Here’s the scenario:
You are camping out in the wild when you are awakened in the middle of the night by something very large sniffing around your tent flap, growling with hunger.
What to do?
If you’re out in the middle of the African veldt,
you’ve got a lion to deal with.
If you’re in Yellowstone, you’ve got a grizzly bear.
With a lion, you are going to have a confrontation,
because the lion is a carnivore and you are meat.
But…
…with the grizzly you’ve got a chance of distracting him by tossing a can of Pringles out the tent flap. See, the bear is an omnivore, and what he wants is food, the exact kind he ain’t particular about.
So what has this got to do with the story of Sodom?
If the rapists at the door were homosexuals, Lot offering them his daughters would have been as logical as holding a handful of Pringles out to a lion and saying, “Nice kitty.”
Lot knew exactly who he was dealing with; he lived in Sodom, he interacted with them on a daily basis, his daughters were engaged to be married to Sodomites,[1] he had no qualms about going out and talking to the Sodomites face to face.
If the would-be rapists of Sodom were fueled purely by homosexual lust, there was nothing Lot could possibly gain by offering his daughters to them; the rapists simply wouldn’t be interested if their drive was sexual attraction.
But rape is not about sex, it is about power. The rapists of Sodom wanted to wield power over the men under Lot’s roof, to shame and humiliate them, to show them who was boss.[2]
Lot knew these men, both culturally and doubtlessly personally. Clearly he understood them to be either heterosexual oriented or as we would use the term today, bisexual. Again, if satisfaction of sexual desire was the objective, offering women in the place of the men under Lot’s roof would have done the trick.
Think not? Well, apparently the practice of heterosexual male gang rape was not unheard of in that neck of the desert. In Judges 9 thru 11 we’re given the story of The Levite And His Concubine which pretty much parallels the story of Lot and Sodom: Stranger in town gets surrounded by rapacious male citizens, a female substitute is offered.
Unlike the story of Lot in Sodom, in the story of The Levite Etc. the rapists are fellow Israelites from the tribe of Benjamin in the town of Gibeah and they accept the offer of the concubine in question. After being brutalized all night, the woman makes her way back to the place where her husband the Levite was staying and collapses on the doorstep dead, nearly dead, or catatonic from shock.[3]
So were the citizens of Sodom and Gibeah bisexuals driven by lust?
No.
Again, the crime — or in this case the atrocity — of rape is only tangentially related to sexual desire. Rape is a crime of control and power: It is the stronger forcing the weaker to submit to the demands of the rapist.[4] This is why statutory rape is treated as seriously as forcible rape: Certain relationships (adult and child, mentor and pupil, doctor and patient, etc.) by their very nature are not mutual arrangement between equals, and the stronger taking advantage of the weaker through guile or guilt is just as much a rapist as the thug with a knife.
So how common is male-on-male heterosexual rape?
Short answer:
Too common.
It occurs in all settings and situations. Prisons are notorious for rape, but what is most shocking are the number of times it is the guards abusing the prisoners (especially if the guards are military and the prisoners civilians). Male heterosexual assaults occur in barracks, during frat house initiations, in high school locker rooms, at boy scout jamborees, at sleepovers. As noted, it has nothing to do with sex, it has everything to do with power and dominance achieved via fear and shame.
It is misplaced pride and arrogance, a belief one is entitled to have what one wants simply because one wants it and that everyone should kowtow and acknowledge this.
It’s an attitude that really takes root and festers when coupled with cultural privilege.
Ezekiel 16: 47-50 has the prophet laying out God’s case against Sodom:
“’You not only followed their ways and copied their detestable practices, but in all your ways you soon became more depraved than they. As surely as I live,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘your sister Sodom and her daughters never did what you and your daughters have done. Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.’”
Not a lot of concern about proper sexual orientation in there, hmm? Much more about treating others with kindness and compassion, being generous and helpful, and not dominating and terrorizing others.
In fact, in light of scripture it would seem that if any group deserves to be singled out for special contempt because of their orientation, it would be privileged heterosexual males…[5]
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[1] Tho he may have had more than two daughters and the ones in his house were the unmarried ones.
[2] Had Lot himself been subjected to such shame and humiliation? Possibly. In Genesis 14 he and his family were captured by the army of Kedorlaomer and his allies after the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah rebelled, and had to be rescued by Abram. After the successful rescue and recovery of Sodom’s stolen loot, the king of Sodom told Abram to keep the goods but return the people who had been captured. Interesting that they viewed them as chattel to be bartered away, not as individuals with their own right to freedom; more interesting still is that the desire to dominate and rule over people was more important to the king of Sodom than the valuable property that had been stolen.
[3] Then things get really weird. We should hope she was dead before the Levite chopped her up and shipped her body parts off to the other tribes of Israel. Next there follows battles and bloodshed, and God lying to the Israelites, and a massacre (including women and children) of the Benjaminites then another massacre (including women and children) of the slackers who wouldn’t participate in the first massacre, followed by a whole buncha slavery and kidnappings and even more rape. Considering that the story kicks off with the unnamed concubine fleeing her husband / owner and returning to her father for sanctuary and what hubby did next to save his own derriere, I think we can all agree the anonymous Levite must’ve been a real s4!t. His host should have simply booted him into the town square with a tub of butter in his hand; that would have saved thousands of lives in the long run.
[4] This is markedly different where a couple by mutual consent agree to let one partner be the dominant one and the other the passive one in their relationship. For one thing, in such relationships it’s the bottom and not the top that’s in control; the fun stops forever the instant the bottom no longer wants to play.
[5] That’s not necessarily a joke. Christ taught that God would use the seemingly worthless as His cornerstone, and Christ’s own genealogy includes only five females: A fake hooker, a real hooker, the descendant of an incestuous relationship, an adulteress, and a teen mother who had a child that was not her husband’s. Maybe God incarnating Himself in male human form was His way of showing that He could work miracles with the most unpromising material of all.
