The End of Gays: Gay Marriage and the Decline of the Homosexual Population

It is admittedly odd to think that a progressive, humanitarian shift in attitudes toward gays and lesbians might lead, ironically, to a noticeable decline in the homosexual population. Yet this is precisely what I predict will happen over the very long course of natural selection should the societal-level normalization of adult homosexual relationships, such as is happening currently with the triumphant legalization of gay marriage in my new home state of New York, continues happily on its way. (I add these emotive terms, “triumphant” and “happily,” to highlight the obvious and inherent goodness of a legal acknowledgment of human sexual diversity, and to make it clear that what I’m exploring in this brief, speculative essay are only the non-politic, genetic consequences of these accomplishments, and nothing more.)  

Not so very long ago, the concept of “gay marriage” was so far from being a legal possibility in its literal sense that most listeners would have probably interpreted this phrase to mean a closeted gay man married to a woman, or a lesbian to a man. From all accounts, such “mixed-orientation marriages” have been around since the very institutionalization of marriage itself and are so common as to be banal. In one extensive study in 1978, for example, researchers Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg, factoring in ethnic differences, found that 35 percent of gay white males, and 13 percent of gay black males, reported having been married to a woman. By contrast, 47 percent of black lesbians and 20 percent of white lesbians had been married to a man.  

[More]