Why Queers are "queer"

[garlicfiend.livejournal.com]

Or: Felix's theory of why straight society can't just Get Over It Already.

x-posted from my journal, 'cuz I thought you might like to know.


disclaimer: what followers are my own personal thoughts and musings. Many of these thoughts were undoubtedly influenced by other sources, but I shan't cite them here, and couldn't remember them even if I were to. So yeah, this is more or less me talking out my ass. I consider it to be a fairly astute and informed ass, but there you have it.

Why Queers are queer. The simple answer is that queer in all its various manifestations of GLBT and everything in between and orbiting around it is actually just a range of perfectly normal variations in human genetic makeup. A simple glance at history with an informed eye reveals these variations in all historical societies. Queers are only queer because the larger part of society has decided they are abnormal.

But why? What's the point of doing that?

Here is what I think. These ideas are based in evolution. If you're not down with that, if you think science is a bunch of liberal bullshit, stop reading now. kthxbai.

A lot of people and put forward a lot of "sciency" reasoning to explain why queer people are born different. We're not. We are born with in the normal range of genetic variation for the human species, simple as that. So instead, I'm going to use some scientific ideas to explain why our society just can't accept that.

Guess what, boys and girls, and everyone in between--we are primates. Like lemurs, howler monkeys, baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees. This is fact. Our genetics are something like 98% similar to chimpanzees. Christians would have you believe this is something to be ashamed of. It's not. Primates were one of the first groups of mammals to emerge after the dinosaurs took a comet up the ass, and they have done pretty well for ourselves since then, although I think humans are kind of giving them a bad name lately.

And one of the things we did right develop a social tendency, and not only that but a very organic, changeable way of building social order. It was an evolutionary tool, and being evolutionary, it had a great deal to do with reproduction. And that means fucking. You can see it in almost every mammalian social structure--an established social structure to decide who gets to fuck whom.

Now, as I said, primate social structure seems to be uniquely flexible. The behavior of most mammals is genetically encoded. This is why we have bred dogs to do so many different things for us. Through selective breeding we have exaggerated and diminished wolf traits. The social behavior of wolves is much more regimented than that of dogs. Dogs lost those encoded behaviors to better exist with humans. A similar process seems to have happened with chimpanzees and the hominids, including us. We do not have a regimented social system enforced by genetics. Instead, we have big brains with only a social framework sketched in. We then fill in the details ourselves through learning and experience. It allows for variation and change.

Now, here is the important bit for this discussion. If you trap a Carpathian wolf in Spain (I think I have my geography right) and fly it up to Alaska's north slope and release it, you are going to have one very cold wolf. But if he meets other wolves up there, there is going to be no confusion as to how to communicate with those wolves. He won't be speaking wolf Spanish to their Inuit. He is likely going to have a different set of genetic behaviors evolved for his native climate, but he will not have to learn a new set of customs and social norms. His genetics provide him with a wolf-society lingua-franca.

Human society however is constantly being remade, relearned with each generation which may or may not make its own changes. What's more is that each person learns society through the filters of their own point of view. So society becomes this organic, dynamic ever-changing process. And it has served humans well. But remember that one of the most important functions of society is to tell us who can and cannot fuck. Mammalian evolution has seldom been keen on free-love. Darwin was not a hippie. That was Jesus. But since genetics do more to tell us who we want to fuck than who we are allowed to fuck, we make up for it with brain power.

This is the meat of my assertion: that all the time, on an unconscious level, our brains are constantly figuring out if we are going to end up fucking the people we come into contact with. Our brains are modeling everything we know about each person and the societal context and all the potential situations that may arise to determine if at some point will want to fuck them, need to fuck them, be coerced into fucking them, and whether fucking them will be a step up in the social hierarchy or a step down, and the degree to which your community would promote or discourage fucking this person. We are also very aware of possible competition for fucking, and we want to know who we need to try to appear superior to, and who might try to threaten any exclusive fucking arrangements we might have.

I am not saying that this is the be-all end-all of human existence. I don't think it is, and I don't even think that this is our deepest most driving biological instinct. It is for some, but not necessarily for everybody. What I am arguing is that it is there, a process that is going on in all of us whether we want to admit it or not. And it's enormously complicated, especially as we live in larger and larger populations, coming into contact with more and more individuals, and as social roles and codes change around us. It's stressfull, enormously stressful. It's one of the great things about monogamous relationships--it doesn't stop this process, but it reduces the immediacy of the conflicts.

So society tries to relieve this stress by simplification. Boys in this group, girls in that group. Look at the opposite group--those are elligible. Look at your own group--they are your competition. Now, doesn't that make things easier? Every human society (that I am familiar with), divides itself into male and female roles. Because the vast majority of any human population is straight (there goes that Darwin again :^(  ). However, while the human brain is really good at modeling systems, it is also really good at making exceptions to those systems. Thus it has also been very common in societies to add some extra roles for their GLBT members. So why hasn't modern western society done that, especially America?

I don't know, for sure. My guess in America would be that it developed as a mix of small agricultural communities and large cities. The farm communities were small enough and religious enough that "queer" communities could never develop there, especially since agricultural America always emphasized a big family to work the farm. When farmers moved to the city to work in factories, they took those values with them. And in the cities, queer populations got by through an underground culture which was generally ignored by an often hypocritical power structure with kinky tastes. And of course many entered the catholic church where they sat back and watch their straight brethren bugger altar boys.

What do human beings fear most? Some would say--in fact many have said--that we fear dying. I doubt it. Otherwise there would be no wars or any of the other risky activities humans do. No, what humans fear most, I'll suggest, is fucking up in society. We often appear to fear death, but I have come to think that what we fear is the finality of never being able to make right what we have fucked up. Hence the games of denial that we play, that we haven't fucked up, that the society we participate in hasn't fucked up, and that somehow before we'll die, we'll have a chance to be redeemed of all our "sins." 

And so we are labeled "queer" and hated. Hated because in all their conniving fuck calculations, we  might trip them up, and they might irredeemably fuck up, be labled as a traitor to their society because the woman they hit on was a guy, or a guy found them attractive. Because to admit we are normal at this point, the religious redneck right would have to completely reengineer their social order from scratch, and that life time worth social maneuvering in search of the most perfect, socially sanctioned, god endorsed fuck would be thrown in the rubbish bin. Fuckin' pricks.

We should have compassion, though. They're humans, doing what humans do, and will continue to do what humans do until the planet breathes its last polluted breath. Compassion doesn't mean tolerance for ignorance and stupidity, but by understanding where they are coming from, probably better than they do, we can better plot a path to where we should like to lead them.

Anyway, that's my theory on things, take it for what it's worth.

~Felix