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Journeyman comments on When does heritable low fitness need to be explained? - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: DanArmak 10 June 2015 12:05AM

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Comment author: V_V 12 June 2015 04:51:55PM 2 points [-]

For obvious political and social reasons, it's hard to be sure how many people are homosexual. Note that we are interested only in obligate homosexuality - bisexuals presumably don't have strongly reduced fitness. The Wikipedia article doesn't really distinguish obligate homosexuality from bi-, pan- and even trans-sexuals. The discussion in the SSC comments used an (unsourced?) range of 1%-3%, which seems at least consistent with other sources, so let's run with that.

Was obligate homosexuality common in the ancestral environment, anyway? If I understand correctly "gays" exist as a recognized social identity only in modern Western societies.
People engaging in homosexual intercourse and relationships probably always existed everywhere, and typically societies with significant influence of Abrahamic religions considered such behavior as a sin and/or a crime while non-Western or pre-Abrahamic Western societies tolerated or even encouraged it, but the general expectation was that people entered heterosexual marriage and had children.

Maybe there is a genetic predisposition to homosexuality but it is unlikely to result in obligate homosexuality, and therefore infertility, outside the specific environment of modern Western societies.

Comment author: Journeyman 13 June 2015 11:38:18PM 1 point [-]

Gay historian Rictor Norton vehemently disagrees with the notion that gay identities are recent. Here is his basic position:

  • Gay identities have existing for a long time, not just recognition of gay behaviors
  • Recent conceptions of homosexuality are politicized, but this does not mean that concepts of homosexuality are new
  • The politicization of modern gay politics, combined with poor record-keeping and past suppression, erases the history of gay identities and cultures.

He takes a position against social constructionism:

It is very easy for historians to establish that most of the sexual categories which are supposed to have arisen under modern capitalism in fact existed much earlier. ...

One of the reasons why many contemporary lesbian and gay theorists fail to appreciate that homosexuals existed before 1869 is the politically correct view that terms such as ‘queer’ and ‘faggot’ and ‘queen’ are not nice, and especially since the late 1960s people have endeavoured to use the phrase ‘gay and lesbian’ wherever possible. There are some men who lived before 1869 whom I would feel uneasy at calling ‘gay’ or ‘homophile’, but I would not hesitate to call them queer or even silly old queens. Many of the mollies of the early eighteenth century were undoubtedly queens, whose interests and behaviour are virtually indistinguishable from queens I have known in the early 1960s (and later). ...

‘Queer’ was the word of preference for homosexuals as well as homophobes for the first half of the twentieth century, and of course is being reclaimed today in defiant rather than defensive postures. In English during the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century the words of preference were ‘molly’ and ‘sapphist’, for which good modern equivalents are ‘queer’ and ‘dyke’. During the seventeenth century and earlier the commonest terms were ‘Sodomite’ and ‘tribade’, for which, again, good modern equivalents are ‘queer’ and ‘dyke’. In ancient and indigenous and premodern cultures there were many terms for which good modern equivalents are ‘queer’ and ‘tomboy’. And the nearest modern equivalent for the nineteenth-century term ‘homosexual’ is: queer. ...

I add my voice to the widespread dissatisfaction with social constructionist thought, that seems to have been based on nothing and to have lead nowhere in the past twenty years. Its initial premises have been constantly reinforced by restatement and incestuous quotation amongst constructionist colleagues rather than supported by scholarly research.

To see more, check out these excerpts from The Myth of the Modern Homosexual.

Comment author: V_V 14 June 2015 01:28:05AM 3 points [-]

So there were slurs to refer to people who engaged in socially objectionable sexual behaviors. It doesn't mean that these people were obligate homosexuals and considered themselves as such.

Comment author: Journeyman 14 June 2015 02:35:53AM 0 points [-]

That's Foucault's theory, but Rictor Norton's book I linked to convincingly debunks Foucault as ideological and ahistorical. Quoting an excerpt, here are historical cases of unmarried men going for each other instead of marriage and children:

In between these two extremes of lust and idealism we find a sense of identity based upon ordinary and unremarkable same-sex love. The records of the Inquisition in Spain, Portugal and Brazil; the police archives of early eighteenth-century Paris; the records of the Officers of the Night of sixteenth-century Venice – all clearly document a preponderance of men who were bachelors and who preferred their own sex. Statistical analysis of the particularly full and detailed Florentine records ‘of the marital status of the men incriminated for sodomy from 1478 to 1483 reveals that fully three-fourths of all such men aged nineteen to seventy were unmarried.

These guys sound like they are exclusive, obligate homosexuals.

As for identity, just because the historical labels for queer people were negative, it does not mean that those terms were just externally-imposed slurs, and that homosexual identities did not exist:

In Foucault’s famous statement: ‘Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of superior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.’ He ludicrously dates this shift to 1870. But the men discussed in the preceding paragraph had a sense of themselves that transcended both ‘the practice of sodomy’ and ‘temporary aberration’. In fact Dutch sodomites in 1734 were described by contemporaries as ‘hermaphrodites in their minds’ (Boon 1989) – an exact match for Foucault’s ‘hermaphroditism of the soul’. The concepts of masculine homosexual women and effeminate homosexual men dominated the premodern world. The homosexual was considered an androgynous species in Aristophanes, in Juvenal, in all the ancient literature about the transgendered priests of Cybele in the ancient and classical world. It was not a modern construct.

The truth is that a homosexual category existed many centuries prior to the nineteenth century. There are literally scores of fifteenth-century Italian authors who portray homosexual characters rather than homosexual incidents (G. Dall’Orto, ‘Italian Renaissance’, EH), and it is a nonsense to label such sodomites ‘temporary aberrations’ rather than members of a species. In real life there is the famous example of self-labelling, the painter Antonio Bazzi (1477–1549) who was proud of his nickname ‘Il Sodoma’. According to his contemporary Vasari ‘he did not take [it] with annoyance or disdain, but rather gloried in it, making jingles and verses on the subject, which he pleasantly sang to the accompaniment of the lute’.

Rictor Norton is a widely published queer historian, his research goes back centuries, and seems very solid. I think we should go with his account and toss Foucault's social constructionism.

Comment author: V_V 14 June 2015 04:21:44AM *  0 points [-]

Makes sense. However all these examples are from Christian Western societies, I wonder about non-Western or pre-Christian societies.

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