Looking at the film Love is All You Need? turns the world upside down. It puts gay couples in the majority and heterosexual couples in the minority, showing a modern day America in which gender roles are flipped as well.

 Girls are pressured to play football and theater is considered “just for boys.”

 It makes you question whether love is all you need, or whether it has to be the right kind of love. To meet your needs for acceptance, belonging and self-actualization in this fictional society, the only kind of love you can have is homosexual. The world is depicted as full of hate, hate of equal measure to today’s American brand of religiously fueled hate, but for the exact opposite kind of couple.

  I would love to explore a world in which the majority & minority of any classification of people is flipped, but the hate has dissolved. This could be a more egalitarian world in which there’s a football team for boys and girls, women and men. Feminists have not violently overthrown the patriarchal world to rule it just as violently, as I saw in the short film Oppressed Majority. To explore the What if? question in Love is All You Need? you could easily construct a reality in which gender roles are not as pronounced & expected, everyone is bisexual but the vast majority find themselves in homosexual relationships & households. This would still make a profound impression on viewers, and give us that unnerving feeling that things do not at all have to be the way they’ve been, among modern people.

  The film had to make a point about bullying though. Put the shoe on the other foot and you’ll understand how ridiculous & insulting any hate based on sexual orientation is. ( I’m not sure whether to say sexual orientation or sexual preference. Sexual preference goes along with the phrase ‘gay lifestyle’ and sexuality as a choice. )

  The way that the Bible is quoted is particularly unnerving because the Bible really could be interpreted in a way that hates on heterosexuality except for “breeding,” as it could also be interpreted in a way that hates on homosexual acts. It is so open to interpretation—and so is history—that I think that our society really COULD reflect the one in Love is all you Need? if things had been interpreted just a little differently throughout history.  If everyone had interpreted Aristotle and Shakespeare as homosexual, if this had been normalized & stayed normalized amid all the centuries of interpretation of everything from the Torah to the science of biology—then our biological urge to reproduce would’ve been seen as normal for “breeders” or the “breeding season” and our urges to merge with a partner of the same sex would’ve been seen as normal for a large percentage of people too. 

  Would there have been a sharp distinction between “breeding” in heterosexuality and love & companionship in homosexuality, so that one of these ways to love ended up demonized & oppressed?  I would hope not, but that is the plausible backstory behind the film.

  Many commenters on the YouTube version insist that humans would’ve died out & society wouldn’t exist, if homosexuals had been the majority for an extended period of time. I disagree. People can be methodical about this & achieve a stable population even if their hearts aren’t in it—even if reproduction isn’t the driving force behind most people’s lives. Even if a minority of heterosexual surrogates & sperm donors are depended on by the majority of couples in the world—we are great survivors. I think this would bring about some respect for heterosexuals & not the hate I see in the film.

 It leaves the question of nature versus nurture open-ended. I wish I could answer it here, but I can’t. I’d like to say that everything’s about interpretation & our attractions & our morality are all relative.

 I have met living examples of gay adults who decided to change their ways & be straight—for religious reasons—and I have met real young people who start to act gay (the cultural representation of gay people’s clothes, voice, hair, gossip, attitude, attractions) because this was popular. There are some examples out there of people who choose to stay in relationships where there’s no attraction & find a way to love each other. Haven’t people chosen their sexuality and/or expression of their sexual identity, in these ways?  Whenever someone asks you who is more attractive and there’s only two choices, neither of which jumps out at you, aren’t you choosing your attraction?

  More often than those cases I hear about people who can’t help falling in love with who they do, or who feel helpless & imprisoned in the closet. I know people who’ve interpreted their feelings in a way that leads them away from their truth.

 

  So do we all have the capacity to choose who we’re attracted to? Do the environments we’re forced into shape the attraction that we allow ourselves? An environment full of only violent men will notoriously lead to many homosexual acts, but not many conversions to homosexuality. In sex-starved prisons, often pointed to as an example, most prisoners do not identify as gay. Their environment shapes the attraction they allow themselves as the need for sex persists.

  Allowing yourself to have a new, abnormal attraction sure sounds like a choice.

  But the character in Love is all you Need? seemed to be born hetero, and everyone around her thought they were born homo.

  If the best person you know is of the same sex as you, do you choose to be attracted to that person & pursue him or her? Usually not. Usually people wait for a passionate love that carries them away & makes them feel powerless in its drive.

   It doesn’t have to be that way. Society doesn’t have to be that way.  We do not have to interpret those feelings of helpless passion as love or as anything positive. We COULD interpret love differently & all begin to choose, in a more cold & rational way, who we love.

  I recommend The Birth Order Companion, a book that changed my life. It’s like Eharmony in that it will point you to a match that is good for you & compatible, not just the match that you happen to come across in life who ends up treating you like shit. Christian bias, with both. Still, if you follow the guidelines of The Birth Order Companion, you’ll keep your head above the emotional waters & choose a mate based on what makes sense for your personality & habits, which are products of your family, upbringing, and birth order. Or, if you’re really hurting-- the book points out that damaged goods shouldn’t even have a mate.

   Is this sort of discretion possible? It's what is expected of gay people by the semi-tolerant religions. Gay and lesbian religious followers are more often expected to be eunuchs-- by the Franciscan brothers, for example-- than to be in healthy relationships, out of the closet.

  What if all heterosexuals were acknowledged but expected to choose asexuality, save the 'breeding season'? Pretty unreasonable right?

  Love is All You Need? is a short film that really makes you think.