MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"

EVEREST

by Kevin Carey

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KEVIN CAREY takes a wry look at the recent British controversy over the social portrayal of homosexuality.

Reading novels is a symptom of chronic discontent of the sort that makes us climb Everest and greasy poles. Absorbing what we read, we may understand relationships better; and even monogamous old men might want to speculate how they might have managed love better when they were younger. In this there is something profoundly utilitarian. I view the oddities of Dostoyevsky or Iris Murdoch as I would view zoo animals, as having some sort of intrinsic curiosity but having no bearing on my state of being.

I undergo that same feeling of scarcely curious detachment when reading about homosexuality. I have been unfortunate enough to live an adult life in an age when this has been a hot social issue but wish it had all been settled earlier. Of course, like white people who say race is not an important issue, it is shallow for me to complain that I find the debate about gays and lesbians boring; but I do.

In Britain the issue has come to the fore again because the Government is seeking to reverse a pernicious legislative clause which forbade education authorities to "promote" homosexuality. The ferocious debate that is going on is not, of course, about promoting anything, it is about the public tolerance of private behaviour. The notion that certain kinds of sexual behaviour can be "promoted" or discouraged is anachronistic in two ways. First, in spite of millennia of sexual prescription from the great, the good and the frustrated, the sexual behaviour of most people has been practical rather than either ecstatic or decorous. It is not a decline in religiosity but contraception which has generated sexual liberation. Secondly, sexual dynamics are social as well as individual; the drive to survive weakens as prosperity increases so that the best form of contraception is money. Homosexuality and infertility are both predictable symptoms of wealth; Gaia applies to people as well as to continental shelves.

Yet my indifference goes deeper. If I find it almost impossible to imagine the heterosexual activity of others, real or in novels, I am at an even greater disadvantage with homosexuality. The reality of that failure to imagine is at the root of all the problems we have transforming sex from a personal to a public concern. Great novelists stop at the bedroom door because they know there is no point entering; they have described and we have apprehended a profound level of psychological understanding but to go any further is to do violence to the verisimilitude. It is notable, for example, that the weakest passages of Proust are those where he comes closest to being sexually explicit; undressed, Albertine ceases to be erotic. Even autobiographical sex is horrendously difficult to portray with any accuracy though an almost equally forbidding obstacle is boastfulness. Pornography is useless simply because it tells us nothing about ourselves or anybody else.

I therefore fervently pray that we can soon rid ourselves of these discussions. Rape is a crime associated with the assertion of power and procreation confers responsibilities which require a degree of regulation but for the rest we should accept that sexual activity is a means to an end and that our decency or unscrupulousness, our veneration and triviality, are as often declared in words as in actions; the point is to behave well to our companions wherever we are and whatever we are doing together.

I know that what I am writing is utterly right and proper but I find it personally hard to accept. I cannot say that all sexual relationships entered into with honesty and consideration strike me with equal sympathy. Just as I mix with my own kind, intellectually, politically, morally, so I find myself most comfortable with those whose psychological outlook is comprehensible, interpretable. There is for me a perfectly proper division between unwavering tolerance and the exercise of preference. I don't have to like gays or Gujaratis however liberal my views on liberty. This explains why I want to settle the liberty argument and then resort to my own preferences; I do not want my comfortable, untidy Episcopalian Church ravaged by a dispute about gay priests because I don't think the subject is relevant and because I don't want to know whether an individual priest is gay or not.

The British dispute has been carried out with a degree of moral muddle suitable to the occasion. The prevailing political correctness forces liberals, somewhat defensively, to assert that all relationships are equally valid, all family structures are equally loving, that all children, regardless of the sexuality of those who care for them, are equally loved; and yet the only chance of reversing the "No promotion" Clause is to set out relationships guidelines to be taught in schools which praise the moral and social benefits of the lifelong, monogamous marriage, totally undermining all the aforesaid.

It would be easier to see through the fog if opponents of repeal were simply to state that for them there is something in homosexuality that sticks in the craw, then we would know where we were but instead we have the usual humbug about what is good for society. We must all be on our guard when materially rapacious politicians, who declare that there is "no such thing as society" and call for the "Night Watchman state" and total economic deregulation, swear that they are concerned about the good of society; it is precisely the degree of economic liberalism which gives power to the strong that encourages them equally to use their strength on behalf of their own whims and prejudices as well as promoting more coherent ends. I would be deeply suspicious of a man that picked my back pocket whilst lecturing me on the precise circumstances in which I might remove my trousers for my greater pleasure.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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