The Last Testament, Vol. I, Chapter 27 (War Is Meaningless):
After Osho on Abortion.
Interviewer: The earlier pope?
Osho: Yes, he was a bishop in Milan before becoming the pope, and the whole of Milan knew about it because he was continuously going around with a homosexual, a young man.
Interviewer: But that’s purely a sexual preference.
Osho: That’s what I am saying – that it is perversion, not preference.
Interviewer: Osho, You mean a man like you, who believes in free sex, you would object to people exercising a sexual preference?
Osho: No, it is not a preference. Otherwise, soon you will be making love to the camera, making love to the electric pole. And please, don’t disturb my junipers! It is not preference, it is unnatural. This homosexuality is a religious contribution to humanity. It started in the monasteries, where only men were living and no woman was allowed in. It started in the nunneries, where only women were living and no man was allowed. Naturally, man is intelligent enough to find some way.
All the monks have been either masturbators or homosexuals, but in some way they have to do something. You cannot change their biology by just preaching. Their bodies won’t listen to your Bible.
Interviewer: But you were a celibate at twenty-one. Why can’t they be?
Osho: I have never been a celibate.
Interviewer: Your Bible says that.
Osho: I have never been a celibate. If people believe it, that is their foolishness. I have always loved women – and perhaps more women than anybody else. You can see my beard: it has become grey so quickly because I have lived so intensely that I have compressed almost two hundred years into fifty.
Interviewer: Of sexuality?
Osho: Yes. But I am not a homosexual. These people have been talking of celibacy, and creating sexual perversion. And the sexual perversion has led to the disease AIDS, which can kill almost two-thirds of humanity. Who will be responsible for it?
Interviewer: Osho, Where do you draw the line between sexual perversion and sexual experimentation?
Osho: There is no sexual experimentation. Sex is a purely biological thing, absolutely determined by biology. For example, in the wild no animal is homosexual. But in a zoo, if only male animals are there and no female is available, they turn into homosexuals. Your world is a zoo, not a wild place. In a wild jungle, nobody… No animal ever turns into a homosexual.
I disagree. Bonobos are homosexual. Clownfishes change gender.
Interviewer: So would you, like Rousseau, talk in terms of going back to nature, to the wild?
Osho: No. I am not saying back to nature, I am saying forward to nature. Not back – back is not my vocabulary – forward to nature. There are tremendous treasures hidden in nature, which these perverted people have denied humanity enjoying. I am against these people, because what they are saying and what they are doing ultimately results in something like a curse.
All the religions have been preaching celibacy, and nobody has ever bothered whether celibacy is medically possible or not. Even Mahatma Gandhi at the age of seventy was having wet dreams in the night. And you cannot find a more sincere man, trying more sincerely than he tried to be a celibate. For forty years, no success. And do you know, in the end he started sleeping with a naked woman? But Gandhians don’t talk about it.
Gandhians even approached Mahatma Gandhi, asking him, “Please don’t do it.” Vinoba was one of them, Kalelkar was another; Maulana Azad, Kripalani, all asked him, “Please don’t do this ‘experiment’” – in your language. It was not an “experiment”; it was forty years of failure of celibacy.
And all these popes… Just two days ago, a Christian minister was jailed for one and a half years because he was abusing small children. That is experimentation. In the pulpit, in the church, he is talking about celibacy, and inside the church he is abusing small children. One of the fathers filed the case, and he got one and a half years in jail. Now many others have come, because they were afraid to say anything against the religious leader, but now he is in jail, many other children have said that he has been doing the same with them.
But this is not just about one priest I am saying this: all the priests have to do it! We are forcing them to do it. We respect their celibacy, and that respect is a bribe to remain celibate. And their biology does not know about your respectability; their biology has its own laws and it follows its own laws.