“Exclusive heterosexuality has to be understood as a perversion of [humanity’s] natural state.  We very quickly rob infants of their health and wholesomeness.  We require them from birth to fall into one of two widely differing and oppositely valued caegories:  girls and boys.  We require them to obliterate half their loving nature so as to become lovers only of members of the opposite sex.  It is as if at birth without our knoweldge or consent we are injected with a heavy addictive drug that will assure our limitation to  one sex role and to exclusively heterosexual realtions.   We’re hooked early.  We’re heterosexual junkies.  When we become adults, we push that drug ourselves, not just on the adults and children but on every newborn infant.  To kick the habit is near impossible.”

And later

“In this light it is not the Lesbian or the Gay man who is “unnatural” but rather the heterosexual person.  The Gay relationship moves toward expression not because it is conditioned from birth to do so or because it is approved by society or because it is given any positive reinforcement whatsoever.  Clearly the opposite is true. The motivating energy of the gay relationship flows rather from inside the persons themselves, from sources that are far more authentic than are responses to external programming”.

(from Sally Gearhart. “The Miracle opf Lesbianism“, in Loving women/loving men;: Gay liberation and the church, and quoted in Richard Cleaver, “Know My Name“, 1989.)

Health warning:  I freely acknowledge that these quotations are taken entirely out of context, of which I have no knowledge whatsover. Nor do I have any knowledge of the rest of Gearhart’s work.  The words, however, I think are thought – provoking and worthy of consideration just as they stand.

I also stress that Gearhart is writing about exclusive heterosexuality. Across history, there have been numerous ancient societies, and modern non- Western cultures, in which it was expected that most people would experience some degree of sexual expression with either gender, thus avoiding exclusive heterosexuality.  Of these, the Greeks and Romans are just the best known.