim jihad's intolerance of individual freedom has been exposed. Orthodoxy in Christianity and Judaism has been exposed as equally intolerant, though somewhat less violent.  

The visible self-liberation of gay men outside Caucasian culture has begun. The rise of non-Caucasian men economically and in global politics will bring with it a rise in gay male culture around the globe. This development will revitalize gay male populations. This will lead to a renewal of gay male creativity and its contribution to society. 

The gay male paradox of embracing heterosexual conformity as a way toward a new age of gay male individual liberation is consistent with the cycles of human history. Gay men now have an accessible recorded history for the first time in human history. We cannot be wiped out in silence, as we have been in the past. We have always known how to move on against all odds.