Apropos of the horrific events in the Middle East this week, the one-line comment that was delivered below audible range in a recent Academy Award nominee for Best Picture bears repeating: “In war, there are no winners, only widows.”

Those were the words whispered into the ear of a man who’d felt that war was the only solution to a crisis in the outstanding film, “Arrival” (2016).

In like manner, the film also took direct aim at the fallacious win-lose sports approach to life and war, which almost led the conflict to a disastrous outcome. Watch it if you want context.

Truly, the unspeakable human carnage from wars of the last 110 or so years, since 1914, still besiege us, despite laudable efforts at advancing diplomacy, the evolution of a humanity on this planet that recognizes the desperate futility of terrible acts of aggression, killing and maiming, including of innocent women and children, in the name of predominantly, straight male supremacist-driven lust for dominion over people and property.

It is the hypothesis underlying this serialized work that had he not been killed by the flu in the 1880s, the popular heir to the British throne, Prince Eddy as he was known, by virtue of being gay and of a mild temperament, could have prevented the onset of that century of carnage that was kicked off by his boorish younger brother King George V with the collaboration of his cousins, Wilhelm and Nicholas, running Germany and Russia, with the sparking of the Great War (World War 1) in 1914.

An article in the journal Nature Communications published in early October 2023 reports an exhaustive study of more than 1,500 animal species ranging from crickets to dolphins and apes which suggest that same sex behaviors among them, as studied by Jose Gomez, a Spanish evolutionary biologist, “all point to evolutionary advantages, such as smoothing over conflicts,” as Carl Zimmer writing in the New York Times this week suggests.

The behavior, the study suggests, “may contribute to establishing and maintaining positive social relationships.” Dr. Gomez noted that “same sex sexual behavior might be one of the ways that mammals can manage their unstable social worlds, a way for mammals to form bonds and alliances, to reconcile after a fight or to divert aggression into courtship.”

So, as was the operational thesis of this author’s work. “Extraordinary Hearts, Reclaiming Gay Sensibility’s Central Role in the Progress of Civilization” (Lethe Press, 2012), the conclusion of the study is that same-sex behavior is not an anomaly or distortion of “normal” behavior, but an essential component of a progressive evolution.

This week’s report is, therefore, a stunning affirmation of this author’s groundbreaking hypothesis, and further advances the notion that had the gay Prince Eddy lived to become England’s king in 1910, a way may have been found to change the course of the extreme and tragic violence that defined the Great War and much of our century since.

In fact, it wasn’t until the gay English poet Wilfred Owen wrote in such a compelling manner about the horrors of the Great War, as in his epochal, “Anthem for a Doomed Youth,” that the world was forced to affirm, not glorify, the true nature of the war.  Owen was killed in combat exactly one week before the November 11, 1918 halt to the hostilities was called.

His poetry, including his “Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” condemned the war for its repudiation of the Old Testament story of Abraham being ordered by an angel to call off the slaying of his son Isaac. Offered “the ram of pride instead of him, the old man would not so, but slew his son, and half the seed of Europe, one by one.”

The gay English composer Benjamin Britten quoted both works by Owen in the libretto of his ”War Requiem,” composed in 1961, to commemorate the reconstruction of the old Cathedral at Coventry, England, destroyed by bombing in World War II. 

“My subject is war, and the pity of war,” Owen wrote in the trenches of the Great War, “The poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do today is warn.”

(To be continued)