A different sense of future, moreover an expectation of instant gratification, is established in the sexual experience of homosexuality. Exactly this characteristic acknowledges the underlying structure of the pragmatics of high efficiency that makes homosexual experiences possible, and even economically acceptable. Acknowledged also is the scale of humankind. Survival is much less affected by fruitless sexuality than within a limited scale of existence and activity. The freedom gained through birth control methods and the freedom to practice non-reproductive sexual relations, such as homosexual love, are in some ways similar. It is impossible not to notice that the development under discussion displays a shift from a domain of vulnerability in regard to the species-any imbalance in procreation, under conditions of severe selection, affects the chances of survival-to the domain of the individual.
The extreme case of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), which is transmitted sexually (among other ways), reintroduced moral concerns at a time when morality was almost dropped from erotic language and expelled from the human erotic experience. The frenzy of sexual freedom and the confusion resulting from the spread of AIDS present contradictory images of a much broader development that affects human erotic behavior, and probably much more than that. Nobody, no doomsayer on record, whether coming from a literate perspective or already integrated in the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy, predicted the new vulnerability which AIDS makes so painfully evident, inside and outside the homosexual segment of the population. The integrated global nature of human life brought Africa, with its large AIDS-infected population, close to countries that reached a different (not to use the word higher) level of civilization. AIDS impacted on the sense of invulnerability, assumed by individuals in industrialized countries as almost a right. This invulnerability is now drastically tested, despite the enormous effort to address AIDS. The disease suddenly put globality in a new light. Statistics connect the sense of danger experienced in Hollywood by HIV-infected movie stars, fashion designers, and dancers to the desperation of the disenfranchised in the first world-drug addicts, the urban poor, and prostitutes-and to the disenfranchised and working poor of the Third World.
Far from being a new phenomenon, the homosexual and lesbian preference, or lifestyle as it is euphemistically called, reaches a status of controversial acceptance in the civilization of illiteracy. The paradox is that while the choice of homosexuality over heterosexuality is facilitated by the pragmatic context of the civilization of illiteracy, the activism of homosexuality solicits recognition within the structures characteristic of literacy. It is very ironic that gay activism, stimulated by the many consequences of the AIDS epidemic, attempts to reverse time, fighting for equal access to exactly those means in which the values and prejudices that condemn homosexuality are embedded. It looks like homosexuals want to rewrite the book or books in which they are damned, instead of freeing themselves from them. Homosexuals want their voice to be heard in church and politics. They want their cause present in ethical writings, and their rights encoded in new laws and rules. They want to enlighten others by making their experience known as art, literature, and social discourse. The genetic condition of the homosexual choice needs to be considered together with the variety of contexts pertaining to the diversity of the civilization of illiteracy that make its unfolding possible.
There is a need to be aware that, between the function of procreation and divergent sexual behavior, a whole gamut of human cultural experience continues to unfold and challenges settled standards. This experience goes beyond language and the literate structure of a linear, sequential, hierarchic, centralized, deterministic pragmatics of limited choice. Human language, as a projection of human beings living within a context appropriate to their self-preservation and development, participated in the taming of our sexual drive. Illiteracy leads to its endless diversification, affecting sexuality in all its manifestations, such as patterns of mobility and settlement, family and community life, social rules, and the encoding of values in moral, economic, and educational systems.
Orality and sexuality were characterized by immediateness, and a reduced sense of space and time. Sex equaled instinct. With writing, and thus the possibility of what later would become literacy, a new set of underlying elements was acknowledged. Sexuality was subjected to the experience of accepted rules-the do's and don'ts appropriate to expectations of efficiency, and their resulting values, corresponding to the scale of humankind and the natural condition. Reproduction still dominated sexuality, while rules of optimal human interaction, encoded in religion or social expectations, started to permeate erotic behavior. To a great extent, language in its literate form expresses the awareness of the various erotic dimensions as they were socially acknowledged at any given time. Literacy enrolled sexuality in the quest for higher productivity and sustained consumption characteristic of the pragmatics associated with the Industrial Revolution. Once conditions making literacy necessary are overruled by new conditions, sexuality undergoes corresponding changes. Basically, sexuality seems to return to immediateness, as it integrates many mediating elements. Sexuality unfolds in an unrestricted set of varieties, escaping some of its natural determination. In keeping with the shorter and shorter cycles of human activity, sexuality turns into an experience of transitory encounters. Since it is a form of human expression, it ascertains its condition as yet another sign system, or language, among the many participating in the practical experiences of our new pragmatic context. It now bridges dramatically between life and death, in a world where the currency of both life and death is, for all practical purposes, devaluated.
Sex and creativity
Experts from fields as different as brain research, cognitive science, and physiology agree that a distinct similarity between the practical experience of self- constitution in sexual acts and in creative efforts of art, scientific discovery, and political performance can be established. It seems that they all involve a progression, reach a peak, experienced as enormous pleasure and relief, and are followed by a certain feeling of emptiness. Like any creative experience, the erotic experience is one of expression. To express means to constitute oneself authentically, and to project hope that the experience can impact others. From this stems the possible language, or semiotics, of the erotic: how it is expressed, what the erotic vocabulary (of sounds, words, gestures, etc.) and grammar are. The semiosis of the erotic includes the participation of the language of sexual relationships, without being limited to it.
Having reached this understanding, we can apply it to the observation that Homo Eroticus is a subject who continuously negates naturalness (from what and how we eat to how we dress, etc.) while simultaneously regretting the loss. Not surprisingly, sexuality is continued in the practice of producing, reading, viewing, and criticizing erotic literature, printed images, video, film documentaries, CD-ROM, or virtual reality. Real- time interactive erotic multimedia captures even more attention. In parallel, humans try to be authentic, unique, and free in their intimate sphere. They scan through image- dominated books, some more than vulgar, subscribe to magazines, face their own sexuality on videotapes, register for sex initiation seminars, or take advantage of group sex encounters. Millions land on pornographic Websites or create their own sex messages in the interconnected world. They do all this in an attempt to free themselves from natural necessity and from the conformist frame of literate Eros, including the many complexes explaining painful real or imaginary failures.
Living in an environment in which science and technology effectively support human experiences of overcoming the constraints of space, time, and material existence, humans freed sexuality from the influence of natural cycles. These, as we know, can even be altered as pragmatic conditions might require for sportswomen and ballerinas. New totems and taboos populate this environment in which Eros, as a reminder of distant phases of anthropological evolution, continues to be present. Like any other creative act, the sexual act involves imagination, and the urge to explore the unknown. It is irrepeatable, yet another instance of discovering one's identity in the uniqueness of the experience.
Although continuously programmed through endlessly refined means, humans maintain a nostalgia for the authentic, but accept, more often unconsciously than not, a mediocre syntax of the sexual impressed upon them from the world of celebrity and success. This syntax is a product of erotic experts, writers, and imagemakers. It is a contentless semantics-the meaning of erotic encounters fades in the meaning of the circumstance-and an absurd pragmatics-sexuality as yet another form of competition, deliriously celebrated by mass media.