318: George Carlin

“Gay Lib”
from “Toledo Window Box” ( recorded 20 July 1974)
by George Carlin

Though titled “Gay Lib”, this stand-up routine has very little actually to do with the details and practicalities of the Gay Lib movement. It’s much more about constitutes natural and unnatural sexual attractions and responses, arguing that a sexual response is just a sexual responses and therefore discrimination is unthinking. George Carlin was by this time recognised as the new Lenny Bruce for the counter-culture, all for tolerance, social change and sexual openness.

From about ten years earlier these were Lenny Bruce’s take on homosexuality which (discounting the liberal use of “faggot for the time) is also very open to the whole range of human sexual responses

By analysing the central matter of sexuality, but not in a prurient manner, both Bruce and Carlin pretty much avoid any discussion of gay stereotypes.

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Gay Lib.
Now interestingly, here is an attempt by a put down and kind of persecuted minority to insist on their place rightfully and their treatment rightfully, without it having anything to do with ethnic or religion or anything! It's really an exciting separate part of Liberation.
Now I have always wondered...Well, we’ve all thought about “homosexual” – “heterosexual”. We’ve always wondered, first of all, sometimes we, if we're younger, we react to that in a way that we've been schooled. Then you kinda get your chops and you get things okay and you understand and it's all right to be able to talk about that:
(mumbles mimicking conversation) ...young.....kid...that’s cool...(more mumbling) You know.
Then.
Well here's what I mean. The word "homosexual" - many people who are not in the position to have to decide this, they wonder:
(puts on voice) "Is homosexuality... is it Normal? Is it Natural? I ask you. Is it Normal or Natural? Is it unnatural and abnormal?"
Now those two words seem to revolve around it. Now let's look at those words for what they are...
"Natural." Hey. Means "according to nature." Is it according to nature? Well....Probably not in the strictest sense because nature didn't presuppose it. Nature only gave us one set of sexual apparatus. Girl's got something for the guys, guy's got something for the girls.
As it is now, a homosexual is forced to "Share" the apparatus that the opposite sex is using on this person. Certainly if nature were in command there'd be two sets of goodies. So nature was not ready. We leaped past nature again in our sociological development, Way down the road ahead of nature.
Is it normal? Normal? Well what's "normal?" Well, let's see.. if you're standing in a room, stripped, and it's dark, (speaks faster) and you're hugging a person and loving them and rubbing them up and down and they're rubbing you and you're rubbing together, and suddenly the light goes on and it's the same sex, you've been trained to go
(long, loud prolonged scream)
But it felt Okayyy.... So maybe it was normal without being natural.