The Argument for a Fertile Homosexuality

In my last post, I turned to evolutionary biology to make the case for homosexuality as a natural part of the cycles of fertility, justifying the inclusion of gay people in those occult traditions which are centered around the fertility cults.

For the longest time, admitting gay men and lesbians into their covens was a huge issue within some witchcraft circles.  Though nobody would go so far as to publicly declare that gay men and lesbians were NOT a part of fertility, there was a decided lack of knowledge about how we fit into the cycles of fertility, and, therefore, how to include us in fertility cult traditions.

Even gay men and lesbians, themselves, lacked (and still lack) a coherent and universally recognized theory for their own roles within the cycles of fertility (both in and out of occult circles).  For many of us, finding a partner, settling down, and raising a family was/is viewed as "playing it straight."  In fact,  back when I was coming out (in the 90s), gay men my age and older would dramatically roll their eyes whenever I said that I wanted to get married.  A few of them even went so far as to attempt to shame me for "trying to be something I wasn't," and no amount of arguing that we deserved to be treated as equals with straight people would persuade them that I wasn't engaged in some radical form of self-loathing.

Our ancestors did not share in this lack of knowledge about the role that gay people played in the cycles of fertility.  According to James Neill (author of The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Society), paleoanthropologists who studied the behavior of early humans believe that one of the primary factors in the success of these early peoples was the evolution of group behavior and interdependence.  As our species developed, smaller societies and clans began to function as one organism, with individual personalities beginning to emerge and everyone contributing to the well-being of the larger whole in his or her own way.  Exclusively homosexual males have been documented performing a range of tasks from providing a "special friendship" to warriors on campaign to caring for the sick for these early clans.  However, regarding the concept of fertility and what we would call gay men, the most interesting fact about exclusively homosexual males in these early clans is that they were protectors of the domestic sphere.  They assisted the women in gathering nuts, berries, tubers, and firewood, but they also served as guardians in case the tribe was attacked while the other men were away at war.

Neill says it best: "With no children of their own to absorb their energies, these homosexual members would have been better able to assist their close relatives.  The presence of these non-reproducing adults would have had the effect of increasing the proportion of productive workers in the total population of adults and children, thereby raising the per capita productivity of the group in their efforts to bring in such necessities as food and firewood, and in tending to domestic chores.  Because of the extra help these individuals [exclusive homosexuals] would have provided, their close relatives would have been able to successfully raise more children, and the ability of the group as a whole to survive would have been enlarged." (p. 72)

An argument might even be made that families with access to these exclusive homosexual members thrived while other families without exclusively homosexual members perished … or, at the very least, were less successful.  It might even be said that most of us today owe our existence to exclusively homosexual ancestors, because, without them, our particular ancestral lines might have died out long ago.  Within the terms of evolutionary biology, this scenario is referred to as the "kin-selection hypothesis."  So, contrary to the popular opinion today that gay people are completely removed from the cycles of fertility, if evolutionary biology and, specifically, the kin-selection hypothesis are correct, it would seem that gay people have a long and deeply rooted tradition of assisting the fertility of their family, tribe, clan, or community.