Discrimination in Human Sexuality; Crisis of Ignorance and Apathy

Presented by: Owen Stanley Villarreal & Orlando Barboza

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”

― Alice Walker

“Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.”

― Derek Jarman

“It takes no compromise to give people their rights...it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.”

― Harvey Milk

“Be strong, believe in freedom and in God, love yourself, understand your sexuality, have a sense of humor, don't judge people by their religion, color or sexual habits, love life and your family.”

― Madonna Ciccone

“Gay rights is not something most of us think about - because most of us happen to have been born straight.”

― Jodi Picoult

“Males do not represent two discrete populations; heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats, and not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.”

― Alfred C. Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male

By Owen Stanley Villareal & Orlando Barbosa

Human sexuality is regarded as a spectrum in contrast to the polar binary thought that is held by the public, this was brought forwards by Alfred Kinsey and Wardell Pomeroy in their Kinsey Scale in 1948 and 1953. They were both unbiased in their reports and gave a scale from 0 to 6 in the spectrum of sexuality from the polar Heterosexuality, to the betweens, and to the opposite polar of Homosexuality.

Some might argue that homosexuality is sinful or immoral due to their religious beliefs or that it is wrong or unnatural because it goes against what is held to be the primary meaning of life which is to reproduce and create offspring to pass off your genes. We’ll concede the fact that yes, at first glance it might be viewed as a contradiction to the primary function of an organism, but that can be rebutted that such belief is only place value by contemporary human society and to base one’s whole paradigm of thought around that would be committing a fallacy of nature and emotivism in which, just because something is natural or unnatural makes it good or bad that fact alone doesn’t make it good or bad as the moral value of natural and unnatural is place by the observer who feels the emotion and not by objective impartiality. Kinsey says that it is in our nature to exist against nature for humans are not black and white; sheeps and goats; we are a continuum that is ever so changing.

Homosexuality has been in recorded history since 2400 BCE, a couple called Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, who were portrayed in the most intimate egyptian-hieroglyphic pose, a nose-kissing position. These tells us that before the dawn of the Judeo-Christian religions, homosexuality was viewed as a normal thing and a mere manifestation of a grand human dynamic. Furthermore, homosexual and transgender individuals were also common among other pre-conquest civilizations in Latin America, such as the Aztecs, Mayans, Quechuas, Moches, Zapotecs, and the Tupinambá of Brazil. Yet, this all changed when the conquistadors came and imposed their beliefs upon them, these cultures were punished with horrific burnings, mauling by dogs, etc, we can deduce from this that the whole concept of homosexuality being wrong came from the Judeo-Christian context and not from cultures of pre-European contact.

            The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Association of Social Workers identify sexual orientation as "not merely a personal characteristic that can be defined in isolation. Rather, one's sexual orientation defines the universe of persons with whom one is likely to find the satisfying and fulfilling relationships". The grand majority of scientist in the area of human sexuality, human psychology, cognitive development, and such related fields, have come to the conclusion that sexuality is a mix of genetic, biochemical, and environmental factors, but that there is not real empirical evidence that it is determined by how someone is raised or what ever values are placed on them.