What's the Difference Between Homosexual and Gay?

The narcissistic trait! There is a psychological literature about this trait in the homosexual and gay personality. I am merely describing the difference I have noticed between my friends who are homosexual or those who self-identify as gay.

The garden variety, run of the mill homosexual is suffering and struggling with his sexual cravings anonymously, quietly, (like most of the rest of us!) with more or less success, guilt, and serenity. The gay person, by contrast, has a self-obsession, specifically about his sexuality. It is something he cherishes, wants to talk about, and manifest to the world:  so he "comes out." Much more than a mere homosexual attraction or craving,  this tendency becomes his social identity. And so there arises an entire lifestyle and culture around the attraction or behavior. It entails an aesthetic, a style, and particularly a type of humor, cynicism and sarcasm. Often I find a religious fascination along with an impulse to ridicule faith. At its worse, there is detectable a sense of superiority, arrogance and condescension. Of course there are a wide range of personalities and many gays are more humble and modest. However, in general the gay movement expects not just toleration..."live and let live"...but full approval. As the entire community celebrates with joy every marriage, hoping and expecting that their shared blood and family will continue fruitfully into the future, so the gay expects the same exultation in their sterile union. They will accept no less.

The dynamic of ordinary marriage is the attraction and union of opposites, which differ drastically even as they complement each other and build upon a profoundly shared common humanity. So, Adam's exclamation of delight:  "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!" She is the same as him, in dignity and essence. but so exuberantly exotic, fascination and mysterious. But the man loving a man is like Narcissus enamored of his own image in that pond.

The is why the gay friendly strategy pursued by the coterie around Pope Francis, and even our own Cardinal Tobin, is so futile. Homosexuals are welcome in the Catholic Church. But the gay identity demands a recognition and honor that the Catholic faith must deny them. Homosexuality as desire and even act is a humdrum, garden-variety kind of concupiscence, with which we are all of us afflicted. Even as it is a deeper, harder agony and cross than most of us carry. But gay identity and culture are structural expressions of spiritual disorder and can only be renounced by the Church.