queerbychoice

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Controversially, Bryson, who has always described herself as bisexual since these Seattle years (except for what she jokingly referred to as her "3-month lesbian separatist period" in the fall of 1994), has been clear in several interviews that she does not consider either heterosexuality or homosexuality to have a genetic basis, but rather considers them to be the result of many social and environmental factors. From a 2002 interview with Rainbow Network: "People often forget that 'gayness' and 'heterosexuality' are new concepts, less than a hundred and fifty years old... 'Straight' and 'gay' and 'bisexual' are all social constructions anyway, but until the world is more comfortable with same-sex desire I'll be calling myself bisexual, as that word comes the closest to describing my own personal make-up."

In another interview from the same time, she said, "I choose to be queer, and I'm proud of my choice. I'm sick of gay people saying 'it's not my fault', like being queer is something to be ashamed of." More radically, she suggested the following: "I truly believe that all people are born with bisexual potential, and I feel strongly that the onus should now be on 'heterosexuals' to come out, as queer people have already done enough hard work questioning sexual mores."

queerbychoice

foucaultonacid

I would say that we can create an attraction or an orientation that is not just temporary - but that in order to do so, we also need to have created an entire system of other beliefs/desires within which the new attraction makes sense. A meaningful, long-term change of orientation can't just be tacked onto the top of a personality without other changes that give the person a reason to desire to be with members of a different gender or other category of people than the person previously desired to be with.

I think that feeling more attracted to a particular gender arises from believing that members of that gender are more likely (at least in our society) to do/feel/be something or other, and that the something or other they are more likely to do/feel/be is important to one's happiness. A person can be either right or wrong about what members of each gender are more likely to do/feel/be, and a person can also be either right or wrong about whether the something or other is really important to their happiness. For a person to choose to change their orientation in a meaningful way, the person would start by questioning these beliefs and looking for reasons to change their mind about these beliefs. If they succeed in finding a good reason to change their beliefs, then they successfully choose to change their orientation.

If they don't succeed in finding a good reason to change their beliefs, then they don't succeed in changing their orientation. However, in a way, this means that they actually choose to keep their existing orientation - because they evaluated the reasons for having each preference, and they made a decision that the reasons for having their existing preference were better reasons.

Of course, the common notion of "free will" demands that there must also a third possibility, which is that theoretically they could choose to change their orientation to one that the preponderance of evidence available to them suggests they should not choose. But I think if we're talking about sane people, this option is going to be so automatically ruled out that it doesn't much count as a choice at all. I think sanity is inherently defined as basing one's choices on evidence whenever evidence is available. If all available evidence suggests to you that being hit by a car would really hurt, and that if you run right in front of the one currently coming at you it will it you, yet you choose to run right in front of it anyway, we call that insane. In exactly the same way, if you see that being in sexual situations with certain people is likely to make you happier than being in sexual situations with certain other people, yet you choose to avoid sexual situations with the first group of people and seek them out with the second group of people anyway, that also would have to mean you're insane.

foucaultonacid

This is exactly why I think the whole idea that sexual orientations are biological (as opposed to being developed in various other ways that you aren't necessarily able to change) increases homophobia. If you accept the idea gayness is biological, then it can be very, very difficult to avoid judging its value in terms of its evolutionary viability, and by that measure, concluding that it probably deserves to be called a "birth defect."

But why should you accept the idea that gayness is biological, just because you haven't been able to change yours? If you see gayness as something that evolved through your interaction with the world, it becomes much easier to say, for example, maybe your gayness is a sign of your greater than average ability to think for yourself, to gravitate toward relationships with people who share more of your experience of life and who can therefore understand you more fully and deeply. It becomes much easier to judge the value of gayness in terms of its social purposes, in terms of furthering the purposes of our lives that we can choose for ourselves, such as making the people we love feel loved and making the world a better place for people of future generations who share that goal, instead of just worrying about making more copies of little bits of DNA.

queerbychoice

I am a devoted female reader of your column. It has always provided me with lots of useful information. I need you to help me with my sister, who is 17. Two days ago a very good friend of hers sent me an email explaining why she (my sister) has been very depressed lately. The cause, according to the friend, is that my sister is lesbian and has broken up with her girlfriend. I was totally shocked to learn this. My sister has always been tomboyish but I didn't imagine she was lesbian. What can I do to help her? Is there no way for her to be straight? Can psychiatric therapy help? Thank you. SHOCKED SISTER

There is a way you can help her, yes, but let's first look at some of the theories and ideas surrounding orientation conversion. A popular pro-gay argument is biology, mostly because it's the most incontestable way of explaining to nosy people with double standards that "it's not our fault, we were born this way." But why shouldn't choice also be a legitimate reason, especially given our obsession with it in so many other circumstances? I feel like I would choose to be queer too, because it works so well for me. I think it's imperative that we start respecting people's choices along with their biology, but also their right to change if they want to try. My guess is that some people can probably change their sexual orientation through willpower or religious conviction, but by that rationale, it would go both ways. In other words, there are probably straight people who could live gay if they really believed it would enhance their lives.

The problem as I see it is, most sexual-orientation conversion methods -- and I've only ever seen ones trying to make gays go straight, no matter what zealots call Pride Day -- are based in fear, particularly of hell, and in self-hate. If I really, really believed in hell and I hated myself for being queer, I'd be working my ass off to dump my girlfriend and find a nice Calvinist boy to settle down with and start using my breasts for something more businesslike than twirling pasties. The real questions become, how much do you hate yourself, and how much would this impact your desire to live a different life? Would you be willing to change your orientation because it was considered by your family and religion to be wrong?

If helping your sister is truly your intent, then how about an open-ended conversation rather than one with such a complicated goal in mind? Your sister's heart is broken not because she's queer, but because she lost a lover.

queerbychoice

davelwhite

Hmm, that's interesting. The heterosexual man, kenadrian, confused about the difference between the various beliefs he listed above, claims interest in diversity. At the same time, he defines being gay as biologically-based, thus erasing the subjectivity of all gay people who may feel either that it is not biologically based for us or that this kind of crappy argument is not necessary because we are human and there is nothing at all immoral about being gay, period, that's all we need to say.

Diversity, Mr. Straight Person, means taking into account ALL of our subjectivity, not just the subjectivity of those gay people whose subjectivity fits into your confused and blurry framework.

So to be clear about the actual real diversity of our experiences and perspectives: Some queer (gay men, lesbian and bi) people feel that we are born this way, others feel it is a choice, others feel it as a combination.

Cut across all of these groups are various perspectives on political strategy: Some feel that it is strategically necessary to defend and justify ourselves by addressing whether we are born this way. Others feel that the "we are born this way" argument is unnecessary, reactionary and has the implicit statement that we are only fully human if we can prove to the heteronornative, heterosexist, homophobic power structure that "we can't help it" (the implication being that we would be straight if we could.)

As for me: I am a lesbian who feels that the "we are born this way" argument is politically ugly and that it's none of heterosexual people's business how any of us are or came to be queer. I could have passed my whole life as heterosexual, but made the choice to NOT DO THAT because it was hurting my soul and my body. I currently live in a household where there is diversity/difference even between my partner and I on our feelings about whether we were "born this way" -- but we are in 100% agreement on the political strategy question and both believe that the pandering and justification of arguing that "we are born this way" supports homophobia in the end.

I guess our actual realities and perspectives and experiences as actual living human lesbians don't fit into the kind of "diversity" that Mr. Hetero Guy kenadrian claims to support.

davelwhite

You know what, maybe this particular study won't turn out to have serious methodological flaws and bad statistical inferences, like all the other ones have turned out to have. But, both the study itself (from what I see in the article anyway) and Alternet's depiction of it avoid any of the obvious, scientific facts that contradict the notion that the gay gene (if it exists at all) is an iron-clad thing that "forces" you to be an out gay person. I will save that evidence for the end, since I have relayed it to Alternet before and it seems to have no effect.

So today, my main question is why, whenever Alternet does a piece on the Gay Gene or gay marriage, they get me and usually bunches of other queer-identified people writing to them telling them that not all of us believe we were born that way, or identify marriage as a goal for us, they just come out again with the same exact article a month later?! And they don't even do that journalistic balance thing, like having a sentence that says "Some queer people dispute this or have other goals." I think I can tell you why, and it isn't pretty: Either the writers at Alternet, or the audience they imagine reading Alternet, views themselves as "progressive" and likes to think of themselves as "supporting gays" but cannot actually deal with the real diversity of the queer community (which, in fairness, often cannot deal with its own diversity very well either). And so they need to not only focus on the normally very fishy (but potentially, in theory, correct) science about the gene, but also the completely bogus notion that if there was a gene we would have no control over what we did about it, we would be forced to come out regardless of our cultural surroundings.

legolastn

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"Do I think I was born this way? No," Swoopes said. "And that's probably confusing to some, because I know a lot of people believe that you are."

Swoopes, who was married and has an 8-year-old son, said her 1999 divorce "wasn't because I'm gay."

She said her reason for coming out now is merely because she wants to be honest.

"It's not something that I want to throw in people's faces. I'm just at a point in my life where I'm tired of having to pretend to be somebody I'm not," the 34-year-old Swoopes said. "I'm tired of having to hide my feelings about the person I care about. About the person I love."

effrenata

freedomofbeing

This community is about conscious self-creation, the freedom to choose one's own identity. Anything pertaining to this topic can be explored here on metaphysical, philosophical, spiritual, artistic, personal, scientific, technological, social, and political levels. What does it mean to have an identity? To construct one's own identity? How does individual identity relate to group identity? What changes can we make in ourselves, and how do these foster changes in society?

From the pro- Self Creation point of view, Freedom of Being is the first and most essential of all freedoms, as well as the ultimate freedom. By changing ourselves, we change the world, one person at a time. The only ideology promoted here is the right of each individual to make that choice for her- or himself.