Who could have predicted a backlash against the long-awaited establishment of equal rights for that last cohort of the population denied them? A decade after the Supreme Court’s milestone Obergefell v. Hodges ruling declared same-sex marriage a national right in the U.S., while a steady 68 percent of Americans support it, among Republicans, support has pummeled during the Trump years from a high of 55 percent to 41 percent now.

Opposition to such rights is a consistent aspect of totalitarian regimes through history, owing to their elevation of a male supremacy that asserts dominion and a demand for a crushing conformity over women, children, subjects and property. Same-sex relations under such conditions become limited to secretive privileges afforded closeted overlords that often take on their brutal characteristics.

The fight to assert the equal rights of self-identified LGBTQ persons has as its essential component the humanization in all aspects of their (our) lives. Only by living openly and without fear or shame can an internal integrity be attained that allows the full potential for love and creative work to flower.

Under such conditions, I’ve always contended that gay persons, those among us who experience same-sex erotic attraction, exhibit a preponderance of unique qualities that make their contributions to humanity not only a benefit, but essential to the survival and evolution of the species. Such persons have hardly been the sole carriers of these traits, but exhibit them at a higher rate than the general population, notwithstanding their too human capacities to internalize antithetical modes taken from a wider, brutal society.

As I spelled out in my first book, a collection of essays entitled, “Extraordinary Hearts, Reclaiming Gay Sensibility’s Central Role in the Progress of Civilization” (Lethe and BCI Books, 2015), there are three aspects to these unique characteristics that I explore in general society, in science, philosophy and among great figures of history and their works, including for some, their achievements toward the American revolution.

The three defining features I identify as a heightened sensibility, an alternate perspective and a constructive non-conformity.

Humanity as a whole has been the beneficiary of these qualities, which, to repeat, are not exclusive to gay persons, but more prevalent, often more native, among them.

On the issue of the correlation between a heightened assertion of male supremacy and political tyranny and repression, for example, it is the gay male and his qualities that historically have stood between the oppressive male and his victims, through art, poetry and even physical and political activism blocking the savagery that would otherwise ensue. It is predominantly the gays, the gay sensibilities, who offer the pathway for social sustainability by tempering the rage of the supremacist male culture against women, children, subjects and property.

Taking up the causes of those cultural victims in myriad big and little ways has been the stuff of countless tales, paintings, poems and treatises down through history.

This counters the view of those like the notable Shakespearian historian A. J. Rowse, for example, when he finally got around to coming out of his closet in 1977 with his book, “Homosexuals and History, A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts,” that “ambivalence” at all defines the subject matter, or that cites the Latin proverb, “homo homini lupus est” (“man is a wolf to man”), describing cruel, selfish and predatory behavior, to explain us. That is neither our essential nature, nor, minus exceptions, most anyone’s for that matter.

In the case of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), it has always been fashionable to cast him as an unrepentant hedonist, citing his novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as evidence. The reality is quite different, however. While there is no doubt this singular genius was gay and behaved in accordance with that under the severe restrictions of his time that drew plentiful pearls-clutching to the degree any of it leaked into the public domain, he was actually a highly sensitive and, of course, articulate humanist. This is reflected in his most thoughtful work, “De Profundis,” penned in prison after being found guilty of “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Much more on Wilde and others in future episodes. Stay tuned.