Ellen Page, Coming Out

ELLEN PAGE COMES OUT! Or something like that. Another homosexual human being, tired of hiding it, tired of living a lie, now fully "gay". She is, presumably, an actress or entertainer of some sort, or maybe just one of those celebrities, famous for being famous. By the looks of her, there'll be a few heterosexual males, sighing with a vicarious sense of lost opportunity. In an even less enviable position is the star football player, a M. Sam, who came out, right about the time he is scheduled to become a professional player. Good luck with that. The number of evolutionary reasons for strict cultural conformity is far too great to fully enumerate, here or anywhere. Suffice to say that humans are social animals, who find as many ways as possible to cooperate, even as they cling to destructive violence as a way to survive. But damn, how far, exactly , do we have to take it? In Biblical times gay people did nothing to propagate the species, in harsh demographic circumstances, where everyone needed to contribute new children. We get that. And never spill your seed in vain; make sure it finds its mark. OK, fine. But does that mean that two thousand years later along our evolutionary adventure we must all express the same sexual preferences, the same religiouioty, and the same hair style and skin color? Exactly how far must we go in imitation each other for reassurance? Compare your skin color to anyone else's, anywhere. You'll never find a match. Terrified of that fact to the point of denying it, we create our imaginary cultural categories, of religion, skin color, everything, and live warily within them, with only a mild, vague sense of dissonance. w clever our expedient conventions! And how tragically flawed, and demonstrably false. And in these latter days, worst of all, how needlessly restrictive.