by Gore Vidal
In the fall of 1977, the journalist Andrew Kopkind visited Bensenville, Illinois, in the heart of the heart of the country, in order to study those roots of grass that are now not only as high as an elephant’s eye but definitely swaying to the right. Save the Family is this year’s rallying cry. Since hardly anyone ever openly questions the value of the family in human affairs, any group that wants to save this allegedly endangered institution is warmly supported.
But to the zealots of what Kopkind calls the New Right, saving the family means all sorts of things not exactly connected with the nuclear family. Kopkind discovered that Family Saviors support “the death penalty, Laetrile, nuclear power, local police, Panama Canal, saccharin, FBI, CIA, defense budget, public prayer and real-estate growth.”
Family Saviors view darkly “busing, welfare, public-employee unions, affirmative action, amnesty, marijuana, communes, gun control, pornography, the 55-mph speed limit, day-care centers, religious ecumenism, sex education, car pools and the Environmental Protection Agency.” Kopkind believes that those attitudes are fairly spontaneous. He is probably right—up to a point. To get Americans to vote constantly against their own interests, however, requires manipulation of the highest order, and it starts at birth in these remarkably United States and never ends.
Until recently, it had not occurred to anyone that a profamily movement might be politically attractive. Our demagogues usually concentrate on communism versus Americanism. But Nixon’s jaunts to Peking and Moscow diminished communism as an issue. Those trips also served to remind Americans that we are a fragile minority in a world where the majority is Marxist. Although communism is still a button to be pressed, it tends to tepidity.
On the other hand, to accuse your opponent of favoring any of those vicious forces that endanger the family is to do him real harm. In the past 18 months, Family Saviors have been remarkably effective. They have defeated equal-rights ordinances for homosexualists in Dade County, St. Paul, Wichita, Eugene; obliged the House of Representatives to reverse itself on an anti-abortion bill; stalled (for a time) the Equal Rights Amendment, and so on. Sex is the ultimate politics and very soon, one way or another, every politician is going to get—as it were—into the act.
Officially, our attitudes toward sex derive from the Old and New Testaments. Even to this day, Christian fundamentalists like to say that since every single word in the good book is absolutely true, every one of God’s injunctions must be absolutely obeyed if we don’t want the great plains of the republic to be studded with pillars of salt or worse. Actually, even the most rigorously literal of fundamentalists pick and choose from Biblical texts. The authors of Leviticus proscribe homosexuality—and so do all good Christers. But Leviticus also proscribes rare meat, bacon, shellfish, and the wearing of nylon mixed with wool. If Leviticus were to be obeyed in every instance, the garment trade would collapse.
The authors of the Old and New Testaments created not only a religious anthology but also a political order in which man is woman’s eternal master (Jewish men used to pray, “I thank thee, Lord, that thou hast not created me a woman”). The hatred and fear of women that runs through the Old Testament (not to mention in the pages of our justly admired Jewish novelists) suggests that the patriarchal principle so carefully built into the Jewish notion of God must have been at one time opposed to a powerful and perhaps competitive matriarchal system. Whatever the original reasons for the total subordination of woman to man, the result has been an unusually ugly religion that has caused a good deal of suffering not only in its original form but also through its later heresy, Christianity, which in due, and ironic, course was to spin off yet another heresy, communism.
The current wave of Christian religiosity that is flowing across the republic like an oil slick has served as a reminder to women that they must submit to their husbands. This is not easy, as twice-born Anita Bryant admits. She confesses to a tendency to “dump her garbage” all over her husband and master and employee, Bob Green. But she must control herself: “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church” (Ephesians 5:23). Anita also knows that because of woman’s disobedience, the prototypes of the human race were excluded from the Garden of Eden.
Brooding on the Old Testament’s dislike of women, Freud theorized that an original patriarchal tribe was for a time replaced by a matriarchal tribe that was then overthrown by the patriarchal Jews: the consequent “re-establishment of the primal father in his historic rights was a great step forward.” This speculative nonsense is highly indicative of the way that a mind as shrewd and as original as Freud’s could not conceive of a good (virtuous?) society that was not dominated by man the father.
“What do women want?” Freud once asked, plaintively. Well, Sigmund, they want equality with men. But that equality was not acceptable either to the authors of the Old Testament or to Freud himself. Today, almost 3,000 years after Moses came down from Sinai, women are approaching equality with men in the United States. But the war against woman’s equality still goes on; at the moment, it is being conducted in the name of The Family.
The New Testament’s Christ is a somewhat milder figure than the Jehovah of the Old Testament. Yet one is very much the son of the other, and so, presumably, nothing basic was supposed to change in the relations between the sexes. In fact, at one point, Jesus displays a positively Portnoyesque exasperation with the traditional Jewish mother. “Woman,” he says to Mary, “what art thou to me?” Mary’s no doubt lengthy answer has not been recorded.
As a Jew, Jesus took seriously the Ten Commandments. But he totally confused the whole business of adultery by saying that even to entertain so much as a Carter-like lust for a woman is the equivalent of actually committing adultery. Jesus also went on record as saying that whores had as good a chance of getting to heaven as IRS men. It is possible that he meant this as a joke. If so, it is the only joke in the New Testament.
To an adulteress, Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn thee,” before suggesting that she stop playing around. Jesus had nothing to say about homosexuality, masturbation or the Equal Rights Amendment; but he did think the absolute world of eunuchs (Matthew 19:10–12). Finally, Jesus believed that the world was about to end. “But I tell you of a truth, there are some standing here, who shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:27). As far as we can tell, the world did not end in the first century A.D., and all those standing there died without having seen the kingdom.
A few years later, Saint Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus. “Both Jews and gentiles all are under sin,” he—what is that best-seller verb?—shrilled. Since Paul was also convinced that the world was about to end, he believed that man must keep himself ritually pure for the day of judgment, and ritual purity required a total abstention from sex. For those who could not remain heroically chaste (to “abide even as I”), Paul rather sourly agreed that “it is better to marry than to burn”—burn with lust, by the way, not hell-fire, as some primitive Christers like to interpret that passage.
Paul also advised married men to live with their wives “as though they had none….For the form of this world is passing away.” Although this world’s form did not pass away, Paul’s loathing of sexuality did not pass away, either. As a result, anyone brought up in a Christian-dominated society will be taught from birth to regard his natural sexual desires as sinful, or worse.
A state of constant guilt in the citizenry is a good thing for rulers who tend not to take very seriously the religions that they impose on their subjects. Since marriage was the only admissible outlet for the sexual drive, that institution was used as a means of channeling the sexual drive in a way that would make docile the man, while the woman, humanly speaking, existed only as the repository of the sacred sperm (regarded as a manifestation of the Holy Ghost).
Woman was commanded to serve and obey her husband as totally as he, in turn, served and obeyed his temporal,
Bible-quoting master. If one had set out deliberately to invent a religion that would effectively enslave a population, one could not have done much better than Judaeo-Christianity.
Curiously enough, Paul is the only Old or New Testament maven to condemn lesbianism, an activity that Queen Victoria did not believe existed and Jesus ignored. But Paul knew better. Why, even as he spoke, Roman ladies were burning “in their lust one toward another…!” Whenever Paul gets onto the subject of burning lust, he shows every sign of acute migraine.
Now, what is all this nonsense really about? Why should natural sexual desires be condemned in the name of religion? Paul would have said that since judgment day was scheduled for early next year, you should keep yourself ritually clean and ritual cleanliness amongst the Jews involved not only sexual abstinence but an eschewal of shellfish. But Paul’s hatred of the flesh is somewhat hard to understand in the light of Jesus’ fairly relaxed attitude. On the other hand, Paul’s dislike of homosexuality is a bit easier to understand (though never properly understood by American Christers). It derives from the Old Testament book Leviticus, the so-called Holiness Code.
Homosexual relations between heroes were often celebrated in the ancient world. The oldest of religious texts tells of the love between two men, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. When Enkidu died, Gilgamesh challenged death itself in order to bring his lover back to life. In the Iliad, Gilgamesh’s rage is echoed by Achilles when his lover Patroclus dies before the walls of Troy. So intense was the love between the heroes David and Jonathan that David noted in his obituary of Jonathan, “Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” Elsewhere in the Old Testament, the love that Ruth felt for Naomi was of a sort that today might well end in the joint ownership of a ceramics kiln at Laguna Beach. Why, then, the extraordinary fuss about homosexuality in Leviticus?
Leviticus was written either during or shortly after the Jewish exile in Babylon (586–538 B.C.). The exile ended when Persia’s Great King Cyrus conquered Babylon. Tolerant of all religions, Cyrus let the Jews go home to Jerusalem, where they began to rebuild the temple that had been destroyed in 586. Since it was thought that the disasters of 586 might have been averted had the Jews been a bit more straitlaced in their deportment, Leviticus was drafted. It contained a very stern list of dos and don’ts. Adultery, which had been proscribed by Moses, was now not only proscribed but the adulterers were to be put to death, while “If a man…lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination” and must be put to death.
What is all this about? In earlier days, Jonathan and David were much admired. Was their celebrated love for each other an abomination? Obviously not. The clue to the mystery is the word abomination, which derives from the Hebrew word to’ebah, meaning idolatrous. At the time of Leviticus (and long before), the Great Goddess was worshiped throughout the Middle East. She had many names: Cybele, Astarte, Diana, Anahita. Since the Jews thought that the Great Goddess was in direct competition with their Great God, they denounced her worshipers as idolatrous, or to’ebah, or abominable; and particularly disapproved of the ritual sex associated with her worship. Many of Cybele’s admirers castrated themselves for her glory while male and female prostitutes crowded the temple precincts, ready for action.
In Babylon, every respectable woman was obliged to go at least once in a lifetime to the temple and prostitute herself to the first pilgrim who was willing to pay her. According to Herodotus, ill-favored women were obliged to spend an awful lot of time at the temple, trying to turn that reluctant trick which would make them blessed in the eyes of the goddess.
No doubt, many Jews in Babylon were attracted, if not to the goddess’ worship, to the sexual games that went on in her temples. Therefore, the authors of Leviticus made it clear that any Jew who went with a male or female temple prostitute was guilty of an idolatrous or abominable act in the eyes of the Great God Jehovah—a notoriously jealous god by his own admission. As a result, the abominations in Leviticus refer not to sexual acts as such but to sexual acts associated with the cult of the Great Goddess.
Elsewhere in the Old Testament, Sodom was destroyed not because the inhabitants were homosexualists but because a number of local men wanted to gang-rape a pair of male angels who were guests of the town. That was a violation of the most sacred of ancient taboos: the law of hospitality. Also, gang rape, whether homosexual or heterosexual, is seldom agreeable in the eyes of any deity.
Human beings take a long time to grow up. This fact means that the tribe or the family or the commune is obliged to protect and train the young in those skills that will be needed for him to achieve a physical maturity whose sole purpose seems to be the passing on to a new generation of the sacred DNA code. The nature of life is more life. This is not very inspiring, but it is all that we know for certain that we have. Consequently, our religiopolitical leaders have always glorified the tribe or the family or the state at the expense of the individual. But societies change and when they do, seemingly eternal laws are superseded. Flat earth proves to be a sphere. Last year’s wisdom is this year’s folly.
In an overpopulated world, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply is less and less heeded. Thanks to increased automation and incontinent breeding, every industrial society in the world now has more workers than it needs. Meanwhile, housing has become so expensive that it is no longer possible for three generations of a family to live in the same house, the ideal of most Christers and strict Jews. Today the nuclear family consists of a boy for you and a girl for me in a housing development…hardly an ideal setting for either children or parents.
At this point, it would seem sensible to evolve a different set of arrangements for the human race. Certainly, fewer families would mean fewer children, and that is a good thing. Those who have a gift for parenthood (an infinitely small minority) ought to be encouraged to have children. Those without the gift ought to be discouraged. People would still live in pairs if that pleased them, but the social pressure to produce babies would be lifted.
Unhappily, the thrust of our society is still Judaeo-Christian. As a result, the single American male and the working woman are second-class citizens. A single man’s median income is $11,069, while his married brother’s income is $14,268 and his working sister’s salary is $9,231. This is calculated discrimination. Plainly, it is better to marry than to be ill-paid.
After tax reform, this year’s major political issue is Save the Family. Predictably, the Christers have been gunning for women’s libbers and fags, two minorities that appear to endanger the family. Not so predictably, a number of Jews are now joining in the attack. This is odd, to say the least. Traditionally, Jews tend to a live-and-let-live attitude on the sensible ground that whenever things go wrong in any society where Jews are a minority, they will get it in the neck. So why make enemies? Unfortunately, Jewish tolerance has never really extended to homosexuality, that permanent abomination. Fag-baiting by American Jewish journalists has always been not only fashionable but, in a covert way, antigoyim.
Eighteen years ago, the busy journalist Alfred Kazin announced that homosexuality was a dead end for a writer. Apparently, fags couldn’t make great literature. Today he is no longer quite so certain. In a recent issue of Esquire, Kazin accepted the genius of Gertrude Stein, but he could not resist mocking her lesbianism; he also felt it necessary to tell us that she was “fat, queer-looking,” while her lover Alice B. Toklas was equally ugly. Although Kazin can accept—barely—the genius of an occasional fag writer, he detests what he calls “the gay mob.” He is distressed that “homosexuality is being politicized and is becoming a social fact and a form of social pressure. Does the increasing impatience on all sides with the family, the oldest human institution, explain the widespread growth or emergence of homosexuality amidst so much anxiety about overpopulation?” This is one of those confused rhetorical questions whose answer is meant to be implicit in the polemical tone.
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sp; Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. Those sexual acts are entirely natural; if they were not, no one would perform them. But since Judaism proscribes the abominable, the irrational rage that Kazin and his kind feel toward homosexualists has triggered an opposing rage. Gay militants now assert that there is something called gay sensibility, the outward and visible sign of a new kind of human being. Thus madness begets madness.
I have often thought that the reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don’t; many respond to both. This plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about.
Today Americans are in a state of terminal hysteria on the subject of sex in general and of homosexuality in particular because the owners of the country (buttressed by a religion that they have shrewdly adapted to their own ends) regard the family as their last means of control over those who work and consume. For two millennia, women have been treated as chattel, while homosexuality has been made to seem a crime, a vice, an illness.
In the Symposium, Plato defined the problem: “In Ionia and other places, and generally in countries which are subject to the barbarians [Plato is referring to the Persians, who were the masters of the Jews at the rime Leviticus was written], the custom [homosexuality] is held to be dishonorable; loves of youths share the evil repute in which philosophy and gymnastics are held, because they are inimical to tyranny; the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, which love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants learned by experience; for the love of Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had a strength which undid their power.” This last refers to a pair of lovers who helped overthrow the tyrants at Athens.