Is there a biological justification for gay men?

All species have evolutionary yard sales to get rid of things they don’t need and acquire what they do (opposable thumbs for some, cash for others). Just as every garage sale has that one thing that won’t sell, the human garage sale has that one thing it can’t get rid of – us. Which is odd, really, because we’ve had more price cuts than Ricky Martin’s latest CD.

Evolutionary biologists know that for a species to survive it must get rid of self-destructive characteristics and acquire self-preserving ones. Since homosexuality has been around since the beginning of time, it stands to reason that nature looks at us as something that helps humanity. But how?

By reducing violence. After all, the one nonsexual characteristic that sets gay men apart from straight men is their gentleness. It’s not that gay men aren’t capable of violence. Look at Alexander the Great, history’s greatest military leader. Or, for that matter, Jeffrey Dahmer, history’s greatest taste tester.

Power hungry or just plain hungry, some gay men are as capable of violence as straight men. But they are the exception, not the rule.

Proof: When was the last time you heard of a “straight-bashing”?

Proof: When was the last time you heard of a gay gang-related crime?

Proof: When was the last time you heard of a gay sports team storming the field to beat up the other team?

Proof: When straight men get together in large groups there are exponentially more arrests for disorderly conduct and violence than when gay men get together.

The best example of our gentleness is the circuit scene. As a friend said to me at the latest circuit extravaganza, “Imagine if three thousand straight guys were here, drunk and wired out of their minds. What do you think would happen? Can you imagine the violence that would erupt?”

My friend was right. There’d be all kinds of fights, serious injuries, maybe even deaths. There’d be paddy wagons to bust up the melees and ambulances to take victims to the E.R.

“But look at us,” my friend waved his arms expansively toward the crowd. “Thousands of men gathered together and not a single fight breaks out. If this were an all-straight crowd, it would have a feeling of danger, menace. We may be vain and shallow, and maybe even self-destructive with drugs, but violent we are not.”

Well, unless you count the pushing and shoving to get in front of the bathroom mirror. But let’s not split hairs. That’s what hairdressers are for.

We are a gentle people and society is the better for it. It’s a fact that gay people are “urban pioneers”, one of the first to go into dilapidated neighborhoods and fix them up. What happens with gentrification? Gentleness. Murders go down, robberies go down, rapes go down.

Ironically, if conservatives had their wish and gay men would simply turn straight, they’d have a much bigger social problem than they think they have now. Consider one of the worst acts of violence – rape. According to the FBI there were 64 rapes per 100,000 women last year. What would happen to that figure if the up-to-10 percent of the male population estimated to be gay turned straight? Is there any question that more women would be raped? Maybe homosexuality is one of nature’s ways of keeping women safe.

Nature has a lot of things in place to make sure we survive as a species – we’re just one of them. But we’re one that nobody seems to recognize. That society is always trying to kill off one of the things that keep it safe is one of life’s great absurdities.

For thousands of years, conservatives have tried to rid society of men who love men. They’ve never succeeded and they never will. Not because they’re fighting a powerful interest group or even the mythical “gay agenda” (brunch, Prada, your child). It’s because they’re going up against a battleaxe called Mother Nature. And as any biologist will tell you, that uber-bitch will slap you to the ground in an evolutionary second if you try to correct one of her “biological errors”.