Where things become interesting is that gender roles and norms will likely be as affected by the energy descent as they were by the birth of modern western culture or its arrival on such or such far shore, and so will gayness, or kathoey-ness for that matter. It is easy to see why. As the flow of high grade energy which still keeps our complex societies working dries up, we will be forced to scale down our economies. This means that our societies will become a lot less complex and that our economy will focus out of services toward industry then agriculture. A lot of jobs will simply disappear and domestic economy will make a big come back. This is bound to create a shift in gender roles on the same scale as the one we experienced at the beginning of the modern age or during the seventies. It is impossible to predict the details of this shift and it will doubtlessly vary according to local culture and conditions. The typically western idea that teaching and secretarial work are "women’s jobs” may have interesting consequences several centuries down the road for instance, when a scholarly tradition will have to be revived by teachers and private secretaries.
What is certain, however, is that there will be a return to the domestic economy and that the home, the family and the community will be put back at the center of the society. After the inevitable demise of the welfare state – or of its corporate rivals – there will simply not be no other way to survive rough times. A new repartition of roles between men and women inside the domestic economy will emerge and with it new definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman. These definitions will be based on biology, of course, but there too there will be considerable variations in time and space.
It is unlikely, however, that gayness, as a specific identity, survives such a shift. Human sexuality being fluid, there will be humans with homosexual leaning until the extinction of the species, but in a differently gendered social environment, they will no longer consider their preferred choice of partner as a fundamental element of their identity. Basically, gayness will fade with the culture which has created it.
That does not mean that homosexual people will be persecuted in the post-collapse world (even though they may and will be in some areas), nor that gay marriage will go the way of gay identity. Again it may and will in some areas, but it is not a necessity. Its main interest is that it integrates what was previously a deviance into the world of home and family which will be central in the future.
In fact it may be this integration which will guarantee the survival of gay marriage / coupling and the continued acceptance of homosexuals in some mainstream societies. Separatism of any kind has no place in a society where community cohesion is literally vital but the argument cuts both ways. In such a society it would be stupid to exclude otherwise productive people on the basis of their choice of partner. Gay marriage may fade away in some culture, but where it will have become established, it will probably become just marriage, with all the obligations and responsibilities it entails. Those who will be excluded, and rightly so because they pose a real threat to community cohesion, will be promiscuous and adulterous people, no matter the sex of their targets.
In a sense, gay marriage is one of the conservative measures we need to implement if we are to socially cushion the energy descent. Of course, for the majority of the population it won’t be much, but in some circumstances, redefining normalcy will enable us to better use human resources, as well as allowing previously discriminated people to be productive members of the community, which is by no means negligible.
A very interesting article. The idea that your identity is dominated by the gender of who you sleep live (and which defines you) is actually a very Western and recent one.
Historically, and in other cultures like the Arab world today, there is no such thing as a gay identity. Rather you are a man who might sleep with a boy just as the Romans and Greeks did all the time.
looking at our society I think its set up to fail massively from a social point of view even without peak oil .
