Pleasure is not the byproduct of sex. It is, increasingly, the reason for it.
The traditional story has the body wired for reproduction, with pleasure as a kind of bribe — a reward the species offers so the organism keeps doing the thing evolution needs done. But the body does not behave like an organism that only wants offspring. Most human sexual activity happens when conception is impossible.
This is not a new observation, though it gets discussed like one. Sexologists working at the turn of the twentieth century were already arguing that non-reproductive sexuality — homosexuality included — reflected an instinct in service of human development, not a deviation from it. The argument that pleasure is legitimate on its own terms predates Stonewall by sixty years. It predates Lawrence v. Texas by a century. It was available, on the record, while the culture spent that same century insisting otherwise.
In this collage, male gay figures engaged in sexual pleasure are inserted into a 1930’s beach scene where the male figure is included as an object of sexual desire. The conflation of these figures underscores the timeless need for human connection of many varieties including gay romance.
Gay culture’s relationship to pleasure, then, is not an exception to how the species behaves. It may be closer to the rule. A practice built around sex that cannot reproduce, openly, without the cover story available to straight sex, has simply been honest about what the body was already doing everywhere else.
The Subdivision continues building the Gayborhood infrastructure.
— Behan
Sources
“‘All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex’: Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology.” History of the Human Sciences, 2023.
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).
