(Part 7)

At the National Dinner of the Human Rights Campaign last Saturday night, the 2,500 gathered in Washington, D.C. for yet another sold out gala were witness not only to a rousing address by President Joe Biden, but also a groundbreaking speech by the HRC’s President Kelley Robinson, who drew the largest cheer of the night with her emphatic assertion that “I’m not interested in being just like everybody else.”

Robinson said that the first chapter of the LGBTQ movement for equal rights was defined by stressing how LGBTQ folks are “just like everybody else,” suggesting that (speaking to a straight world) “except for what we do in bed, we’re just like you.” But then she intoned that it is time for a new chapter, so now the assertion is that “being like everybody else” no longer shall define the movement. “We shall not seek uniformity, but our creativity and diversity imply a freedom without exception.” It was stunning to hear the crowd’s reaction. The cheering hit new decibel level highs for the event.

Actually, those were new words coming from her in that context. They more resembled the claim that this author first developed in his groundbreaking set of essays that ran for 100 weeks in Washington, D.C. LGBTQ magazine under the title, “Nick Benton’s Gay Science” and were then assembled into the book, “Extraordinary Hearts, Reclaiming Gay Sensibility’s Central Role in the Progress of Civilization” (Lethe Press, 2010) that twice rose to No. 1 in Amazon’s ‘Gay Studies’ ranking.

Yes, it also reflected the documentation of the study, reported in my last chapter of this work, of 1,500 species of mammals on the planet in the October 2023 edition of the journal Nature Communications that same-sex behavior correlates to “evolutionary advantages such as smoothing over conflicts…a way to form bonds and alliances, to reconcile after a fight or to divert attention into courtship.”

How important is this? It suggests that in the evolution of sentient life on this planet, alternative sexual orientation and gender identity patterns likely represent the cutting edge of an evolution toward the development of a new human species better equipped to advance life on this planet to escape its eventual demise.

Consider the horrors of western humankind’s last 110 years, the hundreds of millions of lives lost, mostly of innocent civilians, to war and hatred, triggered by the onset of the Great War (World War I) in 1914 and covering the rise of fascism, mass racial exterminations like the Holocaust, the terrible toll taken by the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities to end World War II, and the still not ended propensity of straight male dominated cultures to slaughter innocents even as recently as this month in Israel.

Evolution gave us Prince Eddy, officially Prince Albert Victor, born in 1863 as next in line to the English throne, grandson of Queen Victoria whose kinder, gentler ways were encouraged by Victoria even as she worried about what her boorish son, who became Edward VII, would do even though his reign was brief.

Prince Eddy, as Edward’s VII’s eldest son, never got to become king for he died in 1892 ostensibly of the flu. Only a few years earlier he’d been caught up in the so-called Cleveland Street male brothel scandal of 1889, and a huge cover-up ensued to keep his name out of it. Rumors abounded about what really caused Eddy’s death so soon after.

But history tells us it was an unmitigated disaster for all humanity because Eddy’s brutish younger brother went on to become king in his stead as George V, and he stoked the flames of the Great War together with his cousins, Wilhelm of Prussia and Nicholas of Russia.

Could Eddy have navigated a different outcome had he lived to become king in 1910? No one can be certain, of course, but his temperament as a (closeted) gay man was clearly different, as was documented throughout his upbringing. His were qualities that Queen Victoria seemed to favor, and we can postulate that nature provided one who could chart a course of peace had he not been cut down before having the chance.