“It’s brains.”
There’s something suspiciously Truman Show-ish about the sudden outbreak of marriage-related cultural happenings (The Office, Gossip Girl, Glee, Melrose Place…). The most hilarious example of this is the “flame war” set off by Mark Greif’s ho-hum n+1 essay about how marriage is the least gay and therefore worst thing ever. (Silly me — I had thought it was the most gay and thus best thing ever!) There is a lot to be said about this little serving of apparatchik word salad, but the part that made me angriest was probably this, from the very beginning:
Traditional society choked this [the flourishing of open homosexuality] down — some more progressive parts of it did, anyway — by attributing same-sex love to brain chemistry, or a gay gene, and an eternal sexual identity.
Um. What the fuck else are you going to attribute same-sex love to? Or different-sex love (how weird (gross) does that sound!), for that matter? This has nothing to do with whether there is anything so crude as a single, all-powerful “gay gene.” This has to do with being a materialist — i.e. not a religion-crazed imbecile. Where do you, o wise and honorable Reverend Greif, think love happens? The soul, you little muppet? The “heart”? Does it require some kind of new theory of quantum gravity, like Roger Penrose thinks about consciousness?
These people call themselves intellectuals, but they have yet to adjust their worldview to align with the basic scientific discoveries of the last several centuries, so they end up accidentally spouting nonsense, invoking some ghostly person-essence that does all the loving and the smooching, totally independent from nasty, Scrooge-like “brain chemistry,” which no one should trust their daughter with.
Love doesn’t stop being love just because it involves things that there are science classes about. After all, there never was a God; there never was a soul; but there was love all along. Because, as Donna Martin once said, “It’s brains.”
