D.J. Webb
Is being “gay” a version of the family? How should people be gay? Should they get married, adopt children and try to live out a fantasy family lifestyle? Is this in fact what a society that chooses not to discriminate against homosexuality should seek to encourage?
We are meant to admire Elton John, who has “married” his “partner”, David Furnish. The couple now have two children, brought into the world with the assistance of a surrogate mother. Other similar “married” gay men have adopted children. This fully recreates the heterosexual life experience in a gay form. This is at least one version of how to be gay.
Another version is the George Michael approach. George Michael has stated in the newspapers that he cruises for sex with strangers on Hampstead Heath in London. He claims that he can have anyone he wants on the Heath.
Interestingly, the two versions of the gay lifestyle have clashed. Elton John has encouraged George Michael to seek help for his “sex addiction”, as well as for his taking of drugs. In 2009 George Michael countered,
Elton just needs to shut his mouth and get on with his own life. Look, if people choose to believe that I’m sitting here in my ivory tower, Howard Hughesing myself with long fingernails and loads of drugs, then I can’t do anything about that, can I? People want to see me as tragic with all the cottaging and drug-taking… those things are not what most people aspire to, and I think it removes people’s envy to see your weaknesses. I don’t even see them as weaknesses any more. It’s just who I am.
It seems undeniable that George Michael’s approach of seeking to have sex with as many good-looking strangers as possible is what has hitherto been the “gay” lifestyle. George Michael hasn’t “married” his partner and hasn’t procured children. I lost the thread of what the singer was up to around 2012, and don’t know if he still haunts Hampstead Heath. As an extremely unattractive man, he may well find that his status as a singer will not always, as he gets older, secure him the physical activity with the most attractive young men that he may still crave.
I think it undeniable, however, that most gay men in their 40s and 50s would rather be having frequent sex with as many 18-21-year-old men (“twinks”) as possible, rather than posing as “married men” with “children” in tow.
The Elton John style fake family seems to me to be a freak show—one that even more freakily is what the British Establishment is recommending as the ideal life for gay men.
More recently, there have been a number of news stories showing that an older generation of gay men are “turned off” by the new politically correct developments in gay culture. The fashion designers, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, caused uproar when they criticised the attempt to create “same-sex families” along the Elton John model. The Dolce and Gabbana statements—“no chemical offsprings [sic] and rented uterus: life has a natural flow, there are things that should not be changed” and “the only family is the traditional one”—illustrates perfectly the fact that there is no consensus among homosexual men on creating an artificial family-like gay life.
The fashion designer Giorgio Armani has joined the fray, criticising effeminate or overly obviously gay dress styles, saying “a homosexual man is a man 100%. He does not need to dress homosexual” and “when homosexuality is exhibited to the extreme—to say, ‘Ah, you know I’m homosexual,’—that has nothing to do with me. A man has to be a man”.
It seems there is a culture that is an acceptable part of the multicultural political project that is identifiably gay. A way of dressing. A hairstyle. A musical preference. A less manly mode of behaviour. This culture can be incorporated into the general attack on family values by means of gay marriage, gay adoption of children, by the mainstreaming of the gay identity.
But most of this amounts to taking the homosexuality out of being gay. It is becoming a culture—largely a young person’s culture—and an identity. But at its most fundamental, being “gay” should be about having sex with men. It is possible to enjoy sex with men, even exclusively, and not share the cultural aspects of “gay identity”. Who cares about the hairstyles and the music? If it isn’t about sex, then this culture is a synthetic creation of the political and media class.
Real homosexuality is incompatible with the family, because homosexuality is about sex, not love. I don’t deny that gay men do fall in love with each other—but shorter relationships are statistically more common in the absence of any real family relationship. And, yes, gay men do love attractive young men—but they love all of them, and want to have sex with all of them. Large numbers of sexual partners is what being homosexual has really always been about. A monogamous family-style gay life is really for unattractive gay men.
The family is an entirely different concept to homosexuality: it creates a cocoon within which sex, but also reproduction and the upbringing of children, can be conducted. A 50-year-old man knows the 18-year-old females no longer find him attractive. He has a wife—who will have lost her looks—and he has children and probably grandchildren. He would be losing a lot by foolishly chasing after young women. The family provides a way for him to reconcile himself to his ageing self and his declining sexual activity.
Being gay can be tolerated by society at the margins. There can be a small number of people who don’t have real families, and hanker after sex until they can no longer gyrate, without disturbing social order. Whether such people can find a way to be happy as septuagenarian homosexuals with no children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren, is largely their business, and in most cases likely to be an unhappy affair. In reality, heterosexuality is a greater and more palatable concept, simply because of the way it provides a network of relationships as a compensation for sexual activity for older straight men. Real homosexuality has nothing similar to offer—other than the plastic families of Elton John and his ilk.
Be that as it may, it seems clear that the family-like gays do not speak for the entire homosexual community, and are even seen as freakish in some parts of the homosexual population. The danger is that the political adoption of homosexuality as a cultural cause will spoil the real content of gay life. By going mainstream, the sex is taken out of the sexuality—and then it becomes the plaything of the political elite. Libertarians should therefore oppose the political gay cultural project and lend their support rather to men who like to have sex with strangers in saunas, in dark rooms in gay clubs, in specialist sex clubs, and other similar venues.
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The only thing libertarianism has to say about which people should have sex or form families with each other is that aggression should play no part in the matter, either by way of prohibition or by way of compulsion.
That’s not to say that libertarians might not have opinions on those subjects. It’s just that their opinions on those subjects have nothing to do with libertarianism except where aggression is concerned.
There is a lot to like with this article, but just before one falls for the whole thing, “bug chasing” (urban legend or not) in the era of Socialized Medicine, needs its own elaboration as it relates to the last point–gay marriage, the thinking goes, was one way to force monogamy. Simply stated, the gay lifestyle is expensive on society. The area where conservatives of the present and the “gay community” can work together is on IVF consumer choices (surely, ‘gayness’ will be eliminated by those who can afford such levels of testing, taking the Upper Bell Curve and the Elite Status, out of the person hood pool.) It is after all, “liberals” who will deal the gay culture, as noted, the Final Solution. Libertarians need to develop their thought here.
If they are born like it and it is absolutely, amorally, biologically, determined; does that mean every variety of sexual preference is completely amoral and biologically determined? The gay ideology seems to be a quasi-religion (like atheistic/agnostic/supposedly rational/secular humanism), except they have the right and freedom to force it on every one else; while militantly opposing the same rights for every one else.
It is interesting that many “normal” people wouldn’t have a clue about what constitutes (in reality) the “gay” life style-dogging, cottaging and the village etc. Gay rights has been so promoted by the news media and its various “fundamentals” that most people have been indoctrinated into accepting it as an absolutely true, righteous, dogma. When I mention gay men who become straight the invariable answer is that they must be bi-sexual.
One of the world war one poets said-only about 1/10th of the boys who practiced buggery were homosexual, at his school and when they left; they switched their lusts to woman kind. It is probably the case in many male only environments, but with the gay agenda many men have been screwed up into think they are physiologicaly somehow fixed as a homo sexual; just because in a moment of desperate weakness, wickedness and uncontrolled lust; they succumbed to this base perversion.
I’ve never so much as understood the prejudice against all-male sex between consenting adults. I certainly don’t think it should be subject to the smallest legal penalty. This being said, gay activists are tiresome people. They turn a piffling deviation from the norm – assuming, that is, it really is a deviation at all – into a defining characteristic. Meeting these people is rather like being greeted with the words: “Hell, I’m John. I smoke a pipe.”
If two men want to have sex with each other, good luck to them. There’s little enough affection of any kind in the world. If they want to get married, let it be. If they want to introduce fatuous comments with “Speaking as a gay man…” so much the worse for them. The only valid objection is when a gay activist starts asking for the taxpayers’ money, or for laws to censor speech or to compel association.
Some of my friends have a taste for all-male sex. Others haven’t. I am a civilised man, and I take my friends as I find them. One of the few non-technological blessings of modern England is that there are more men like me than there used to be. One of my various ambitions in life is to make sure there are many more of us.
I more or less agree. I think that all I disagree about is whether homosexual sex (which clearly exists as an observable phenomenon and cannot be denied) can be termed “sex”, as opposed to a mere desired “act”; sex being a term which as a (mostly) biological scientist I tend to reserve for the reproductively-directed kind inside those phyla and classes of creatures in which it is observed commonly to happen. But perhaps I am just being a pedant here.
Since when is George Michael “an extremely unattractive man”?
Er… he’s the one on the right in this picture: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/02/16/article-2102148-11C44388000005DC-810_634x441.jpg
So what you mean is, he’s extremely unattractive to you.
well, it is my view that were he not a singer with a lot of money he might find 18-year-old lads did not willingly disrobe for him…
I suspect that if he was not a singer with a lot of money, he’d find a good deal fewer 18-year-old lads who willingly disrobed for him. Or 18-year-old women, if that was what he was interested in. And that that would be true no matter what he looked like.
Here is a young man in whom Elton John has taken a fatherly interest. Most touching how the affection is reciprocated.
https://40.media.tumblr.com/f42bf666167619f34426c785b73ea741/tumblr_n1biw1h1Dl1tsohk1o2_500.jpg
Who is that?
That is a Czech model – but it’s news to me that Elton John has any connection…
http://www.queerty.com/elton-john-brings-bel-ami-porn-star-on-french-riviera-getaway-20120821
Oh really!! Then Elton cannot be taken seriously with the fake family thing!!!
Assuming that it’s true, by that logic neither can any heterosexual who’s ever done the same thing.
I have to say for Elton John to take a porn star on holiday humanizes him in my eyes – I can understand that much more than the messing about with surrogate mothers and pretending to get married to a man who, if you think about it, cannot really be his preferred sexual partner. Would he prefer to wake up to David Furnish or to Dolph Lambert? Come on now!!
The great Dolph Lambert. Mr Blake has a professional eye on him to play in the cinematic treatment of one of his novels.
Is that Aelric then? I imagined that Mr Blake imagined him with longer hair and a hairy chest. The rest of it is good though. Cast him now, for he looks sufficiently intelligent to play the role strategically and fully.
His acting experience to date has been somewhat limited. But I’m sure he’ll do.
Mind you, the love of Stephen Fry’s life leaves much to be desired. I wonder if the wedding present list contained a bottle of shampoo and new razor blades?
http://scanfigus.com/uploads/celebrity/Elliott%20Spencer.jpg
This is, of course, an unduly bitchy comment. Mr Blake reminds me that he has Mr Fry in mind to play an obese eunuch in the screen adaptation of “Terror of Constantinople.”
If the rules of this Blog allowed, I would remove my comment.
I don’t see why you would need to remove it. Part of the point of libertarianism is that people should be free to say something without pouring over it to assess its acceptability first.
The right to freedom of speech is tempered by a moral obligation to be polite and by common prudence. I should have the right, were I so inclined to exercise it, to call Stephen Fry the most awful things. But the man has done me no harm, and, if he were to see these things, he might feel rather hurt, and he might take against Mr Blake.
In the same way, I should have the right to get the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on my knuckles, but need to bear in mind that others might not be so willing to associate with me afterwards, and might use their right to freedom of speech to say inconvenient and hurtful things about me.
Hey, that’s funny Sean!
Well, neither he nor Stephen Fry is attractive – the whole story of the “marriage” is quite forgettable!
If I were rich and gay and over the hill, I can tell you which I’d rather wake up next to. From the picture I’ve given, you can almost smell Mr Spencer’s hair.
Whatever happened to the child’s right to a mother and a father in holy matrimony? What a sad scary world we live in.
Children have no such right. Their only right is to be treated well in the families they actually have.
But it is not for the state to determine who should parent these children. We as adults have a duty to make sure that children have a well balanced family (mother and father be it biological or adoptive) so that they can thrive and a have good chance at succeeding in life.
We have a duty to see that children are not made grossly unhappy. Beyond that, it’s a matter of leaving them alone in whatever family chance has given them. Anything more is a step to endorsing the current social worker police state.
So in a libertarian world, how would we address this issue of leaving children alone in a balanced heterosexual environment whilst not having the state in the lives. At this moment it is impossible so the only thing we can do is campaign to scrap all the laws created in the last 50 years because I know that what you are after Sean is a society where there is a minimal state so that we can live lives in freedom without hardly a tier in the state.
What I am campaigning for is a minimal state with fewer and yet tougher laws and free markets to trade with the world nations without involving globalism and definitely leaving the EU. By minimal state, I also mean getting rid of the state’s right to define marriage so that faith, religious and secular groups are free to define marriage without having the homosexual agenda pushed on them. I also mean Christians and minority religious groups having the right to offend and evangelize without having the state interfering. And to top it off, I mean freedom of speech and expression without fear mongering from the state.
There is no issue. So long as children are not being starved or beaten or raped or burned with red-hot irons, or whatever, what else goes on in a household is no one else’s concern. If both the parents are of one sex, I fail to see what any fuss could be about.
I don’t know about your family background Sean but with mine, my Dad walked out on the family when I was 10 but I got lucky because my step-dad has been a solid influence making sure I still had a mother and father figure. I have attached a link relating to someone who was brought up by same gender parents but suffered for it:
http://www.christian.org.uk/news/my-father-was-gay-and-i-oppose-gay-marriage/
When you quote, ‘so long as children are not being starved or beaten or raped or burned with irons or whatever’. In a general libertarian society, how would we know if any of these things weren’t happening to children?
With all the scandals going on in Rotherham and other parts of the country turning a blind eye like a general libertarian would, I can’t buy into your argument that children will always be safe under an almost no-state government such as yours.
Children will not always be safe under any kind of government or non-government. Bearing in mind the scandalous state of the “child protection” agencies, however, it is better to accept that we live in an imperfect world and look for the least harmful option. That is probably leaving alone.
I agree with your first your point. What I am trying to get at is that a under a general libertarian government, what would be your way of punishing those who harm children to a horrific extent and even murder? Because from our little debate, I am concerned that libertarians in general have not thought about ways to protect children and punishing those who would harm.
As a political fusionist, the way this could be done is by making sure the death penalty was brought back for paedophilia and murder of children, making sure communities took a more active role in looking out for each other and respecting the traditional family whereby children would be better protected and can live a life of freedom with a traditional well balanced family be it biological or adopted.
This is all very interesting, but I can’t help thinking that if something wasn’t broken in the first place, then why was it necessary to monkey (sorry!) with it?
How do you mean exactly?
“What does it mean to be gay?”
It means to be happy, cheerful, carefree.
If Mr. Webb wants to address the issue “What does it mean to be homosexual,” then let him use the right words in his title.
If people wish to scorn people like me who make a big deal about this misusage, that’s their right. BUT in that case, let me hear NOT ONE WORD EVER about “he who controls the language controls the discourse,” or about the nasty Marxist habit of substituting words for other words so as to make this or that sound nasty if it’s actually good, or good if it’s actually nasty.
Which was in fact the reason why this particular verbal hijacking was committed in the first place; deliberately, so as to put a pretty face on homosexuality. –And that is NOT a swipe at homosexuality, by the way. It’s a swipe at people who misuse language PURPOSELY in order to MISLEAD.
There is a well-known British libertarian who delivers various interesting lectures. I’ve seen several of these, and was quite interested in the one I saw last week, courtesy of YouTube. A great deal of the lecture was given over to the importance of calling things by their right names. I believe that Mr. Orwell was invoked. It was wonderful, and I loved it.
And then this fine libertarian and defender of the English language went and started yipping about “gays” and “gay rights” (I suppose — it was “gay” this and “gay” that till hell wouldn’t have it, and that is of course one of the Major Issues of the Day, or so we are told).
Walk the walk, or else shut up.
The word “gay” has been used with sexual connotations, e.g. promiscuity, for centuries. It’s been used with reference to homosexuality for close to a century. The idea that it’s lately and suddenly been taken over for political purposes is hogwash. Its usage evolved, as usages do.
Julie, you are in fact right. The word “gay”, which might be accepted as part of a subcultural lingo, has now been imposed as the only mainstream word for homosexual, in order to control the discourse. None of the words is really great. “Homosexual” sounds medical. The only term I really approve of is “men who like men”, which removes the phenomenon of homosexuality from the gay identity and culture, which is part of my point in the article.
Thank you, DJ, and thanks for the article also. One correction: Lesbians are also homosexual. The prefix “homo” is from “same,” not from “man” (as in homo sapiens) and certainly not from “male.” From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
By contrast, from the same source;
Lesbians are female homosexuals, but they are not gay – the phenomenon is totally different. I would argue it is in fact the opposite phenomenon. The LGBT concept that gay men have to approve of lesbians and transsexuals as well is a political construct – and quite offensive!
I don’t like the categories “gay” and “straight.” I don’t much like words like “homosexual,” which sounds like a medical description. It’s as if we were to make up words to distinguish tea drinkers from coffee drinkers. The truth is that some people, at some times or all times, like all-male or all-female sex, and some like mixed sex.
There should be no laws against any consensual acts between adults. At the same time, anyone who defines himself mainly by his sexual tastes is to be pitied or despised. For any person of taste and intelligence, there are more important things in life than sex.
It would be a pity to let this discussion close without a bit of fire and brimstone and a stern reminder of what befell the Cities Of The Plain.
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/election-candidate-wants-gay-people-jailed-adultery-made-illegal-and-rock-bands-outlawed-31176105.html
As I’ve said before, you British libertarians somehow manage to avoid political correctness and go for common sense instead, in contrast to us American libertarians, who, for the most party are as marinated in political correctness as the most egregious liberals are.. In aid of spreading your attitude over here, again I reprint: http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-beatrix-potter-fallacy.html
Thanks
The mediaevals didn’t even have a concept of “sexual orientation.” They wouldn’t have understood why anyone would define themselves according to what they did in the bedchamber. In a very general sense, all mediaevals were either virgins or sodomites (meaning anyone who had spilt semen, according to a particularly broad definition). To my mind, the labels “gay”, “straight”, “asexual”, “bisexual”, and the twenty million or so other ones which I forget, are less useful than the labels used by the mediaevals.
Agreed. Until the last quarter of the 19th century, moralists and the relevant enforcement agencies were more concerned about acts than orientations. This doesn’t make many of the enforcements any more legitimate, so far as they violated the right to be left alone. But it makes better sense than all this stuff about “gay lifestyles.”
Until the second half of the 20th century, there was no such lifestyle as “outlaw motorcycle club member” or “Mouseketeer” or “rock star,” either.
“Gay lifestyles” emerged at the point where it became reasonably safe for homosexuals to stop pretending they were heterosexuals everywhere outside the bedroom. It’s not some kind of giant conspiracy. Societies and cultures change, and that means new ways of living emerge.
I see Damian Hockney has weighed in with further comments on how gay life has become less bohemian and more middle-class – see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11594550/David-Hockney-too-many-gay-men-just-want-to-lead-ordinary-boring-lives.html It seems there is a real flood of these comments at the moment, as older gay men suddenlyl realise that the “gay” has been taken out of being “gay” by the way the political class has taken over the concept…
It’s not so much that gay life has “become” less bohemian and more middle class than that until recently only the bohemians were public about their sexual orientation.
Back in the 80s, I knew monogamous gay couples who had been married for decades.
But they weren’t especially keen on advertising that at a time when it was still considered perfectly normal to despise and discriminate against them, or even prosecute them as criminals for having relationships, marriages and families that Mrs. Grundy didn’t approve of.
No Thomas, the gay couples you knew hadn’t been “married” for decades. Gay marriage had not been legalized, and even now that it has been, it’s status remains the subject of dispute.
If I get in my car and drive down the road without a license, I’m driving.
If I get married without a piece of paper from the state saying it’s OK to be married, I’m still married.
You can “dispute” the “status” of my driving or my marriage all you want, but that kind of wanking doesn’t change reality, it just makes you feel like you’re in charge or something.