It's a Gay Life - But is it also a Good Life?

After recently presenting a paper on the politics and psychopathology of homophobia, somebody emailed to ask if I could provide a more philosophical explanation why gay men and lesbians are often viewed negatively by those who identify as heterosexual and belong to the straight majority.

In order to do this, we need to think back to a much older question - one that is central both to ancient philosophy and Christian spirituality - namely, the question of what constitutes a good life. The answer, of course, is all to do with one’s relationship to the truth (aletheia).

For the good life is also the true life, which means that the respectable citizen is one who not only speaks the truth, but manifests it in their daily existence (in what they do and don’t do). This crucial idea is one that has deeply ingrained itself within Western culture and continues to shape our thinking today. Thus we are obliged to ask - as Pilate famously asked Christ - what is truth?

If I remember correctly, Jesus replied that he was the truth, which doesn’t really answer the question. Michel Foucault, however, rather more helpfully supplies us with four key components: the truth is that which is unconcealed, unalloyed, unchanging, and - most significantly for us here - perfectly straight. The true life is never bent or crooked; never deviates from a direct and narrow path to God in accordance with what is revealed, pure, eternal, and upright.

And so it quickly becomes clear why those men and women who are thought to lead secretive, mixed-up, and irregular lifestyles - who are said to be either inherently queer or wilfully perverse - can never be fully trusted or respected within a heteronormative (and heterosexist) society; for they can never lead a good life or a true life.

Nor, for that matter, can they lead a natural life, in the Classical or Christian-moral sense. For the gay life, having historically been lived on the margins of society and in defiance of certain laws, conventions and agreed customs, is also a life which undermines a value system indexed to Nature. 

Thus, homosexuality is doubly false and doubly threatening to those who, rightly or wrongly, pride themselves on being straight and who see the world in black and white, rather than as rainbow-coloured.