SO ORTHODOX science announces that there are indications that homosexuality may be genetically determined, threatening to give the might of societal approval to the concept that we were born this way, and not corrupted or perverted from the supposed biological imperative of heterosexuality.
If the findings prove well-founded, and there is no reason to suppose they are not, then surely it throws into grave doubt the Darwinian theory of evolution, as it is currently understood to apply to humans. For one of the implications of this research is that there are factors not related solely to the physical survival of the species which are at work biologically in our behaviour as individuals.
If the human race bred on strictly Darwinian lines, the genes responsible would have been weeded out a long time ago. Most of us, after all, do not reproduce. The taunt from bigots at home and abroad has been "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." Well, it appears she made us all exactly the way we are, in all our variety and confusion.
What if our sexual drive, as opposed to our orientation, is also inherited? I know from what he has told me, that I have my father's randy nature. At times, I find myself totally driven by it. Is that biology or decadence? Fate or free will?
It seems to me that either we accept the sexuality that we are born with, however it may manifest, and live it (in moderation of course), or we risk dangerously perverting a vital force of self-expression basic to our natures. This goes for every kind of sexuality between adults that is (a) safe (b) sane and (c) consensual.
A man I met last week is a teacher at a convent school, a pillar of his local Catholic Church, playing the organ there. He is plagued with guilt over his sexual fantasies, and the amount of time he spends talking with other men on the phone sex lines, writhing about the floor in his living room in the throes of a monumental wank.
He attends, as well as regular church meetings, weekly meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous, for he wishes to stop. But it doesn't work. Time after time he finds himself discussing his favoured scenario on the phone to men who will listen, one of whom was me.
SUBMISSIVE
He wanted to sit under my desk for an afternoon, totally naked, and service, by prearranged hand or facial gestures, various parts of my anatomy, starting with my feet. His particular kick was that he wanted to be ignored most of the time, and used whenever the whim took me.
His attitude to his own sexuality was of complete despair and self-loathing, for no matter how he tried, he could not suppress it. He was setting himself up for a breakdown, a fact he freely acknowledged when we were talking in his flat later that evening. After abandoning a vocation as a priest, he had made himself indispensable at his local church, teaching religion at the school, and generally was ensuring that the split in his personality would be as tortuous as possible.
He also wanted a boyfriend, but was bleakly pessimistic about the prospect, since he could never go public with him, and as I pointed out to him, he was hardly going to find love through the masturbatory haze of the sex lines. I found myself playing the role of a rescuer, attempting to "save" someone from the pernicious grasp of the Catholic Church. I should have saved my breath. But such self-abnegation fascinated me, attracted me, reflected my own fantasies.
When, after twenty minutes of tea and sympathy, he offered me total submission, offering to worship me and serve me and be my slave, my cock registered immediate approval, but there are, thankfully, times when it is overruled. And this was one of them. I left, realising the extent to which he was thoroughly enmeshed in the exquisite pain of living his impossible life, heading (deliberately?) straight for hell and damnation.
His talking subservience to dozens of men on the carpet is as much part of his Catholicism as rousing the faithful to song in praise of the Blessed Virgin. And I felt, when he offered himself to me, that he had the most powerful strength of will I had met in a long time. Those who play the submissive role are the stronger. For they offer the illusion of power. And men, especially, are suckers for illusion.
People like him are everywhere, and not just in the Catholic Church. But I suppose they are doing no-one any harm, except themselves. But I lament the extent to which authoritarian religious education (and I imagine his classes are ultra-orthodox to compensate) robs young people of the belief that they are whole and healthy in themselves, and creates a split in which the needs and urges of the body are loathed and feared. If those drives are suppressed, they can enslave you.
It is all natural, after all.