Every species that has sex engages in
some form of homosexual act. But human homophobia is rooted in our denial of
unencumbered happiness.
Carnal intercourse against the order of nature.
That’s quite a mouthful. While upholding Section
377, the Supreme Court judgment recorded different interpretations of the concept. We are told that “such acts have a tendency to
lead to unmanliness and... to persons not being useful to the
society”. We learn that Black’s Law dictionary defined “the order of nature” as
something “pure”, that “the basic feature of nature involves organs, each of
which has an appropriate place”.
What was that? Because the “most unnatural” penetrative sex I have ever heard about is beyond the “impurest” of
human tendencies. Male Amazonian river dolphins penetrate the
blow-hole -- the cetacean equivalent of our nose -- of other males. While the boys have
"nasal sex", female Bottlenose dolphins use their snouts as dildos on
other females. Talk about each organ having "an appropriate place".
Yet, we are told that
every organ has "a designated function assigned by nature", that
"sex and food are regulated" and why "what is pre-ordained by
nature has to be protected". Really? Tell that to dolphins or, for that
matter, any species that has sex. Animal homosexuality has been known since the time of Aristotle, who described 2300 years ago
how he witnessed two male hyenas having sex with one
another.
But morality gathered a
lot of taboos over time and did not allow biologist George Levick to make
public his observations of "depraved penguin behaviour" during
Captain Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1910. Levick stayed for an entire
breeding season with a colony on Cape Adare but did not include in
the official report the accounts -- suitably written in Greek -- of non-procreative (and homosexual) sex among male Adelie penguins. The fascinating details remained unknown nearly for a century.
Since Levick's
embarrassment, homosexuality has been recorded in around
1,500 species. About one-third of these instances are well documented. From insects to
primates, these species throw up
ample cases of sexual activity, courtship, affection,
pair bonding, and parenting among same-sex partners. While most show bisexual behaviour, exclusive
homosexual orientation is not rare. Among domesticated sheep, for example, about 10% of males refuse to mate with females but
readily mate with males.
Clearly, homosexuality is as natural as anything observed in nature and not
an individual "lifestyle" choice. But a lot
of us demand human conduct to be far above bestial standards. In 2008, when
biologist Lindsay Young first reported that nearly one-third of Laysan albatrosses (that pair for life) were actually female-female couples, many shot
back in anger, asking rhetorically if people should follow
other “natural” practices, such as animals raping one another or eating their young.
Of course, such outrage conveniently overlooks
the fact that, unlike rape or filial cannibalism, consensual same-gender pairing or sex does not violate or endanger. And this debate over “naturalness” and demanding biological
justifications from the wild also trivialises the issue. We anyway
understand very little of animal behaviour yet.
While some species may have practical purposes — group
bonding, honing sexual skills or simply tiring out competition — for engaging
in homosexual acts, it is equally possible that others do it simply because
they enjoy it. There cannot be any single explanation of why individuals of
different species engage in activities that appear homosexual to us, just like
we cannot hope to understand every member of the LGBT community from a fixed
perspective.
But obsessed with a distorted sense of purity, our
social morality perhaps resents the very idea of "pure" pleasure and
happiness for the sake of pleasure and happiness.
Have we rushed too far down the Darwinian path -- where every aspect of our behaviour must eventually lead to
reproduction – merely because it suits our Grinch mentality? Do we demand as a
society that sexual pleasure remains a spinoff of a
supposedly greater purpose and feel unsettlingly guilty when pleasure itself
appears to be the goal?
But for the appalling hypocrisy, such moral
tyranny would appear comical since none of us let go of any opportunity to pursue what makes us happy, even if it is socially taboo, as long as we can get away with it. We don’t
really care what abomination the 30-million-strong LGBT community indulges in
as long as they keep it, like the rest of us keep our own unspeakable
deeds, in the closet. We want legal provisions
to hold them guilty of pleasure because they refuse to feel guilty for their
existence like the rest of us feel for our deviations.
We may want all we like
to believe that our choice of pleasure makes us what we are, but it is who we
are that determines what makes us happy. And derived consensually, no happiness
needs justification.
One winter evening more than two decades ago, a young lecturer sauntered down uninvited to a
coffeehouse table occupied by a bunch of university students busy exchanging
notes over a few thin volumes of poetry. For a few minutes, they listened in
silence as he guffawed and wondered what the “unproductive fad for abstract
poems” ever achieved. Then, a deadpan girl cut in: “So why do you masturbate?”
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