(EDIT: After about thirty seconds of self-consultation, I believe that it's probably best to rewrite the whole damn thing since I started in kind of a roaring haze.)
Just wanted to get a little bit into the background of some of the themes that I'd like to explore.
I'm not an expert on any of the subjects that I'm talking about, and all of the studies that I reference will have to be dug up again, so if any of you have any further information or links to studies, I would surely like to hear of them.
When Kumo proposed the idea to me (a ren'ai game based on shuudo), I realized that this was a good chance to explore themes of sex and gender, especially how they were formed in the past and how they can relate to us today. Of the five interests, there are four separate directions by which the protagonist and the interest arrive at romantic love. We'll explore them in a bit, but we ought to go through some definitions first.
Sex - in biology, both the act of procreation by means of the interaction of two differentiated phenotypes in which they each donate the genetic material necessary to create their offspring, and also the phenotypes themselves. Often confused with gender.
Gender- One way in which we create a distinguishing culture for ourselves is by setting gender roles - how members of each of the sexes are supposed to handle themselves with regards to work, family, and social life. In psychology and sociology, gender is an individual's self-described identification and satisfaction with her or his sex's assigned role. While how one is taught to view one's sex is most likely the biggest influence over how one arrives at one's gender identification, gender should not be confused with sex.
Homosexual - Somebody who identifies themselves as wholly attracted (romantically and/or sexually) to members of their self-identified gender. In the modern Western world, they run at about two to four percent of the population, though studies show that a larger percentage identify as heterosexual but have either experimented with or fantasized about members of the same gender.
Now that that's over with.
One thing that's always bugged me when thinking about sex is that homosexuality is virtually absent from the historical record in a form that we can unambiguously recognize it as. When discussing possible homosexual or bisexual figures throughout myth and history (Gilgamesh, Sappho, Alexander, Elagabalus, Mori Ranmaru, the 'lesbian nuns' of early-modern Spanish theater, Abraham Lincoln, et al.), there is almost always at least one of three things blocking us from making a completely historically accurate claim - either the evidence was invented or destroyed, there is contrary evidence, with the homosexual evidence being only a small and circumstantial part of the record, or the relationship may appear unambiguous but could be interpreted as something else based on the figure's position in society.
And yet, since the late part of the 19th century, psychology has recognized homosexuality as something at least partially intrinsic within certain individuals. Concepts of a 'third gender' eventually involved into the orientation spectrum (straight <-> bisexual <-> gay) that we have today. Today scientific evidence shows us that homosexuality is at least partially based on genetics and partially based by environment. Assuredly this was the same back throughout the rest of human history, since I find it difficult to believe that a 'gay gene' only evolved within us in the last 6,000 years. So why don't we have a better historical record of homosexuality?
Perhaps there were fewer homosexuals in the past. I believe that the current best guess that we have regarding how homosexuality comes about in humans is that there is at least one genetic 'trigger' (perhaps towards positive reception of the same sex's pheromones) that must be 'pulled' by environmental stimuli for the necessary proteins to be created. If the trigger, or some of the triggers if there are more than one, does not exist, the child will grow up straight. If the trigger or triggers exist but their environment is not conducive to 'pulling' it or them, then the child will also grow up straight. It is possible that the genetic triggers evolved to prevent overpopulation and destruction of resources (for example, studies have shown that families with multiple boys have a much higher chance of the younger boys being homosexual than the older boys) while still retaining the use of all the children born as those who can help heterosexual couples and their children to survive. In times when the population was lower, this may explain why we see fewer people who may have been homosexual - the low-population environment did not trigger the 'gay gene' in as many people.
More certainly, the mores of society prevented homosexuals from openly identifying themselves or coming into position where they could identify themselves. Women could be isolated from each other after marriage, preventing them from forming intimate relationships with each other. Men who took the passive side of the relationship were derided as being feminine. Many societies demanded that the family lines were kept long and the sexes kept in their places. Pure homosexuality broke against both of those demands, and both the demands and the desire to keep those demands may have created an environment that would have prevented the 'trigger' from going off and certainly would have prevented some people from accepting their homosexuality or identifying themselves openly.
And even then, with the limited numbers, the limited acceptance, and the limited records, there still should have been a few records of somebody who proudly, openly, and exclusively declared their love for members of the same sex, right? If there is, I haven't heard of it yet. Why do we lack plentiful examples from our thousands of years of history? Why is it that in many areas of the world, the concept of a homosexual is considered a decadent, modern, Western psychosis?
It took me a while, but I think I may have something of an answer. I think we have a parallel in any scientific understanding that we had before we had any evidence to disprove it - for example, geocentrism. For a man on Earth, which appears stationary but with a sun, moon, and stars that appear to move across the sky, the Earth appears to be a center point. This ties in with the fact that for most religions, man is a special beast and Earth is a special place for him to live in. Obviously, the premodern man says, the Earth must be the center of the universe, since Creation rotates around me and appears to have been created to serve the special creation of man. The evidence that he sees is reinforced by a worldview that he agrees with. When Copernicus comes along and says hold on a second, I have new evidence that will change your worldview, the premodern man does not believe him. The new evidence contradicts what he has seen, and it breaks his worldview, rendering Earth not as the divinely created home of man but as a chunk of wet rock that may have no special significance. It is not that the premodern man is too stupid to understand that the earth could go around the sun, but that he (just as you or I) are hardwired to cling to our current worldview as hard as we can. Just as the premodern man has only the greatest difficulty adjusting his worldview to include an Earth that moves around the Sun, historical man (and some non-historical men today) may have not been able to see homosexuality for what it is, because their worldview did not include it. This very likely includes the homosexuals themselves.
We ascribe great significance to our position within society at large. Nation, religion, gender, class, ethnicity - all are general categories of people from which we draw our desired-for attributes. In the past, many of these categories held views that promoted taking stake in establishment and continuance rather than in personal happiness. You may have had sex because you enjoyed it, but you also had sex because you wanted to pass down your property and you knew that you were going to need hands to help you in the future. Sex and its procreative functions took on moral dimensions - too little and you were a failure. Too much and you were a wastrel. With the wrong people and you were a fiend. In the wrong way and you were an abomination. Sex was assumed to be primarily for procreation and only secondarily for pleasure.
So let's say you are our theoretical historical homosexual. You've been raised to believe that men do hard work and sire children in order to secure the family line, and women do house work and bear children to do the same. As you grow older, you may show little fondness for members of the opposite sex but great fondness for members of the same sex. Why is this? I would think that you would attempt to rationalize it based on your previous gender role and understanding of sex - you've been isolated from the members of the opposite sex and kept in close contact with members of the same sex, so you would interpret your fondness as being indicative of your commitment to the values of your gender. Indeed, the instances of male homosexual acts in warrior cultures were often framed as bonding exercises to strengthen one's warrior skills, and women could cloak their love for each other in the intimate friendships that some women have.
As you reach the age of maturity, you are married to a suitable partner. Why don't you love him or her? Well, it's not like you selected him or her yourself. Maybe you're not compatible. Maybe your understanding of the opposite sex has been retarded by your lack of meaningful exposure to its members. If you're a woman, your lack of interest in sex may be rationalized as a personal quirk or, in eras when women's sexuality was tightly controlled, even normal. If you're a man, you might think that you suffer from impotence or a reduced libido. As long as you continue to fulfill your role and pass down your line, you will rationalize your 'inadequacy' in order to fulfill those goals.
Lending further support to what I've thought is the fact that the few reports that we have of homosexuality seem to be restricted to members of society for whom pleasure was a possible avenue of personal desire. Before the modern era, this seemed to be limited to eccentric noblemen. During the modern era, there seems to be at many times a sexual underground in which men and women of leisure could congregate in secret. We see examples of it in the molly houses of early modern England, the Boston marriages of 19th-century America, the Class S literature of Japan, lesbian bars in interwar Berlin, all accelerating until the awakening of gay men and women as an open class in the 1950's. It's only when sex is divorced from procreation that thoughts of homosexuality can really begin to flower, which may be why the opponents of homosexual rights are so intent on recoupling the two back together. But that's a subject for another essay.
Tomorrow, if I have a brain at lunch, I'll start working on how the protagonist and the interests piece together these contrarian ideas in order to arrive at their destinations.
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