How many kids are raped by gay dads?
a homophobic defense of gay adoption.
Between the ages of 6 and 18, I always had (closeted) gay best friends. I was pressured, on several occasions, to show my penis to them. These boys always seemed to have a certain flair about them.
Sometimes we would do “penis racing.” We would both pee into the toilet at the same time, seeing who finished faster. I also did this with my stepfather. Maybe I learned the game from the kids, and showed it to my dad, or maybe it was the other way around.
During early years, I discovered my love of the smell of my stepdad’s armpits — I still love the smell of my own armpits. At some point, I became uncomfortable with him kissing me on the lips goodnight. Maybe it was because his mustache was scratchy.
There was a controversy when Tom Brady demanded a full-lipped kiss from his 11 year old son. Not a full cancellation, but a bit of a stir.
Did Brady have the right to demand a kiss? Is it ok for a father to kiss his son on the lips? Does it reflect some dark incestuous, homosexual desire? Is it a superficial cultural difference, like how Italian men kiss each other’s cheeks? Is Tom Brady secretly raping his son? Is this evidence of an elite pedophile cabal?
“That’s what Michael Jackson did.”
By the time I was 10 or 12, I was sleeping over my best friend’s house. It was not considered gay to sleep in the same bed, so that’s what we did. But he was a momma’s boy. When he thought I was asleep, he snuck away to sleep with his mom. Score! I got the bed all to myself.
I am not saying there was anything going on between my friend and his mom, but we did discuss, at times, how big his mom’s boobs were. Later on, I would learn that gay men have unusually close relationships with their mothers — as did Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler. But I didn’t think about that at the time, and I fell asleep.
As I slept, his drunk dad came home. His parents were in that pre-divorce stage where they weren’t sleeping together. His dad, fumbling around in the dark, came into the bedroom and slipped into bed with me. I was awoken, but I pretended to be asleep. It was weird, but I didn’t feel any danger.
In the morning, I woke up, and his dad was gone. I went about my day, playing video games with my friend. When I went home, I told my mom what happened. She told me “that’s what Michael Jackson did.”
I was concerned. Was I molested? Was I victim? Was my spiritual integrity violated? Or was my mom overreacting? Should my friend’s dad go to jail over a simple and innocent mistake? Who, exactly, has the authority to intervene, surveil, and decide right from wrong?
My paranoia eventually turned inward. Puberty transformed innocent crushes into furious masturbation. Sex sprang out of a disturbing abyss, took hold of me, imposed itself like a parasite from another dimension, hijacking my brain, controlling me. I’ve always hated losing control.
If I could go from being an asexual kid to a horny teenager, did that also mean that I could transform into a gay man? Was I a deeply closeted homosexual?
I feared a loss of my agency and identity. Like a thief in the night, desire would overtake me and change my life forever. I would never be a normal father, I would never have a wife or kids, and worst of all, I would lose my Platonic friendships, which would all become infected by lust.
Sitting alone in the closet with a knife, I scared myself with spiraling nightmares. In zombie movies, once bitten, the brave man must kill himself, to prevent his own corruption. If I knew that I would someday become a monster, would I be obligated to castrate myself?
Rape Paranoia
When I was a teenager, my young cousin was playing downstairs in the basement with my stepdad. It was late at night, and I was upstairs, lying in my bed in the dark. All of a sudden, I was overcome with the feeling that my young cousin was in danger, and I needed to go protect him. Fear gripped me in the way that I imagine a mother feels when her child is in danger — irrational, instinctual intuition. I don’t usually have panic attacks, but I suppose that’s what you could call it.
I ran downstairs, burst open the door to the basement, and found them watching a movie. “What’s up?” they asked. “Oh, nothing, just checking in on you guys.”
Years later, my stepfather, an alcoholic, was ranting to me about the sexual adventures of his youth. His confession mixed shame with a perverted pride, bragging about ambiguous events that were too dirty to describe in detail. Threesomes? Orgies? Cheating on his wife? But sensing (dimly in his drunkenness) that I was apprehensive, he issued a caveat, slurring his words:
“I just wanna tell you, you know, I absolutely, I never did anything with young boys. Just girls.”
Summer Camp Rape Jokes
One year at summer camp, there was a counselor who was gay. I asked,
Why is it normal for boys to sleep in a cabin with a gay man, but we would never accept a straight man sleeping in a cabin with girls?
I brought this up to the assistant director, a beanie-wearing hipster from Vermont who liked weed, craft beer, skating, and snow boarding. His water bottle had 20 stickers plastered all over it, with catch phrases like “hang ten!” He stared at me, mouth gaping open, eyebrows furrowed, and said,
Damn dude, that’s really dark. Like, that’s really dark. How could you even say that, dude?
I was shamed and humiliated by the authorities, and my concerns were dismissed.
Then, one day, one of the younger kids started running around saying, “I’m gay.” He was far too young to have any sense of sexuality. I don’t think he knew where babies came from, so I asked him how he discovered this. He told me that his gay counselor explained it to him; being gay means that you like men.
The most upsetting thing about this wasn’t that the kid was being brainwashed or “groomed” into being gay. My issue was that gay men seemed to be immune from and outside of all the normal prohibitions against adult-child sexual conversations, while maintaining all the same privileges as everyone else. I found the double standard to be hypocritical; an unfair exception.
If the rule is that “gay men are allowed to say whatever they want, whenever they want,” like a clown or court jester, then what business did they have being allowed in polite society? Shouldn’t they be living inside a colorful tent on the edge of town? If they wanted to be accepted as “normal,” why weren’t they held to the standards of normalcy? Why was I the only person who cared about the rules?
Another gay counselor (man, there sure were a lot of gay counselors…) found himself alone in the cabin with a camper, and asked the camper to leave, since no counselor is allowed to be alone with a single camper. When the camper asked for the reason behind this rule, the counselor responded, “because I would rape you.”
It was an off-color joke. Of course this counselor wasn’t going to rape anyone — what sort of rapist would come out and say it so bluntly?
When I heard this story, I reported the counselor for being inappropriate. I was a tattle-tail, a hall-monitor, a church lady, a Karen. I wanted to get revenge against the authorities for being humiliated as a “homophobe.” If I had to follow the stupid inconsistent illogical rules, so would everyone else.
But, for a moment, let’s reverse the gender of the kid. Imagine if it was a straight male counselor making a rape joke to a teen girl.
Evicted from Gay Paradise
My first experience being hit on by older men came when I took a semester off and traveled to Hawaii. I was looking for a place to stay, and ended up on a large ranch on the edge of the ocean with its own private waterfall. Peacocks and donkeys wandered around a primordial garden of Eden.
When I arrived, the owners gently vetted me on how accepting I was of gay people and how open I was to trying new things. Like, for example, hanging out with them in their hot tub.
I was soft, twinkish, and underdeveloped for my age. My chest was hairless and I barely ever had to shave. I thought about my young body under the water, brushing up against their hairy Gen X legs, accidentally touching, exploring, getting gay with it.
Every text message contained sneaky, plausibly deniable sexual innuendo. Like,
“when are u cumming over? ;)”
They thought I was stuck in the closet, and I needed to be pulled out.
Their house was filled with naked paintings of prepubescent boys. They did not have children. If they did have kids, I would wonder.
Trying my best to be polite (which we all know is not my strong suit), I asked them to respect my boundaries and stop with the innuendo. I was promptly kicked off the property.
If I was a young woman staying with two frat bros, and they constantly sexually harassed me, everyone would understand if I became a staunch feminist as a result. But if I came away from this experience homophobic, literally uncomfortable around gay men, that is less socially acceptable.
Homophobes are stereotyped as conservative chuds who don’t like gay people because they’re too weak, too soft, and too feminine. I’ve always been hated by these homophobes because I am androgynous and I talk like a fag. But despite sharing much in common with the gays, I’m still uncomfortable being hit on.
I received a message on Substack a few months ago from a woman asking to peg me, which inspired my essay, “I am a deeply closeted homosexual.” This was my attempt to explain myself to those who perceive me as feminine, passive, and submissive.
I had no clue what this person looked like, whether they were female or trans, old or young, fat or skinny — I just knew someone was trying to peg me, and it triggered a fight-or-flight response. If I come off as hostile, acerbic, cruel, sardonic, or mean-spirited, this is just a defensive coping mechanism, a means to deal with vulnerability and fear.
Karen, where art thou?
Creepiness is the sexualization of people who don’t want to be sexualized. It is a desire which imposes itself against boundaries.
Human sexual signaling is mostly non-verbal, and cannot be described analytically. Staring, making innuendo, or even speaking in a particular tone of voice can come across as creepy. The “male feminists” who claim to “respect women” often end up being the creepiest of all!
To protect women, we place men under blanket suspicion. Some men are asexual, and most men never commit abuse, but how can we tell? Better safe than sorry. Men only want one thing, and it is disgusting.
Women are the first line of defense against anti-social behavior. If women did not serve this civic duty, the enforcement of social rules would fall into the hands of men, who have two modes: ignore or incite. In response to conflict, men either overlook and tolerate it, or they begin swearing and throwing fists.
“Passive aggression” is the foundation of civic society. You cannot run a society on “overt aggression,” and you also can’t get by on “pure passivity.”
There needs to be some way to communicate social boundaries that neither capitulates nor escalates. Women did not “build” civilization as priestly engineers, but they remain the “building blocks” which maintain it.
Women feel solidarity with homosexuals, and reactively defend them. Women do not empathize with young twinks who are sexually harassed by older men. As a result, gay pushiness goes unnoticed — or worse, “noticing” becomes stigmatized as homophobia.
When I catch myself staring at a woman, I feel “creepy” and deliberately look away. If I find myself staring at a handsome man, I never feel guilt. Women deserve protection and respect, whereas men have a duty to compete and defend themselves. Complaints about gay creepiness can be dismissed: “you’re homophobic” — “you must be secretly gay” — “oh, get over yourself” — “it’s just flirting, big deal!”
Where’s the limit?
In communist East Germany, they paired up young orphan boys with pedophiles. In Berlin, in revolutionary daycares like Rote Freiheit, children were encouraged “to show and touch their genitalia.” At some point, it is necessary to draw a line against sexual freedom.
At what point does society intervene? At the point of kissing? What about cuddling in bed, naked? Are parents allowed to be naked around their kids? At what age does it become inappropriate? What about the nudists?
If a single, heterosexual male adopts a daughter, and they live alone, and he homeschools her in his secluded 50 acre compound, should this raise any eyebrows?
What if Matt Gaetz, as an unmarried 30 year old, wants to adopt a 14 year old Cuban? Or Mike Johnson, who adopted a 14 year old when he was in his 20s?
I’m not attempting to be overly pedantic or salacious (that comes naturally; I don’t have to try). But I have a morbid fascination with the taboo, combined with a desire for clear-cut, well-defined rules.
Due to the ambiguous gray zone between ill-defined social norms and the law, Child Protective Services has gained a unilateral, unregulated, extra-judicial authority to take children away from families. How do we decide who can adopt, and who gets their children taken away?
Currently, it is legal for adoption agencies to discriminate against single men. The typical reason for discrimination is because men lack “maternal instincts.” But perhaps this is a politically correct excuse, and the real reason is that we suspect them of being creepy.
How many dads harass their daughters?
Prehistoric peoples had a weaker incest taboo,1 and close-family sexual relations are still more common than you might expect.2 Some small percentage of dads, gay and straight, are rapists; a larger percentage are “creepy.”
Here’s a trolley problem for you:
If we created a radical TERF paradise where fathers were not allowed to interact with their daughters, would the reduction in sexual harassment be worth it?
If we RETVRN to 2002, when gay dads were not allowed to adopt or do surrogacy, would the reduction in sexual harassment be worth the reduction in adoption?
In TERF paradise, we could place dads under strict surveillance, requiring cameras to be installed in all residential housing. The TERF paradise would be enforced by a tyrannical jackbooted militant lesbian army.
But unless you are a radical TERF, it is ok to permit fathers some privacy and autonomy, even if this risks the possibility that a small percentage of fathers will be inappropriate toward their daughters. We don’t exile all dads from their daughters on the basis of “better safe than sorry.”
If we ban gay dads from adopting or doing surrogacy, the risk calculation is a bit different. It would be feasible to ban gay men from adopting or doing surrogacy. We just need to go back to 2002.
The question is: should we?
I wonder how Lyman Stone, my favorite conservative, might deal with this issue. Rather than asking him what he actually thinks (boring), I will ask the phantom hallucination that I have of him sitting in my brain. Phantom Lyman, how do you deal with the issue of same-sex adoption and surrogacy?
“Well, Deep Left, I’m glad you asked. As a traditional Christian, I oppose gay marriage. Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Adoption should only be permitted to married couples. Since gay men cannot marry, they cannot adopt.”
Phantom Lyman makes a straightforward and inoffensive argument. He’s not saying that “gay men be raping all the kids up in here.” He’s making a legalistic, technical, deontological argument. The Bible says it, he believes it. No need to accuse anyone of being creepy toward their kids.
I am in the more controversial position of being ok with gay marriage, but also being suspicious of same-sex adoption. The idea of two gay men cuddling with their son in bed, alone, in their underwear, caressing... you know, it’s all a bit too much for me.
Inside me, there are two autistic wolves: one is really afraid of gay people, and the other one really likes graphs and charts.
Warning: what follows is the BORING part of the article where I discuss numbers and stuff.
If there is a difference between gay and straight parents, it should show up in behavioral outcomes. If children adopted by gays have higher rates of drug use, self-harm, mental illness, poor grades, or lower income in adulthood, then there’s something wrong going on.
Despite my deep-seated homophobia, I found no evidence for that.3
What I did find evidence for, however, is that if you control for income and divorce rates, the children of gay dads underperform the children of straight or lesbian parents. However, if you then control for lower church attendance, then straight parents are the inferior ones.
Disaggregation
Outcomes between gay and straight parents are identical, but this does not mean that there are no differences in parental environment. There are statistical differences between gay, lesbian, and straight couples. Relatively speaking:
Gay couples4 have high incomes, low divorce rates, and low church attendance
Lesbian couples have high incomes, high divorce rates, and low church attendance
Heterosexual couples have low incomes, medium divorce rates, and high church attendance
Divorce
Lesbian couples have a 2x higher divorce rate than gay couples. If divorce has a negative impact, then the children of lesbian couples should have worse outcomes. But this isn’t the case.
This implies one of two things:
Parental environment doesn’t matter. The reason why the children of divorced parents have worse outcomes is because the genes which predict divorce also predict other nasty behaviors. An adopted child doesn’t inherit their divorced parent’s genes. Divorce is a predictive cofounder, not a causal factor.
Or, perhaps parental environment matters, but lesbians are such super-awesome parents that they balance out the negative effects of their higher divorce rate.
Then there is the middle option:
There might be a genetic cofounder regarding outcomes for children of divorce; but also, divorce still negatively impacts children to some degree, independent of genetic cofounders.
The Iceberg of Divorce
In the iceberg model of divorce, the raw divorce rate is a proxy for a population’s overall relationship satisfaction and health. Even if studies on same-sex adoption adjust for the raw divorce rate, they aren’t accounting for the rest of the iceberg.
Charles Murray (Coming Apart, 2010) shows that rich people have a low rate of divorce, while poor people have a high rate. This supports the cofounder thesis, that divorce doesn’t cause dysfunction; it is a result of dysfunction.
Following Murray, I hypothesize that the divorce rate of any population is a proxy for overall social-emotional stability.
Poverty, drug addiction, and criminality all correlate with divorce. Given a higher divorce rate, we should expect higher levels of conflict within that population. We should expect lesbians to be dysfunctional parents, because divorce is a result of dysfunction, not a cause of it:
Relationship instability appears to be higher among gay and lesbian parent couples and may be a key mediating factor influencing outcomes for children.
On the other hand, maybe my hypothesis is incorrect. Maybe it is healthier to end a relationship rather than trying to “force” it. In that case, the higher divorce rate of lesbians is evidence of higher emotional intelligence.
It’s also possible that lesbians make terrible partners, but excellent parents. Lesbians verbally and physically abuse one another at higher rates, but they never abuse their kids. The kids are spoiled, despite their squabbling moms, and it all evens out.
But in this case, we would have to make the opposite argument for gay men. Despite gay men having a lower rate of divorce, the outcomes are “the same,” meaning that gay men must be worse parents, once we control for the impact of divorce.
You can’t have it both ways. You must claim one of the following:
Divorce rates have no impact on children.
In spite of high divorce rates, lesbians are great parents; and in spite of low divorce rates, gay men are terrible parents.
If gay and lesbian parents produce “identical behavioral outcomes” to straight parents, and to each other, then their differential divorce rates must be compensated for by other factors.
Income
The other thing we have to account for is that married gay and lesbian couples are richer5 than married straight couples. There are a few mechanisms by which income could lead to better life outcomes for children:
Genetic cofounders: Rich people are more stable, healthy, and competent, and they pass on these genes to their kids.
Environmental cofounders: The attributes which allow people to gain wealth also make them more competent parents.
Environmental gifts: Money itself improves the lives of children. Better food, better schools, better toys, better healthcare, better therapy, better everything.
Unless we believe that the effect of income on behavior outcomes is solely genetic, then the higher incomes of gay and lesbian parents must be affecting their adoptive children in some way.
Since married gay men are less likely to divorce, and they are richer, this means that, after controlling for divorce and income, gay men are pound-for-pound worse parents.6
If the homophobes were correct, then this would be because gay dads rape, groom, or sexually harass their children at higher rates. However, I found no evidence7 that the daughters of gay men turn out better than the sons, which is what we would expect if differential rape rates were a factor.
Putting aside the rape thesis, we have to consider whether gay dads lack certain socio-emotional skills that allow them to be good parents, which is the basic conservative take. Maybe it has nothing to do with being gay, but the fact that they are men, and men are just generally worse at providing empathic support to children.
This is either a win for feminists or a loss, depending on how you look at it. It’s a win in the sense that women have higher emotional intelligence and produce better outcomes for children (yay women!), but it’s a loss in the sense that careerism and notions of equality are depriving children of a crucial source of social-emotional support.
By pushing women away from performing childcare and into pursuing physics, there’s an opportunity cost, even if women are just as good at physics as men. This is because women have a comparative advantage in child rearing. Society as a whole loses if they neglect that role in pursuit of financial gain.
Notice that I said “women” and not “mothers.” It is plausible that a career woman could hire a nanny to raise her children on her behalf and attain all the benefits that I’ve described. But this requires that there is an ample pool of women eager to serve as surrogate mothers on behalf of these career women.
Since American women are far too careerist to meet this demand, we either need to implement socialist policies to fund expensive childcare, or we need to import millions of women from the third world to do it for us.
Remember, I’m not speaking to individual experiences here — just averages.
Religiousness
Lastly, LGTBQ couples tend to be less religious.
Religiousness is correlated with mental stability and positive life outcomes. If LGBTQ couples are less religious, we should expect them to be worse parents. The fact that they are not implies one of two things:
Religion doesn’t actually matter for behavioral outcomes — the finding that “religion improves life satisfaction” is just another assortative genetic cofounder.
Despite being less religious, gay and lesbian parents are just so awesome that it all cancels out.
Conclusion
Women are less likely to sexually abuse children. Men are more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, to get in car crashes, and to engage in risk-taking behavior like gambling.8 They are less likely to offer physical affection, like hugging, which is crucial for the psychosocial development of children.
Many dads defy these statistics and stereotypes. They are not cold and distant; they are warm and loving. They are not cruel or neglectful; they are caring and attentive. Most dads are decent dads. But decency is not a black-and-white binary. Parental behavior is a spectrum.
Given the low divorce rates and high incomes of married gay men, we should expect them to be better parents than average. But they are not. Maybe gay men lack the emotional and intuitive qualities that make for a good parent. Maybe the TERFs were right.
If all we care about is the average outcome, then there’s no reason to restrict same-sex adoption. Still, that doesn’t actually mean that gay parents are identical to straight parents. They could be better in some ways, and worse in other ways.9
From Lyman Stone:
First of all, other primates don’t exhibit the breadth of Westermarckian-type-effects we see in humans. Humans are unique for the breadth of their care relationships and the breadth of their incest taboos, especially father-daughter. This tells us that whatever is going on with human incest taboos, it must be evolutionarily fairly “recent” in phylogenetic terms.
More than that, in a paper I haven’t published yet using over 10,000 ancient human genomes, the decline in incest really is historically recent! Incest rates were a lot higher in the past than they are now.
From Sebastian Jensen:
the true rate of sibling incest is likely closer to 22% instead of the reported rate of 15%… it seems that between 0.5% and 5% of Western women have sex with their fathers at some point in their lives, and about one in 1000 to 10000 men have sex with their father or mother at some point.
If you’re a conservative reading this, and you have some evidence to the contrary, please share it.
I did find a study from 2014 that claimed that:
“Emotional problems were over twice as prevalent for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents… However, biological parentage nullified risk alone and in combination with any iteration of factors. Joint biological parents are associated with the lowest rate of child emotional problems by a factor of 4 relative to same-sex parents, accounting for the bulk of the overall same-sex/opposite-sex difference.”
This is a pretty big blow against the idea that adoptive parents or stepparents are “just as good” — but it also suggests that the harm caused by same-sex parenting goes away if we account for the “non-biological” aspect. In other words, same-sex adoption is no better or worse than heterosexual adoption.
I’m referring to couples, not individuals. Gay couples are a subset of gays overall — gays who are single may be poorer than the average single person.
I will also mention that the reason that gay and lesbian couples have higher incomes is because they are less likely to “formalize” relationships, so the ones who get married are a selected population.
Please let me know if you find evidence to the contrary.
In the audio recording, I originally claimed that men were more neglectful and physically abusive. But I did not have sufficient evidence of this claim. Most accusations and convictions of of neglect are against female caregivers. Additionally, women are just as (if not more) likely to initiate physical violence against children.
Where I continue to be skeptical of claims of “equality” or “worse women” is in the fact that accusations of neglect are culturally mediated. A single mother is convicted of neglect, while the dead-beat dad is not. Technically, every single dead-beat dad is “neglectful.” In the case of physical abuse, while women initiate violence more often, the violence is less intense (spankings vs severe beatings).
Even if same-sex parents perform worse on some metrics than heterosexual parents, the real question is whether same-sex parenting is better or worse than the orphanage. In terms of budgetary impact and child outcomes, that is much easier to prove, since:
children in foster care had consistently better experiences and less problems across the three outcomes as compared to children in residential care.
If we deny same-sex parents the right to adopt, and there are not a sufficient number of qualified heterosexuals, then children will be stuck in orphanages.
One could make an argument that if we lowered the barriers to heterosexual adoption, then this problem would be solved. However, according to the 2015 study, low-quality (unmarried) heterosexuals were equivalent to, or underperformed, same-sex couples on 3/6 metrics. So it’s not clear that lowering standards would result in welfare gains for children.
This feels like you had an idea for a blog, wrote the first half planning on finding corroborating data later, looked into the data, found nothing good, and abruptly wrapped up the post.
This type of article is exactly why I think substack is one of the worst things ever invented. In the past, this would be a snarky tweet. "Parents have the right to kiss their kids on the lips goodnight!" People would've called you a pedophile, that would be that. But now, through the wonders of a decentralized media platform, idiots like you now have the power to stretch out your ideas (about "penis racing"?) into long-winded, pompous, pseudo-intellectual essays.