It makes total sense that, from a broad cosmological perspective, that which manifests the fundamental dissymmetry of the unfolding universe would be at the forefront of its progressive change and evolution.
In human development on this planet, cosmic dissymmetry is evidenced by a roughly seven-percent deviation from the norm, which accounts for such anomalies as left-handedness and primary same-sex orientation in persons.
While left-handedness is a physical phenomenon, same-sex orientation is a more-or-less mental one, one which reveals a predisposition to value reality and sensation from a different “vantage point,” so to speak. It is not same-sex orientation which creates this predisposition, as is often thought, but the other way around.
That accounts for why most homosexual persons experience themselves as “different” in early childhood, long before sexual arousal is a factor in their lives, per se.
From this standpoint, it is clear that persons manifesting this alternative predisposition embody, as a general rule, the highest potential as vanguards in the universe’s impulse for positive self-development.
They bring an alternative sensibility, an alternative perspective and a natural constructive non-conformity to everything they experience and impact, and it is just those features that constantly presses humanity to break out from its status quo at any given moment to progress to greater enlightenment, self-consciousness and the extension of progress to the entire species.
Such progress is in the direction of, in human social terms, universal rights and democratic values and therefore, at any stage, it presses against the normative social organization based on “social Darwinist” or “might makes right” paradigms.
Thus we have, since the first emergence of human society, the struggle of the “poet,” the manifestation of dissymmetry and progress, against the tyrant, the “king of the hill” at any given moment, ruling with an iron fist as the dominant male.
In the last century or so, the notion of “revolution” has had a bad connotation because it has been associated with developments in Russia and China, for example. But those did not produce progressive change, despite claims to the contrary, and were in fact merely the succession of one form of tyranny over another.
The last major example of a real “revolution” advancing humanity was that which resulted in the founding of the United States of America. It was egalitarian, it advanced democracy rooted in core concepts of the inalienable rights of all persons. Since the founding of the republic and its Constitution, it was progressed toward the fuller realization of those core values by eliminating slavery, granting suffrage to women, outlawing child labor, empowering workers and spreading such values abroad.
So, there is little doubt why evidence shows the seminal role of same-sex oriented persons in the development of the U.S., from her spiritual forebears in the Old Testament David, to Socrates and the Greek republican model, to the pillars of the Renaissance and the emergence of modern scientific method, to Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, national poet Walt Whitman (who coined the term, “Great Poets,” to apply to us), preserver of the union and freer of slaves Abraham Lincoln, and to Eleanor Roosevelt, the shepherd of the nation through its Great Depression, its global leadership in vanquishing genocidal fascism and extending the notion of American core values through the United Nations’ International Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Through all this, tyrants that have resisted these constructive developments have fought against them bitterly. Is there any doubt why they, and the social systems that prop them up, train their young to bully and beat up “young poets” on the nation’s playgrounds, and to bash, marginalize and drive them to suicide whenever they can?
But by the late 1960s, in fact, the tyrant paradigm was on the ropes as never before in history. Its slavery was gone, its male-exclusive right to vote was gone, its structural institutions of domination – racism, sexism and anti-labor thuggery – were crumbling like never before. Progress against it had led right into their homes, turning their own chattel, their wives and children, against them.
“Gay liberation” was poised to be a death blow, freeing countless of the tyrants’ own children to fully actualize their constructive non-conformist revolutionary potential through the process of “coming out” boldly against any arbitrary social constraints set up to deter them. The fullest liberation of all persons on the planet, to be led by this vanguard, was closer to realization than ever.
The tyrants did not take this lying down. They unleashed a massive counteroffensive.
As their hands were tied by institutional gains in justice and the force of law, the more clever among them fought back with a three-part counterpunch, the cornerstones of enlightened counterinsurgency, the full deployment of the infamous “Three C’s:” containment, conflict and cooptation.
“Containment” aimed to circumscribe the target population, to cordon it off, to separate it from the rest of society. This involved the invention of the term, “homosexual.”
To be continued.