When the Ugandan TV anchor Simon Kaggwa Njala prepared to host his Morning Breeze show one December morning in 2012, he thought it would be just another day on the job. Little did he expect that his interview with the trans activist Pepe Julian Onziema and the evangelical pastor Martin Ssempa would go viral. Clips and screenshots of Kaggwa asking his guest: “Why are you gae?” would be turned into memes and viewed by millions of people around the world.
Onziema attempted to argue in favor of gay rights on the grounds of freedom of public self-expression and the right to have sex with the person of one’s choice in the privacy of one’s bedroom. Ssempa responded with outlandish antics, such as shaking phallic-shaped fruits and vegetables in Onziema’s face. Given the violence, harassment, and punitive legislation aimed at gays and lesbians in Uganda, it would seem barbaric not to sympathize with Onziema’s cause and find Ssempa’s performance off-putting.
But on a purely discursive level, the debate perfectly captured the tension between the “enlightened” but reality-denying abstractions of gay identitarianism and a “primitive” engagement with the rawness of the real. Consider one of Ssempa’s rants:
Sodomy is about confusion. Men and women are not the same. There is nothing natural about putting a man’s genitals inside another man’s excretory system. These people come in and tell us that what they do is something that is normal. They try to equate heterosexuality with homosexuality as if it’s vanilla ice cream over chocolate. But they are not … You see, these are facts. They want to discuss this on the level of words. Let me tell you the concept of ontology … ontology is the science of knowing something. When you talk about sodomy in its ontological reality, you talk about the whatness, in its substance. And when you advocate for something, you have to know what it is before you promote it… Whenever I go there, she [Onziema] gets uncomfortable… When you take a man’s genitals and you insert them into the intestine, they put their genitals into the excretory system. This excretory system is not designed to receive; it is only for exit.
Ssempa points out his interlocutor’s discomfort—caused, in part, by the pastor’s rude berating of the activist, but also due to the fact that Onziema has learned to shut down the discussion or divert when confronted with such arguments. The standard activist strategy is to simply refuse to engage with anything that can be defined as “ignorance” and “hate.” Onziema recites a script, insisting that gay sex is no different from heterosexual coupling before going on to regurgitate familiar talking points about the majority of HIV patients having contracted the illness from heterosexual sexual encounters (to which Ssempa responds: “It’s a gay disease, whether you like it or not!”). Activists win this game by demonizing those who disagree, rather than by appealing to reason.
In recent decades, it became habitual in elite circles—and increasingly within mainstream society—to proclaim that “love is love.” While conservative religious folk, moral traditionalists, and countercultural queers continue to insist otherwise, wide swaths of the public in developed nations agree that gayness is “valid” and “natural.” Inasmuch as the same understanding applies to heterosexuality, it follows that the pursuit of gay sex and romance is a viable lifestyle choice, if not a biological imperative. Today’s LGBTQ activists have made it their business to entrench these convictions by pressuring those in power, not only to protect homosexuals, but also to penalize those who dissent from the idea that gayness is an essence and that homosexuality is as fundamental to life as heterosexuality.
“Gay sex had to be evacuated of its substance.”
In order to accomplish this shift, activists and lobby groups needed to divert attention from the actual core of homosexuality: gay sex. To convince the public not only to tolerate but to celebrate the category of gayness, gay sex had to be evacuated of its substance. The invention of gayness as a “sexual orientation”—a sociopolitical identity category immune from moral, aesthetic, or metaphysical scrutiny—required that sodomy be mystified. This new narrative is predicated on a determined effort to evade reality. It requires power to be wielded over public discourse in an authoritarian manner to obscure the complex biological, sociological, and ethical implications of gay sex.
In his 1976 book The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault describes the turn away from the category of the sodomite—defined neither by his inclinations, nor by inhabiting a distinct category of “being,” but by his actions. Foucault recalls that the discourse on homosexuality was largely shaped by the Catholic Church’s manualist tradition (an approach to moral deliberation that relied heavily on highly structured theological rules), which centered on the wicked act of sodomy, rather than the wickedness of the person. Any demonization that might have been directed at the dangerous, debauched sodomite himself was concerned with the effect that his actions had on his soul. We may recall, for example, Saint Peter Damian’s fiery condemnations of sodomites within the Vatican’s walls in his eleventh-century letter The Book of Gomorrah, concerned primarily with the sullying effect that the wicked vice of sodomy had upon them.
Foucault then traces the shift from the individual who chooses to engage in a particular action such as sodomy to the modern pathologized homosexual—conceived, in part, in Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s clinical studies in the 1880s—who can no longer even try to evade his diseased medical condition. The creation of the homosexual as a bearer of a quality rather than a performer of acts represents a crucial step that opened the door to the later emergence of gayness as an identity category and its distancing from the act of sodomy. The medicalized homosexual has been robbed—or relieved—of his agency in this process. Whether you view him with pity or disgust, his condition is a fixed matter that is out of his hands. What should we do with this defective invalid: Rehabilitate him? Quarantine him? Regard him as an object of charity? Whichever we settle on, the locus of the issue has incontrovertibly shifted from the man’s behavior to his soul. Under these conditions, the homosexual is a homosexual whether or not he engages in sodomy.
In the absence of either social acceptance or a “cure,” the era of the pathologized homosexual, spanning from the 1890s to the 1970s, left the gay man in an odd limbo, on the one hand forcing him to live with his formally abnormal status, on the other granting him no agency to do anything about it. The twentieth-century emergence of conversion therapies, treatments that promised to turn homosexuals straight, served both to affirm the paradigm that sexual orientation constituted an identity (albeit one that was now changeable) and to spur on the oppositional effort to normalize and protect homosexuality (now fixed, yet vulnerable to attack) from such extreme influences.
The final step in the process of constructing the homosexual—a man devoid of agency and severed from an essential relationship with sodomy—was prompted by the AIDS epidemic. Thanks to the efforts of organizations like ACT UP in the 1980s, anyone who criticized gays for engaging in sodomy—especially for engaging in anal sex, the anal tissue being particularly susceptible to contracting sexually transmitted infections—was accused of victim-blaming. ACT UP’s foregrounding of the suffering of AIDS victims solidified the narrative of the gay man who has no choice but to embrace who he truly was born to be. The consequences of embracing potentially dangerous practices would need to be managed externally.
AIDS activists successfully wielded talking points to their advantage. Take the common assertion that AIDS is not a “gay disease” (predicated on the fact that the majority of HIV patients are women but ignoring that infection rates are nearly three times higher among gay men than they are even among female sex workers) and that, correspondingly, the blame for the disease’s persistence ought to be placed not on those who choose to engage in unprotected anal sex, but on governments for not adequately funding HIV treatment and research.
“His agency is null.”
The proposition that an individual’s identity is predetermined has rendered free will superfluous. And so, when a young person discovers an erotic tension between himself and others of his sex, he is told that this alone makes him “gay,” regardless of how he chooses to direct this tension. Game over. His agency is null, for—in the words of the gay icon Lady Gaga—he must have been “born this way.” He must accept his fate because there’s no use putting on a show to hide the truth. But—and here comes the payoff—once he learns to accept and express his authentic self by pursuing a relationship with another man, he will be “on the right track.” Toward what exactly, we can’t be sure.
By the time Gaga jubilantly pronounced gayness-by-birth the norm in 2011, the LGBTQ lobby had managed not only to win over the hearts and minds not just of the American public, but of major corporations. The NOH8 Campaign and It Gets Better Project, for example, took it upon themselves to disseminate catchy slogans in order to cement the new status quo while enjoying their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Only five years later, the US government would hop on the bandwagon, declaring that gay relationships should be incorporated into the legal definition of marriage on the grounds that no lonely gay should ever have to fear “call[ing] out only to find no one there,” in the purple prose of the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.
The new, sentimental narrative of homosexuality discreetly evades the matter of sodomy. Technology aids in this effort. One can use condoms to protect against gonorrhea, or, better, get on PrEP to enjoy anxiety-free unprotected sex. One can, equally, ease the discomfort of receptive anal sex with silicone-based lube, use enemas to avoid the embarrassment of fecal matter on a partner’s genitals, and so on.
One can reasonably argue that the differences between gay and straight sex do not pose a moral problem. Perhaps it is not morally imperative that sexual interactions be open to the possibility of procreation. Some may determine that a gay couple’s sexual similarity (rather than complementarity) and inability to procreate (adoption and surrogacy notwithstanding, as they are not sexual practices) are morally neutral matters. Others might even believe that there is something morally positive about this difference. But to deny that said differences are at all meaningful—or that they are real—is delusional.
To recognize that homosexuality is not ontologically the same as heterosexuality is a matter of reason: penis plus penis (or vagina plus vagina) is not interchangeable with penis plus vagina. Just as importantly, we should also be able to recognize that undeniably different psychological dynamics are at work in male/male and female/female romantic relationships than in male/female ones. To deny any of these claims, one would have to eradicate all differences between males and females, and this would also put an end to all identity categories downstream from these biological forms.
“Advocates of homosexuality’s subversive and countercultural value also lose in the shift toward identity.”
There is plenty at stake for traditionalists in the shift toward the identitarian framing of homosexuality. Their moral arguments nullified by this framing because it obscures the role of morality in sex. Yet advocates of homosexuality’s subversive and countercultural value also lose in the shift toward identity, because they must relinquish the claim that homosexuality challenges both the natural order and social conventions.
In the introduction to the 2011 music video for Born This Way, Lady Gaga speaks of a “new race” born on “government-owned alien territory” that is immune to judgment or prejudice and boundlessly free. Gaga pronounces her manifesto over eerie background music and esoteric imagery that evokes Aleister Crowley’s 1904 manifesto The Book of the Law, which proclaims the dawn of a “new aeon” of creatures uninhibited by the limits not only of tradition, but of reality itself.
Kudos to Gaga for releasing such electrifying music, but I couldn’t help but think of Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 book Lord of the World when listening to her vision of that perfected human race. Benson’s apocalyptic novel features a one-world government that promises a perfectly ordered global society, one which requires the elimination of dissent by any means necessary. Within the utopian cosmos that Gaga (or rather, her label execs) concocted, there is space for neither arguments regarding the moral nature of homosexuality nor a celebration of its conflict with the norms of nature and society that inspires cultural innovation. In fact, there are no conflicts in Gaga’s utopia, nor is there morality in it, or even reality. There is only infinite perfection: sheer homogeneous, blemish-free perfection.
Pope Francis cited Benson’s novel in a 2013 homily about the “ideological colonization” of gender theorists in developing countries in Africa and South America. He warned of a “worldly” form of progressivism that aims to propagate a “globalization of hegemonic uniformity.” It is understandable to hope that the world will grow to be more compassionate and more hospitable to all people, but at what cost? Must it require us to cede our agency to entities that presume to recreate reality in their own perfect image in exchange for boundless freedom?
This essay was adapted from Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual.