I just saw a headline with a long list of letters, one of them repeated. You’ve probably seen the abbreviated version: LGBT. Honestly, I don’t really know what all those additional letters represent, especially the one with a “2.” I could research it, but by the time I looked it up, there would be yet another letter tacked on to the seemingly unending list. Soon every human being will have a letter designation unto his (or her, or their, or … own, mine, your’n). But then, that will mean a return to the idea that each of us is an individual, or to say Kamala Harris redundancy style, “unique.” Stick around, people, we’re head ultimately to where we started (though Cantor’s idea of infinity might apply, as he noted, to fractions, which can run to infinity between two whole numbers: 1.1, 1.11, 1.111, 1.1111, 1.11111 and 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16…1/263 millionth…1/billionth…); so, maybe we won’t really attain the individualism that we seek and will, in fact, be dubbed part of some group—ironically separated by inclusion.
And that’s what this is about: Being separated by virtue of being included.
Aren’t we all H?
Human. Homo sapiens. Better yet, wise, wise man, Homo sapiens sapiens.
And seeing the headline “ generation alphabet: 40% of Brown University Students LGBTQQIAAP2S+, “ I thought of how divisive the Left is in the name of inclusion. Going out of its way to label every version of human being, it has pigeonholed each variation, limiting the interactions among all the variations to contentious squabbling or to unintellectual acquiescence that prohibits free thought and belief. These are truly dangerous times for individualism, and they evolved strangely enough from the desire of individuals to express their perceived individualism.
These are unfortunate times for those who believe they are fortunate times: Liberty to declare shades the declarations inside inescapable boxes. And those, for example the supposed 40% of Brown University students who declare themselves members of the multiple-letter group, who decide to jump into those boxes while they are young—and who might be a bit confused by a brain that hasn’t reached maturity— might find themselves living in self-imposed confinement when they are older, for once declared, always declared in a society with an elephantine memory and digital records. “Hey, didn’t he say…when he was at Brown? Look, here’s the video I found archived online.” A pigeonholed life is a restrictive one that perpetrates divisions in the species.
The Age of Declaration
Do so many young people really want to declare any sexual orientation for any reason other than the peer pressure to do so? I don’t know. I’m not young, and I suppose I passed through a rather ordinary—or even stereotypical—teen time way back in the fifties. Naive as I was, say at ages 14 and 15, however, I did recognize that we humans come in variations. My version seems to have made me think girls were different from boys—certainly more attractive to me and often smarter in class, and with few exceptions much better at handwriting. Yep. I was a “typical” teen of the times. My version also imposed on my brain that females deserved some protection by virtue of their generally smaller size and weakness in comparison with most males.
The generalizations that infused my mind seemed to make sense even in light of my recognition that some females were decidedly different from my stereotype: They were as fast or even faster than I, some taller, and others far more capable of tasks of endurance than I, who could never run cross country at their pace or distance. Yeah. I might have played football, baseball, and basketball, but I found myself to be an inferior human in the presence of some females, particularly in the presence of those who were far more intellectually capable than I. But they were “nice to look at, what with all those mysterious body parts suggested by swimming suits they wore at Mountain View Inn’s swimming pool, where we carefree young teens gathered during those two summers before we could “officially work” thanks to child labor laws in my state and hometown.
But then there were those males who did not fit the image of my father, a WWII Marine who had fought in Okinawa after a childhood of hardship —he lost his father when he was eight, the age at which he had to start working to help his mother and two sisters survive after his father’s death and during the Great Depression. Like the stereotypical Marine, he was self-sufficient, tough on himself, and hard-working. His idea of medical care is encapsulated in the expression, “Rub a little dirt on it.” So, yes, I saw him as a version of Male and saw others by comparison. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I learned the words effeminate and effete. It wasn’t until high school that in my naive state I wondered why some men chose not to marry, so sheltered was I in my stereotypes. But in my sphere of life, all those who had chosen the single life—that is, not bound in some way to a woman—were very pleasant human beings, neighbors, members of the parish, and guys who went about their lives without any noticeable fanfare. If they were members of the later-named Alphabet people, they made no outward declarations. It was, as I understood later, a time when people like code-breaker Alan Turing of computer fame were punished for being homosexual; danger lay in declaring. It was a travesty, for sure—Turing committed suicide—but one that was avoided by “staying,” as the term evolved, “in the closet.” Such was the world of my naivety. It was a society of surmise. We knew, maybe, but we didn’t say, and the cares of the day were far more important, anyway.
Of course, any perusal of Victorian underground literature reveals that even during an “uptight” era, intrasex relationships were not uncommon. Ask Oscar Wilde. So also, there’s little to doubt that the story of Hester in The Scarlet Letter could have been told about Puritan males in the manner of Petronius’ famous first-century tale of Encolpius and his 16-year-old boy lover Giton in The Satyricon. Just because they kept their mouths shut about their lifestyles doesn’t mean that there were no Alphabet people in seventeenth century New England, Victorian England, and Muslim Iran today. No one surveyed the population or studied human sexuality Kinsey-like; we can only assume that at least a small percentage of Puritan Harvard’s students probably could have responded the way today’s students at Brown University responded.
Sex and Vegetation
No, this isn’t about Vegans having intercourse. Call it a paraphrase of Sir James Frazer’s chapter “Sacred Marriage” in his voluminous (even in the abridged version) The New Golden Bough.
Let’s talk ancient rituals, the subjects of Frazer’s work, particularly those rituals associated with fertility and the month of May. First, who doesn’t love a parade? Parades from Rio’s and Bourbon Street’s Mardi Gras through Moscow’s Victory Day Parade and American Fourth of July parades, recreate ancient rituals associated with spring. You know, fertility, eggs, Easter’s risen Christ and the births or rebirths of nations. Second, who doesn’t know the system: Slow-walking a street lined with onlookers, marchers follow a format found in both developed and Third World nations—I’m thinking, for example, of six-hour long processions in Antigua Guatemala, a parade of saints’ statues encased in glass “coffins” held on the shoulders of colorfully dressed processors, each village having a specific design and color combination. Does this sound familiar? It should if you have watched high school bands march in their colorful uniforms.
Anyway, parades go back to long before modern times. Triumphant marches by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and other Middle Eastern emperors and generals after victories come to mind, as do the North Hemisphere’s springtime rituals, aka parades, involving “leaf-clad mummers” dressed as woodland spirits (sprites), goddesses, and fertility icons. Now if you are offended by the actions of today’s marchers during celebrations of Pride, consider these words, and not a paraphrase, from Frazer:
“When our rude forefathers staged their periodic marriages of the Kings and Queens of the May…they were doing something far more important than merely putting on a pastoral play for the amusement of the rustic audience. They were performing a serious magical rite, designed to make the woods grow green…the corn shoot…And it is natural to suppose that the more closely the mock marriage of the leaf-clad mummers sped the real marriage of the woodland sprites, the more effective was the rite believed to be. Accordingly, we may assume with a high degree of probability that the profligacy which notoriously attended these ceremonies was at one time not an accidental excess but an essential part of the rites, and that sin the opinion of those who performed them the marriage trees and plants could not be fertile without the real union of human sexes” (125). *
Yes, our ancient Northern Hemisphere ancestors paraded and “profligated” their way down the public path in plain site of onlookers. Our species has been “marching for sex” for centuries, millennia even. Parades associated with sexuality are nothing new; their origins lie in the depths of ancient times. Their geographic locations make a net across the planet.
So, sex parades—gender? parades—aren’t new, regardless of their participants’ current attempt either to “shock” onlookers or to defy propriety. Consider that even the processions of Easter in cities like Antigua Guatemala and other Christian countries represent “rebirth,” and are thus associated with those ancient fertility rites with leaf-clad mummers (can anyone say, Philadelphia Mummers’ Day Parade?).
If you know Frazer’s work, you know that he records similar public displays in both hemispheres. Apparently, we’re pretty much all the same species with the same tendencies—particularly when sex (and gender) are concerned. However…
You know there’s always a “however.” What strikes me as interesting is that all the ancient “fertility parades” were associated with actual “fertility.” In contrast, reproduction doesn’t seem to be the motive behind Alphabet parades.
That H Parade
I don’t have any particularly profound insights on the issue of adding more letters to the growing alphabet list. While I was writing this, I looked up the letter with the “2.” Apparently, “2S” means “two spirited,” and it identifies a person who bears both a feminine and a masculine spirit. I suppose it's akin to my saying that we humans have both testosterone and estrogen; maybe a 2S has an equal amount of them, whereas “boys” have more T than E, and “girls” have more E than T—but as Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, now Supreme Court Justice, said when asked if she could define “woman,” “I’m not a biologist.” I guess she never heard of chromosomes.
Strange that response of hers. I assume she “knows” she is a woman even though she can’t define what makes her a woman (such is the peer fear of committing to something definite). Her response makes me wonder whether or not there’s a parallel to what St. Augustine said about time: “If no one asks me what time is, I know what it is. If someone asks me what time is, I don’t know what it is.”
I’m sorry that so many are so afraid of defining that they willingly refuse to take a stand (particularly troubling in a Supreme Court Justice) lest they offend current cultural sensibilities. Yet, all those who kowtow to the latest Alphabet list designations, are, in fact, taking a stand. They commit to identification by some general characteristic to the detriment of the multiple characteristics that we all possess. The same comment can be made with respect to the recent statement by an archbishop that using “Father” in the Lord’s Prayer is “troubling.” Sure, we can assume that in the absence of anthropomorphically imagining God, the Deity is not bound to human sexual identity—the roles of Alanis Morrisette as God in the film Dogma, George Burns as God in Oh, God!, Morgan Freeman as God in Bruce Almighty, and numerous other actors and actresses notwithstanding.
So, let’s make March each year Human Pride Month. We can celebrate our commonality. We can parade, even display our profligacy as in the new abbreviation PDA that accompanies pictures of celebrities kissing or hugging. Hey, we humans have been publicly displaying affection for as long as we have existed, pretty much like bonobos in the weeds. Show your pride next spring. Hold a march in March, the month of the Vernal Equinox, the day of balance between light and dark, winter and spring, death and rebirth. Human Day. Wear some leaves—or don’t. Show some affection for other humans, all other humans.
*Frazer, Sir James. The New Golden Bough (Abridged) ED. Theodor H. Gaster. 1959.
And that’s what this is about: Being separated by virtue of being included.
Aren’t we all H?
Human. Homo sapiens. Better yet, wise, wise man, Homo sapiens sapiens.
And seeing the headline “ generation alphabet: 40% of Brown University Students LGBTQQIAAP2S+, “ I thought of how divisive the Left is in the name of inclusion. Going out of its way to label every version of human being, it has pigeonholed each variation, limiting the interactions among all the variations to contentious squabbling or to unintellectual acquiescence that prohibits free thought and belief. These are truly dangerous times for individualism, and they evolved strangely enough from the desire of individuals to express their perceived individualism.
These are unfortunate times for those who believe they are fortunate times: Liberty to declare shades the declarations inside inescapable boxes. And those, for example the supposed 40% of Brown University students who declare themselves members of the multiple-letter group, who decide to jump into those boxes while they are young—and who might be a bit confused by a brain that hasn’t reached maturity— might find themselves living in self-imposed confinement when they are older, for once declared, always declared in a society with an elephantine memory and digital records. “Hey, didn’t he say…when he was at Brown? Look, here’s the video I found archived online.” A pigeonholed life is a restrictive one that perpetrates divisions in the species.
The Age of Declaration
Do so many young people really want to declare any sexual orientation for any reason other than the peer pressure to do so? I don’t know. I’m not young, and I suppose I passed through a rather ordinary—or even stereotypical—teen time way back in the fifties. Naive as I was, say at ages 14 and 15, however, I did recognize that we humans come in variations. My version seems to have made me think girls were different from boys—certainly more attractive to me and often smarter in class, and with few exceptions much better at handwriting. Yep. I was a “typical” teen of the times. My version also imposed on my brain that females deserved some protection by virtue of their generally smaller size and weakness in comparison with most males.
The generalizations that infused my mind seemed to make sense even in light of my recognition that some females were decidedly different from my stereotype: They were as fast or even faster than I, some taller, and others far more capable of tasks of endurance than I, who could never run cross country at their pace or distance. Yeah. I might have played football, baseball, and basketball, but I found myself to be an inferior human in the presence of some females, particularly in the presence of those who were far more intellectually capable than I. But they were “nice to look at, what with all those mysterious body parts suggested by swimming suits they wore at Mountain View Inn’s swimming pool, where we carefree young teens gathered during those two summers before we could “officially work” thanks to child labor laws in my state and hometown.
But then there were those males who did not fit the image of my father, a WWII Marine who had fought in Okinawa after a childhood of hardship —he lost his father when he was eight, the age at which he had to start working to help his mother and two sisters survive after his father’s death and during the Great Depression. Like the stereotypical Marine, he was self-sufficient, tough on himself, and hard-working. His idea of medical care is encapsulated in the expression, “Rub a little dirt on it.” So, yes, I saw him as a version of Male and saw others by comparison. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I learned the words effeminate and effete. It wasn’t until high school that in my naive state I wondered why some men chose not to marry, so sheltered was I in my stereotypes. But in my sphere of life, all those who had chosen the single life—that is, not bound in some way to a woman—were very pleasant human beings, neighbors, members of the parish, and guys who went about their lives without any noticeable fanfare. If they were members of the later-named Alphabet people, they made no outward declarations. It was, as I understood later, a time when people like code-breaker Alan Turing of computer fame were punished for being homosexual; danger lay in declaring. It was a travesty, for sure—Turing committed suicide—but one that was avoided by “staying,” as the term evolved, “in the closet.” Such was the world of my naivety. It was a society of surmise. We knew, maybe, but we didn’t say, and the cares of the day were far more important, anyway.
Of course, any perusal of Victorian underground literature reveals that even during an “uptight” era, intrasex relationships were not uncommon. Ask Oscar Wilde. So also, there’s little to doubt that the story of Hester in The Scarlet Letter could have been told about Puritan males in the manner of Petronius’ famous first-century tale of Encolpius and his 16-year-old boy lover Giton in The Satyricon. Just because they kept their mouths shut about their lifestyles doesn’t mean that there were no Alphabet people in seventeenth century New England, Victorian England, and Muslim Iran today. No one surveyed the population or studied human sexuality Kinsey-like; we can only assume that at least a small percentage of Puritan Harvard’s students probably could have responded the way today’s students at Brown University responded.
Sex and Vegetation
No, this isn’t about Vegans having intercourse. Call it a paraphrase of Sir James Frazer’s chapter “Sacred Marriage” in his voluminous (even in the abridged version) The New Golden Bough.
Let’s talk ancient rituals, the subjects of Frazer’s work, particularly those rituals associated with fertility and the month of May. First, who doesn’t love a parade? Parades from Rio’s and Bourbon Street’s Mardi Gras through Moscow’s Victory Day Parade and American Fourth of July parades, recreate ancient rituals associated with spring. You know, fertility, eggs, Easter’s risen Christ and the births or rebirths of nations. Second, who doesn’t know the system: Slow-walking a street lined with onlookers, marchers follow a format found in both developed and Third World nations—I’m thinking, for example, of six-hour long processions in Antigua Guatemala, a parade of saints’ statues encased in glass “coffins” held on the shoulders of colorfully dressed processors, each village having a specific design and color combination. Does this sound familiar? It should if you have watched high school bands march in their colorful uniforms.
Anyway, parades go back to long before modern times. Triumphant marches by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and other Middle Eastern emperors and generals after victories come to mind, as do the North Hemisphere’s springtime rituals, aka parades, involving “leaf-clad mummers” dressed as woodland spirits (sprites), goddesses, and fertility icons. Now if you are offended by the actions of today’s marchers during celebrations of Pride, consider these words, and not a paraphrase, from Frazer:
“When our rude forefathers staged their periodic marriages of the Kings and Queens of the May…they were doing something far more important than merely putting on a pastoral play for the amusement of the rustic audience. They were performing a serious magical rite, designed to make the woods grow green…the corn shoot…And it is natural to suppose that the more closely the mock marriage of the leaf-clad mummers sped the real marriage of the woodland sprites, the more effective was the rite believed to be. Accordingly, we may assume with a high degree of probability that the profligacy which notoriously attended these ceremonies was at one time not an accidental excess but an essential part of the rites, and that sin the opinion of those who performed them the marriage trees and plants could not be fertile without the real union of human sexes” (125). *
Yes, our ancient Northern Hemisphere ancestors paraded and “profligated” their way down the public path in plain site of onlookers. Our species has been “marching for sex” for centuries, millennia even. Parades associated with sexuality are nothing new; their origins lie in the depths of ancient times. Their geographic locations make a net across the planet.
So, sex parades—gender? parades—aren’t new, regardless of their participants’ current attempt either to “shock” onlookers or to defy propriety. Consider that even the processions of Easter in cities like Antigua Guatemala and other Christian countries represent “rebirth,” and are thus associated with those ancient fertility rites with leaf-clad mummers (can anyone say, Philadelphia Mummers’ Day Parade?).
If you know Frazer’s work, you know that he records similar public displays in both hemispheres. Apparently, we’re pretty much all the same species with the same tendencies—particularly when sex (and gender) are concerned. However…
You know there’s always a “however.” What strikes me as interesting is that all the ancient “fertility parades” were associated with actual “fertility.” In contrast, reproduction doesn’t seem to be the motive behind Alphabet parades.
That H Parade
I don’t have any particularly profound insights on the issue of adding more letters to the growing alphabet list. While I was writing this, I looked up the letter with the “2.” Apparently, “2S” means “two spirited,” and it identifies a person who bears both a feminine and a masculine spirit. I suppose it's akin to my saying that we humans have both testosterone and estrogen; maybe a 2S has an equal amount of them, whereas “boys” have more T than E, and “girls” have more E than T—but as Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, now Supreme Court Justice, said when asked if she could define “woman,” “I’m not a biologist.” I guess she never heard of chromosomes.
Strange that response of hers. I assume she “knows” she is a woman even though she can’t define what makes her a woman (such is the peer fear of committing to something definite). Her response makes me wonder whether or not there’s a parallel to what St. Augustine said about time: “If no one asks me what time is, I know what it is. If someone asks me what time is, I don’t know what it is.”
I’m sorry that so many are so afraid of defining that they willingly refuse to take a stand (particularly troubling in a Supreme Court Justice) lest they offend current cultural sensibilities. Yet, all those who kowtow to the latest Alphabet list designations, are, in fact, taking a stand. They commit to identification by some general characteristic to the detriment of the multiple characteristics that we all possess. The same comment can be made with respect to the recent statement by an archbishop that using “Father” in the Lord’s Prayer is “troubling.” Sure, we can assume that in the absence of anthropomorphically imagining God, the Deity is not bound to human sexual identity—the roles of Alanis Morrisette as God in the film Dogma, George Burns as God in Oh, God!, Morgan Freeman as God in Bruce Almighty, and numerous other actors and actresses notwithstanding.
So, let’s make March each year Human Pride Month. We can celebrate our commonality. We can parade, even display our profligacy as in the new abbreviation PDA that accompanies pictures of celebrities kissing or hugging. Hey, we humans have been publicly displaying affection for as long as we have existed, pretty much like bonobos in the weeds. Show your pride next spring. Hold a march in March, the month of the Vernal Equinox, the day of balance between light and dark, winter and spring, death and rebirth. Human Day. Wear some leaves—or don’t. Show some affection for other humans, all other humans.
*Frazer, Sir James. The New Golden Bough (Abridged) ED. Theodor H. Gaster. 1959.
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