Gay Boy Makes Good

Remember Jim McGreevey? He's not only turned his life around, he's helping others do the same:

He is in a healthy, happy relationship with Mark as he studies to become an Episcopal priest. He is giving back to others who have made mistakes, often because they were caught up in the circumstances of their lives.

Gay people mostly forgave McGreevey for his affair when it came to light five years ago. We are well aware of the many ludicrous situations that occur because men, particularly in McGreevey’s generation, have been forced to live their lives in the closet. That he is living such an honorable and giving life freed from the shame of the closet is testament to the real Jim McGreevey.

McGreevey volunteers at Exodus Transitional Community at the Church of Living Hope in East Harlem, New York, which tries to help newly-released prisoners learn life skills and handle the significant challenges that ex-convicts face.

News like this starts connections forming in my head, such as the fact that, in most non-Judaeo-Christian societies, those with same-sex orientation seem to occupy a very high proportion of spiritual roles in the community -- one thinks immediately of the North American berdache, men who adopted women's roles and dress, and who were regarded as spiritually very powerful by their community. The men who married them were seen as specially favored. There are equivalent institutions in other cultures.

There is also, in shamanism, a recurring motif of the shaman-in-the-making becoming, at least psychically, a member of the opposite sex. This is supposed to complete him/her and enable the shaman to serve the whole community.

And can we talk about the high proportion of gay men in the priesthoods of various Christian denominations? (It would also be interesting to see a breakdown of members of the "helping" professions -- doctors, nurses, social workers, therapists -- by sexual orientation.)

Edward O. Wilson once posited the development of altruism as a result of genetic economics: if a non-breeding member of a group devotes his/her time to caring for others in the group -- offspring, mostly -- that behavior and the root causes of it (i.e., the non-breeding part) would be reinforced as an adaptive trait and carried on through siblings and their descendants. Can we see the same mechanism at work in the maintenance of same-sex orientation in vertebrates?

No conclusions, but some interesting trains of thought.