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ERA, Homosexual Rights, and the New Era

Reprinted in:
The Gay News-Telegraph, Vol. 2, No. 3, December, 1982

Back at the turn of the Century, life really was a lot more simple. But it was also a lot more strenuous. People didn’t generally get too educated, or move too far from where they were born. Most of them were close to farming. When a man and a woman got married, it was a partnership. Doing one's part was often a matter of life or death. Women bore children, men generally had greater upper body strength, and so a division of labor (if you’ll pardon the pun) existed. Both “men’s work” and “women’s work” required great strength and endurance.

Because this division of labor worked well for most of the people and for the society, and because life was more simple and less questioned, people got classified in a very rigid fashion. There was a very obvious difference between the children being born. Some were male and others were female. In other words, People were sexed. And because of the division of labor, there were really two sub-cultures of the human race. There was the culture of women and the culture of men. Women looked to other women and men looked to other men to find out how to behave. And so ways of behaving we now call “gender” were taught to and picked up by children.

One of the ways that men and women were supposed to reveal their gender (and so, indirectly, their sex) was to be attracted sexually to the opposite sex. There were very clear rituals around which this was supposed to take place: courting, marriage, rearing a family, and so forth. It is quite important, for the sake of the point of this article, that the reader see how sexual orientation was seen only as a reflection of a person’s gender and not as something with a separate development of its own.

Now, in the late Twentieth Century, we know that things are not so simple. A person’s sex does not determine his/her gender and sexual orientation. We cannot understand the human race by doing a simple binary classification: male? ok, then masculine and sexually attracted to women; female? ok, then feminine and sexually attracted to men.

Instead, what we know is that each person can be classified along three continua. Kinsey was one of the first to recognize this. He Proposed (supported by much data) that people could be classified along a scale from 0 to 6 in terms of their degree of homosexuality or heterosexuality. Kinsey was talking about sexual acts. However, I’m sure you will all agree, if you think about the people you know, that people can be classified on a masculinity-femininity scale ,too. Some men are more feminine acting than some women, some women, more masculine acting than some men. Nature even makes babies that don't clearly fit the sexual dichotomy. The doctor and the anxious parents usually do that, sometimes surgically.
Probably the most significant discovery for homosexuals is the fact that gender and sexual preference are developmentally distinct. Gender takes definite form around 18 months with the development of language. The child decides whether it is a little girl or a little boy. Sexual preference, on the other hand, has its first glimmerings around age 5, but does not really blossom until puberty. And we know know that it is true, and always has been true, that about 5 to 10 percent of each gender develops a sexual preference for itself.

My point in all of this is a simple one. We get much closer to understanding the biological, psychological, and social reality if we give up trying to classify people unambiguously according to sex, gender., and sexual orientation. The reality is that each person falls somewhere on each of these three axes. In other words, we used to think that there were only two types of people, men and women. In late Twentieth Century we know that there are really an infinite number of unique people as defined on three continua.

Now, tedious as the above lecture may have seemed, it is very crucial to my explanation of the connection between the Equal Rights Amendment and homosexual rights. For you see as the Century has worn on, we have been discovering more than just the apparently trivial but, in truth, monumentally insignificant fact that each person is unique. We have discovered that an incalculable amount of suffering and injustice has been done because we have overlooked this fact. People with various degrees of hermaphroditism have been held up to incalculable shame and ridicule. Men with feminine tendencies and women with masculine tendencies have been scorned and denied legitimate work. And people who have been attracted to the same sex—well, they have been tortured (under a doctor's surveillance), locked away, and/or killed.

The ERA is stated very simply in terms of rights not being denied on account of sex. But I hope you see, in light of the above discussion, how inextricably bound up with sex is the question of sexual orientation and sexual preference. The women who have worked so tirelessly for the ERA have done this country a great service. But it is a mistake to think of ERA in terms of being a women’s movement. Rather, one should think of it as a people’s movement—a movement by various groups of people who do not fit the rigid gender stereotyping. Most people are androgynous and bisexuaI in some degree. So almost everyone does not fit the outdated dichotomy. And so, homosexual rights, women’s rights and men’s rights are inextricably bound up together. They cannot even be conceptualized adequately apart from one another.

If you think this is complicated, however, the situation is even more complex. For, you see, the equal rights movement is just a part of an even greater movement of the human race. We can see the events leading up to this point very clearly. In the first half of the Twentieth Century we learned that the horror of war knows no bounds. Following the Second World War we embarked on the American Dream, which, in addition to being based on the false dichotomies discussed above, contained the additional assumption that the Dream belonged only to the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. During the ‘60s the civil rights movement and the growing problems of poverty and pollution made us aware that not all was well. The women’s movement, and the gay rights movement of the ‘70s were a logical extension of the ‘60s—yet two more groups who did not fit the so-called “American Dream” were expressing their dissatisfaction.

But one other thing happened during the late ‘60s. A human being stood on the moon and looked back at the earth. And as he stood looking at this precious blue-green jewel veiled in white, the first glimmerings of the monstrous degradation of “this Holyest Erthe” must have crossed his mind. It was indeed a “giant step” for humanity. Up until that point, we had ben busy individualizing. At that point, a unity was brought into human thought that had not been there before, at least not in just that way. Thus, partly because of this vision, it became apparent to some that this “space ship earth” needed a course change.

And so, we are at last ready to discuss the final idea of this piece. This earth is on the verse of a transformation. We see many facets of this transformation, some real and apparent, some only potential and developing. Computers and international media access have totally revolutionized our conception of world-wide events. We experience the Israel-PLO conflict in Beirut as if it were occurring outside our windows. Pollution and species extinction remind us that the earth is a closed system.We cannot.escape the international aspects of community, even in the business world, where multinational corporations wield power that popes and queens have only dreamed of. Swiftly and surely, we are developing a planetary awareness—the idea that this planet is a living ecosystem in which nations, cultures, and people are maintaining a somewhat precarious balance.

Beyond this external awareness of the shrinking globe, however, we are simultaneously undergoing an internal revolution—the planetization of consciousness. Metaphysical inquiry and interest abounds. Quantum Physicists tell us such strange sounding things as “there are an infinite number of universes” and “we now believe that the future can cause the past. Competent research into psychic phenomena endlessly amazes us. Remote viewing, out-of-body experiences, telekinesis, are being documented in the laboratory by physical scientists. Eastern Philosophy and Western science are beginning to agree that we are all One.

We are returning to a new idealism—a belief that the Universe is basically Mind linking us all in a web of consciousness in which if one strand moves, all do. The bankruptcy papers of the billiard ball conception of the universe are being filed by the very scientists who once defended it. Rozak, Thompson, Lessing, Pearce, Castaneda blow our minds with a new paradigm for reality. Findhorn, SRF, Course in Miracles, Psychosynthesis become household words. This is no trendy fad to become passé in ten years; there are hundreds of references that back up these opinions.

This transformation of consciousness is having a revolutionary effect on our values. How can I blow the SOB’s out of the Kremlin when I am consciously linked to Russian factory workers and farmers? How can I think such selfish thoughts if others can read them? If I am part of a greater mind that encompasses the planet, then shouldn’t I be inquiring into the nature of that mind? What these rhetorical questions are meant to suggest is that the human race is not only undergoing a communication revolution, it is also undergoing a spiritual revolution.

It now becomes apparent how the women’s movement and the homosexual rights movement of the’70s were a part of this spiritual revolution. In the prior 400 years, when we were assured by the very best scientists that we were merely atoms whirling in a void, it was easy to think of human function in terms of biological reproduction and concrete sexual metaphors. As long as role-appropriate behaviors for men and women were defined on the materialistic plane, then Perhaps ERA and homosexual rights seem like ideological luxuries—not very practical.

But what a relatively few male and female heterosexual and homosexual persons have been reminding us is that there is more to a person than their alleged biological and cultural sexual function. Once it becomes clear that people exist along a continuum of sexual orientation and gender identity, it also becomes clear that the important human characteristics, such as intelligence., compassion., self-realization, talent., creativity, spirituality, and so forth, are distributed more or less evenly between heterosexuals and homosexuals, between men and women in the sense of gender identity.

The ERA takes the emphasis of of what men and women are supposed to be doing, and puts it on what they might and can do. It moves us away from a rigid cultural and biological definition of gender-appropriate roles, and toward a more spiritual definition of the human person. It is consistent with the belief that spiritually, we are One, even if we may look and behave differently.

And do you know what ? No person is any more responsible for this new shift, this new awareness, than the liberated homosexual person. Why? When man sexually and affectionally loves man, when woman sexually and affectionally loves woman, they set a clear example that jars the stupefied mind loose from its cultural blinders. Because what happens with liberated homosexual men and women is that they live the same rich, full lives that liberated heterosexual men and women do. They refuse to be defined by rigid gender-role expectations. They remind people in the most concrete way possible that. the important things in life are love, compassion, intelligence, vocational success, friendship, and last, but not least, a sense of connectedness to the whole of Creation.

As we stand on the threshold of a New Era—at a new frontier of evolution, it becomes clearer what all the controversy and dissension has been about. The·Equal Rights Amendment has been an important ticket to this new age, a ticket to the other side of the universe, if you will. A side of the universe that is near as loving your neighbor as yourself. But not everyone has wanted to go there. This is not the first time that the human race has fought for love and understanding.

In the early '70s Dennis Altman in his book Homosexuality compared the homosexual person to the philosopher. Both, he said, are gadflies to society. Homosexuals and philosophers force people to look at their unexamined and unwarranted assumptions. At that same time, Joseph Chilton Pearce was telling us in The Crack in the Cosmic Egg how to throw off the shackles of outdated, rigid thinking about reality itself. Now, in the early ‘80s we can see that homosexuality has been an important Crack in the Cultural Cosmic Egg. It has helped us to see beyond rigid stereotyping, beyond narrow, materialistic focus. Homosexual men and women, you are more important than you may have dreamed. Society owes everything to you, but will never inherit the Kingdom until it sees you as you really are. You really are a Portent of The New Age.