Homosexuality as recoil from the 'other'
(by Thomas Howard)There is at work in the [sexual] rite an awareness of the other. The nature of any union is such that it follows only upon the junction of separate things. You can't have a union of one thing. That is a solitude. A union requires at least two elements. There is a distinct kind of satisfaction that attends union: in chemistry you bring two things together in the compound that you want--say, water; in music you bring two notes together and get harmony; in human affairs you bring people together and form a community that makes possible a certain espirit and solidarity not possible to one man alone. In the sexual realm the union involved is that of the two modes under which man appears, male and female. It is the effort by both to know the other, but the other which is also itself. This may be the point at which the human imagination has traditionally suspected . . . homosexuality . . . to be less than the desideratum. . . .
Homosexuality would be a case in point of recoil from the other. It seeks the ecstatic union with a second image, to be sure, but with an image that is not an image of the other mode under which man appears, the opposite sex. It fears to go out of itself in quest and exploration of the other, to give itself to the other in conquest and surrender, and to receive the same from the other. It seeks this exchange with an image that is a repeat of itself, and there is no analogy in all heaven and earth for such a thing--for significance (or fruit, or meaning) following upon the union of identicals. On all levels, there is this union of differences: of positive and negative charge, of stamen and pistil, of cock and hen, of god and goddess. At the very origin of man himself, the god (masculine) comes to earth (feminine), and into the image which he forms from the stuff of her body he breathes the breath of life. And in the supreme instance of all, when it is time for him to appear among men, the Incarnate does not issue straight from the godhead but rather from the fecund visitation of the Holy Ghost upon the body of the Virgin Lady.
It may be objected that fruit is not the object of a homosexual relationship; it is, at its best, an expression of love. The only rejoinder to this would be the whole argument of this book--the idea that things are not random; that one thing signals another; that there is an antiphon sounding among all things in the universe; that what appears here may throw light on that over there; indeed, that it is probably a case in point of the same thing. If this has any validity (and one must always stop short of inquisition in pressing an argument like this), the kind of union sought under homosexual conditions would be no union at all, but only the parody of a union, since the suggestion of all things from physics to biology to myth bespeaks a pattern in which authentic union involves different modalities of the same thing: "different," as in electrons and protons, or male and female, so that it is union and not mere juxtaposition (you can't fuse two electrons); "of the same thing," so that we don't find sweet peas and sea gulls gohabiting, or turtles and gazelles.
Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance? A Critique of Modern Secularism
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1969), pp. 121-122 (from Ch. 7, "Sex").