Dan Savage's latest column (via) contains what I can only call a tantrum, a Rumplestiltskin-style stamping of his foot in a two-year-old's fury. Which is nothing new, of course, for Savage. But as I read his outburst, I began wondering just why he was so angry.
The occasion of his tantrum was another antigay bigot saying that homosexuality is a "conscious choice." Savage challenged the bigot to prove that homosexuality is a conscious choice by sucking his (that is, Savage's) dick. No doubt the homophobic force behind one man's telling another man to suck his dick made Savage feel ultra-manly, and will allow many of his readers to feel ultra-manly by proxy. (Just as Rush Limbaugh's fans participate vicariously in his obnoxiousness: Yeah, man, what he said! Ditto, ditto, megadittoes.) But aside from that, what's the point?
First, a thought experiment. Suppose, just for the sake of figuring this out, that the bigot accepted Savage's challenge, knelt down before him in front of a large audience and video cameras, and orally received Savage's manhood, even unto completion. Would the bigot thereby become gay? Does having carnal knowledge of a person of the other sex (as many homosexual people have done) turn one into a heterosexual? Of course not: it's a virtual cliche that one homosexual experience doesn't turn you gay, or mean that you're gay -- unless it does, because the fact that you were even willing to try it proves that deep down inside you are really, truly, essentially gay, and wanted it all along. One of the benefits of relying on folklore is that it lets you have things both ways.
Where do you draw the line, though? Think of an actor like Ewan MacGregor, who has often played gay characters, kissing other men and even simulating sexual acts with them very convincingly. Does that mean he's really gay? Secretly gay? He once said in an interview that he found it easier to do sex scenes with men than with women, because there was no sexual tension with men. Whether or not he was telling the truth, this made sense to me, because I could imagine myself in the reverse situation. (Again, folklore comes in here: many people, gay and straight, still assume that anyone who plays a gay character must be gay. But as Lily Tomlin said of playing heterosexuals on one of her comedy records, "You don't have to be one to play one.") What about heterosexual people who've done homosexual sex work -- not just men who allow queers to pay for the privilege of bringing them to orgasm, but men who allow themselves to be penetrated orally or anally for pay?
It seems that some people are able to perform sexual acts with partners who aren't their first choice (oops) without revulsion -- even sometimes with pleasure -- for various reasons. It might be something that most people are able to do, depending on the act, the partner, and the reason. But then consider someone like Andrew Tobias, who wrote a memoir, The Best Little Boy in the World, under a pseudonym in the 1970s. It has been a long time since I read it, but Tobias went on working the same themes, sometimes under his own name, into at least the 90s. As I remember it, Tobias's coming out as a gay man was problematic because of his phobic reaction to intimate contact with other males. "Cowboys don't kiss" was his rationale for not be able to bring himself to kiss another man, and I remember a scene in the book where he tried to make a boyfriend's penis more orally appealing by covering it with syrup. (It didn't work: the gag reflex won out.) This raises all kinds of intriguing questions about what sex is, how people decide what to do sexually and so on, but the point is that just because you find a particular sex act repugnant, it doesn't prove anything about your sexual orientation or its origin.
If Savage's bigot were to accept his challenge, then, what would it prove? The Born-gay theories have always left room for people who engaged in same-sex eroticism only because they were in single-sex environments (boarding schools, prison, ships at sea, the army), distinguishing from those who did so of their (our) own free will, because we were inverts, constitutional homosexuals, whatever the current jargon was. (What is the Homosexual Constitution? Is it the charter of the Gay Agenda?) And I can't help noting that antigay bigots have shown an entertaining tendency to be hiding gay desires and practices. If this bigot were to chow down on Savage's manhood, it could at least be interpreted as a triumph of the gay gene.
I'm not sure, because Savage's fury renders him so incoherent, but I think he meant something like this: If a bigot finds the idea of sucking a cock repugnant, it's because he's right. Sucking a cock is inherently so disgusting that only a mutant could find it (barely) tolerable. This is why gay homosexuals should be regarded with pity, not contempt: because our genes drive us to submit to the disgusting, degrading, emasculating penetration of our bodies by other males. Except, of course, that as Andrew Tobias's experience shows, a good many gay men are just as revolted by the idea of being penetrated as any straight homophobe; and many straight men aren't revolted by it and can do it, even enjoy it, if they have reason to.
Another problem with Savage's diatribe is that he seems to be agreeing that choices are trivial, even whimsical. A good many gay people react to the "choice" line by denying that they just woke up one morning and decided to be gay. No doubt they're telling the truth, but that's not how most choices are made. Choosing a college, choosing a career, getting married, changing one's religion -- people don't wake up one morning and whimsically decide such things out of the blue. If homosexuality were a choice, people would have some kind of reason for choosing it. A challenge from an advice columnist to fellate him isn't a good reason. "If being gay is a choice, choose it," Savage taunted his subject. "Show us how it’s done. Suck my dick." I wouldn't do it, and I'm gay. (Should I claim that my genes forbid me?) If the bigot chose to fellate Savage, it would prove that he's a pervert, but it wouldn't make him gay.
Which brings me to my other big question about Savage's column. Why does the claim that homosexuality is chosen make him, and so many other gay people, so angry? Savage ranted that those who make the claim "would appear to be just another group of deranged conspiracy theorists who can’t be dissuaded by science or evidence or facts." Let him who's without sin cast the first stone, Dan: the born-gay science doesn't hold up, and has been refuted (often by gay scientists) many times. (In fact the whole nurture/nature divide is invalid, but that's another big topic in itself.) "Choice" is not the opposite of "born this way," and science has nothing to say about choice: it can't prove that anything is or is not a choice.
Granted, people do get worked up over differences of opinion and matters of fact, but you can usually find reasons why they're doing it. Many people are offended by evolutionary theory because they think it means they were descended from monkeys, and while I consider them foolish, I understand some of the deep-rooted feelings that such a scenario invokes. Many other people are offended by those who reject evolutionary theory; they seem to take the rejection personally, and while I consider them foolish, I also understand their feelings. And so on.
I suppose Savage would say that he's so enraged because of the destructive consequences of antigay bigotry. But Savage doesn't feel that way about the destructive consequences of US foreign policy in the Middle East, for example: if our support for dictators made many Muslims "irrational" and commit acts of "terror," then the US has an obligation to invade, kill a few (or many) thousands more, and make things right in some vague fashion. Another invasion will make them rational and peaceably inclined towards America, just as 9/11 made Americans rational and peaceably inclined toward Muslims. Or if it doesn't make them peaceably inclined toward America, at least the violence and oppression we visit on them will convince them not to fuck with us, as it did before 9/11. No, rationality is not one of Dan Savage's strong points.
So what's going on in this case? As I've indicated, I suspect that many gay people still feel very bad about being gay, and can only make peace with their bad feelings by thinking of homosexuality as something that was forced on them by their genes, that they can't help, something that they'd reject if they could, and that they would never have chosen. For men especially I believe that this is connected to the stigma of being a faggot, with all its degrading associations.
Savage fastened onto his target's argument to "a radio interviewer that gay people shouldn’t be covered by the [British Columbia] Human Rights Act because being gay is 'a conscious choice.'" Why counter his falsehood with another falsehood (that is, that we didn't choose to be gay, our genes made us do it)? In the first place, no one ever doubted that women and "racial" minorities are born that way, but it didn't shield them from discrimination; the same lousy science that is used to claim that homosexuality is inborn was also used to claim that women and "racial" minorities were incapable of functioning as full citizens. In the second place, why not point out that the BC Human Rights Act also forbids discrimination based on religion, which is surely a conscious choice? To say nothing of marital status, political belief, lawful source of income, criminal or summary convictions, and other conditions that are either chosen or the result of choice. If the law protects someone who consciously chose to become a Christian, why shouldn't it protect someone who chose to become gay?
I think this is a stronger argument. I don't know effective it would be in affecting people's opinions, since bigotry is not based (as some people seem to believe) on mistaken assumptions: the mistaken assumptions are based on the bigotry. But I think it should be tried, if only because it happens to be true.
Showing posts with label born gay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label born gay. Show all posts
The Right to Choose
Dan Savage's latest column (via) contains what I can only call a tantrum, a Rumplestiltskin-style stamping of his foot in a two-year-old's fury. Which is nothing new, of course, for Savage. But as I read his outburst, I began wondering just why he was so angry.
The occasion of his tantrum was another antigay bigot saying that homosexuality is a "conscious choice." Savage challenged the bigot to prove that homosexuality is a conscious choice by sucking his (that is, Savage's) dick. No doubt the homophobic force behind one man's telling another man to suck his dick made Savage feel ultra-manly, and will allow many of his readers to feel ultra-manly by proxy. (Just as Rush Limbaugh's fans participate vicariously in his obnoxiousness: Yeah, man, what he said! Ditto, ditto, megadittoes.) But aside from that, what's the point?
First, a thought experiment. Suppose, just for the sake of figuring this out, that the bigot accepted Savage's challenge, knelt down before him in front of a large audience and video cameras, and orally received Savage's manhood, even unto completion. Would the bigot thereby become gay? Does having carnal knowledge of a person of the other sex (as many homosexual people have done) turn one into a heterosexual? Of course not: it's a virtual cliche that one homosexual experience doesn't turn you gay, or mean that you're gay -- unless it does, because the fact that you were even willing to try it proves that deep down inside you are really, truly, essentially gay, and wanted it all along. One of the benefits of relying on folklore is that it lets you have things both ways.
Where do you draw the line, though? Think of an actor like Ewan MacGregor, who has often played gay characters, kissing other men and even simulating sexual acts with them very convincingly. Does that mean he's really gay? Secretly gay? He once said in an interview that he found it easier to do sex scenes with men than with women, because there was no sexual tension with men. Whether or not he was telling the truth, this made sense to me, because I could imagine myself in the reverse situation. (Again, folklore comes in here: many people, gay and straight, still assume that anyone who plays a gay character must be gay. But as Lily Tomlin said of playing heterosexuals on one of her comedy records, "You don't have to be one to play one.") What about heterosexual people who've done homosexual sex work -- not just men who allow queers to pay for the privilege of bringing them to orgasm, but men who allow themselves to be penetrated orally or anally for pay?
It seems that some people are able to perform sexual acts with partners who aren't their first choice (oops) without revulsion -- even sometimes with pleasure -- for various reasons. It might be something that most people are able to do, depending on the act, the partner, and the reason. But then consider someone like Andrew Tobias, who wrote a memoir, The Best Little Boy in the World, under a pseudonym in the 1970s. It has been a long time since I read it, but Tobias went on working the same themes, sometimes under his own name, into at least the 90s. As I remember it, Tobias's coming out as a gay man was problematic because of his phobic reaction to intimate contact with other males. "Cowboys don't kiss" was his rationale for not be able to bring himself to kiss another man, and I remember a scene in the book where he tried to make a boyfriend's penis more orally appealing by covering it with syrup. (It didn't work: the gag reflex won out.) This raises all kinds of intriguing questions about what sex is, how people decide what to do sexually and so on, but the point is that just because you find a particular sex act repugnant, it doesn't prove anything about your sexual orientation or its origin.
If Savage's bigot were to accept his challenge, then, what would it prove? The Born-gay theories have always left room for people who engaged in same-sex eroticism only because they were in single-sex environments (boarding schools, prison, ships at sea, the army), distinguishing from those who did so of their (our) own free will, because we were inverts, constitutional homosexuals, whatever the current jargon was. (What is the Homosexual Constitution? Is it the charter of the Gay Agenda?) And I can't help noting that antigay bigots have shown an entertaining tendency to be hiding gay desires and practices. If this bigot were to chow down on Savage's manhood, it could at least be interpreted as a triumph of the gay gene.
I'm not sure, because Savage's fury renders him so incoherent, but I think he meant something like this: If a bigot finds the idea of sucking a cock repugnant, it's because he's right. Sucking a cock is inherently so disgusting that only a mutant could find it (barely) tolerable. This is why gay homosexuals should be regarded with pity, not contempt: because our genes drive us to submit to the disgusting, degrading, emasculating penetration of our bodies by other males. Except, of course, that as Andrew Tobias's experience shows, a good many gay men are just as revolted by the idea of being penetrated as any straight homophobe; and many straight men aren't revolted by it and can do it, even enjoy it, if they have reason to.
Another problem with Savage's diatribe is that he seems to be agreeing that choices are trivial, even whimsical. A good many gay people react to the "choice" line by denying that they just woke up one morning and decided to be gay. No doubt they're telling the truth, but that's not how most choices are made. Choosing a college, choosing a career, getting married, changing one's religion -- people don't wake up one morning and whimsically decide such things out of the blue. If homosexuality were a choice, people would have some kind of reason for choosing it. A challenge from an advice columnist to fellate him isn't a good reason. "If being gay is a choice, choose it," Savage taunted his subject. "Show us how it’s done. Suck my dick." I wouldn't do it, and I'm gay. (Should I claim that my genes forbid me?) If the bigot chose to fellate Savage, it would prove that he's a pervert, but it wouldn't make him gay.
Which brings me to my other big question about Savage's column. Why does the claim that homosexuality is chosen make him, and so many other gay people, so angry? Savage ranted that those who make the claim "would appear to be just another group of deranged conspiracy theorists who can’t be dissuaded by science or evidence or facts." Let him who's without sin cast the first stone, Dan: the born-gay science doesn't hold up, and has been refuted (often by gay scientists) many times. (In fact the whole nurture/nature divide is invalid, but that's another big topic in itself.) "Choice" is not the opposite of "born this way," and science has nothing to say about choice: it can't prove that anything is or is not a choice.
Granted, people do get worked up over differences of opinion and matters of fact, but you can usually find reasons why they're doing it. Many people are offended by evolutionary theory because they think it means they were descended from monkeys, and while I consider them foolish, I understand some of the deep-rooted feelings that such a scenario invokes. Many other people are offended by those who reject evolutionary theory; they seem to take the rejection personally, and while I consider them foolish, I also understand their feelings. And so on.
I suppose Savage would say that he's so enraged because of the destructive consequences of antigay bigotry. But Savage doesn't feel that way about the destructive consequences of US foreign policy in the Middle East, for example: if our support for dictators made many Muslims "irrational" and commit acts of "terror," then the US has an obligation to invade, kill a few (or many) thousands more, and make things right in some vague fashion. Another invasion will make them rational and peaceably inclined towards America, just as 9/11 made Americans rational and peaceably inclined toward Muslims. Or if it doesn't make them peaceably inclined toward America, at least the violence and oppression we visit on them will convince them not to fuck with us, as it did before 9/11. No, rationality is not one of Dan Savage's strong points.
So what's going on in this case? As I've indicated, I suspect that many gay people still feel very bad about being gay, and can only make peace with their bad feelings by thinking of homosexuality as something that was forced on them by their genes, that they can't help, something that they'd reject if they could, and that they would never have chosen. For men especially I believe that this is connected to the stigma of being a faggot, with all its degrading associations.
Savage fastened onto his target's argument to "a radio interviewer that gay people shouldn’t be covered by the [British Columbia] Human Rights Act because being gay is 'a conscious choice.'" Why counter his falsehood with another falsehood (that is, that we didn't choose to be gay, our genes made us do it)? In the first place, no one ever doubted that women and "racial" minorities are born that way, but it didn't shield them from discrimination; the same lousy science that is used to claim that homosexuality is inborn was also used to claim that women and "racial" minorities were incapable of functioning as full citizens. In the second place, why not point out that the BC Human Rights Act also forbids discrimination based on religion, which is surely a conscious choice? To say nothing of marital status, political belief, lawful source of income, criminal or summary convictions, and other conditions that are either chosen or the result of choice. If the law protects someone who consciously chose to become a Christian, why shouldn't it protect someone who chose to become gay?
I think this is a stronger argument. I don't know effective it would be in affecting people's opinions, since bigotry is not based (as some people seem to believe) on mistaken assumptions: the mistaken assumptions are based on the bigotry. But I think it should be tried, if only because it happens to be true.
The occasion of his tantrum was another antigay bigot saying that homosexuality is a "conscious choice." Savage challenged the bigot to prove that homosexuality is a conscious choice by sucking his (that is, Savage's) dick. No doubt the homophobic force behind one man's telling another man to suck his dick made Savage feel ultra-manly, and will allow many of his readers to feel ultra-manly by proxy. (Just as Rush Limbaugh's fans participate vicariously in his obnoxiousness: Yeah, man, what he said! Ditto, ditto, megadittoes.) But aside from that, what's the point?
First, a thought experiment. Suppose, just for the sake of figuring this out, that the bigot accepted Savage's challenge, knelt down before him in front of a large audience and video cameras, and orally received Savage's manhood, even unto completion. Would the bigot thereby become gay? Does having carnal knowledge of a person of the other sex (as many homosexual people have done) turn one into a heterosexual? Of course not: it's a virtual cliche that one homosexual experience doesn't turn you gay, or mean that you're gay -- unless it does, because the fact that you were even willing to try it proves that deep down inside you are really, truly, essentially gay, and wanted it all along. One of the benefits of relying on folklore is that it lets you have things both ways.
Where do you draw the line, though? Think of an actor like Ewan MacGregor, who has often played gay characters, kissing other men and even simulating sexual acts with them very convincingly. Does that mean he's really gay? Secretly gay? He once said in an interview that he found it easier to do sex scenes with men than with women, because there was no sexual tension with men. Whether or not he was telling the truth, this made sense to me, because I could imagine myself in the reverse situation. (Again, folklore comes in here: many people, gay and straight, still assume that anyone who plays a gay character must be gay. But as Lily Tomlin said of playing heterosexuals on one of her comedy records, "You don't have to be one to play one.") What about heterosexual people who've done homosexual sex work -- not just men who allow queers to pay for the privilege of bringing them to orgasm, but men who allow themselves to be penetrated orally or anally for pay?
It seems that some people are able to perform sexual acts with partners who aren't their first choice (oops) without revulsion -- even sometimes with pleasure -- for various reasons. It might be something that most people are able to do, depending on the act, the partner, and the reason. But then consider someone like Andrew Tobias, who wrote a memoir, The Best Little Boy in the World, under a pseudonym in the 1970s. It has been a long time since I read it, but Tobias went on working the same themes, sometimes under his own name, into at least the 90s. As I remember it, Tobias's coming out as a gay man was problematic because of his phobic reaction to intimate contact with other males. "Cowboys don't kiss" was his rationale for not be able to bring himself to kiss another man, and I remember a scene in the book where he tried to make a boyfriend's penis more orally appealing by covering it with syrup. (It didn't work: the gag reflex won out.) This raises all kinds of intriguing questions about what sex is, how people decide what to do sexually and so on, but the point is that just because you find a particular sex act repugnant, it doesn't prove anything about your sexual orientation or its origin.
If Savage's bigot were to accept his challenge, then, what would it prove? The Born-gay theories have always left room for people who engaged in same-sex eroticism only because they were in single-sex environments (boarding schools, prison, ships at sea, the army), distinguishing from those who did so of their (our) own free will, because we were inverts, constitutional homosexuals, whatever the current jargon was. (What is the Homosexual Constitution? Is it the charter of the Gay Agenda?) And I can't help noting that antigay bigots have shown an entertaining tendency to be hiding gay desires and practices. If this bigot were to chow down on Savage's manhood, it could at least be interpreted as a triumph of the gay gene.
I'm not sure, because Savage's fury renders him so incoherent, but I think he meant something like this: If a bigot finds the idea of sucking a cock repugnant, it's because he's right. Sucking a cock is inherently so disgusting that only a mutant could find it (barely) tolerable. This is why gay homosexuals should be regarded with pity, not contempt: because our genes drive us to submit to the disgusting, degrading, emasculating penetration of our bodies by other males. Except, of course, that as Andrew Tobias's experience shows, a good many gay men are just as revolted by the idea of being penetrated as any straight homophobe; and many straight men aren't revolted by it and can do it, even enjoy it, if they have reason to.
Another problem with Savage's diatribe is that he seems to be agreeing that choices are trivial, even whimsical. A good many gay people react to the "choice" line by denying that they just woke up one morning and decided to be gay. No doubt they're telling the truth, but that's not how most choices are made. Choosing a college, choosing a career, getting married, changing one's religion -- people don't wake up one morning and whimsically decide such things out of the blue. If homosexuality were a choice, people would have some kind of reason for choosing it. A challenge from an advice columnist to fellate him isn't a good reason. "If being gay is a choice, choose it," Savage taunted his subject. "Show us how it’s done. Suck my dick." I wouldn't do it, and I'm gay. (Should I claim that my genes forbid me?) If the bigot chose to fellate Savage, it would prove that he's a pervert, but it wouldn't make him gay.
Which brings me to my other big question about Savage's column. Why does the claim that homosexuality is chosen make him, and so many other gay people, so angry? Savage ranted that those who make the claim "would appear to be just another group of deranged conspiracy theorists who can’t be dissuaded by science or evidence or facts." Let him who's without sin cast the first stone, Dan: the born-gay science doesn't hold up, and has been refuted (often by gay scientists) many times. (In fact the whole nurture/nature divide is invalid, but that's another big topic in itself.) "Choice" is not the opposite of "born this way," and science has nothing to say about choice: it can't prove that anything is or is not a choice.
Granted, people do get worked up over differences of opinion and matters of fact, but you can usually find reasons why they're doing it. Many people are offended by evolutionary theory because they think it means they were descended from monkeys, and while I consider them foolish, I understand some of the deep-rooted feelings that such a scenario invokes. Many other people are offended by those who reject evolutionary theory; they seem to take the rejection personally, and while I consider them foolish, I also understand their feelings. And so on.
I suppose Savage would say that he's so enraged because of the destructive consequences of antigay bigotry. But Savage doesn't feel that way about the destructive consequences of US foreign policy in the Middle East, for example: if our support for dictators made many Muslims "irrational" and commit acts of "terror," then the US has an obligation to invade, kill a few (or many) thousands more, and make things right in some vague fashion. Another invasion will make them rational and peaceably inclined towards America, just as 9/11 made Americans rational and peaceably inclined toward Muslims. Or if it doesn't make them peaceably inclined toward America, at least the violence and oppression we visit on them will convince them not to fuck with us, as it did before 9/11. No, rationality is not one of Dan Savage's strong points.
So what's going on in this case? As I've indicated, I suspect that many gay people still feel very bad about being gay, and can only make peace with their bad feelings by thinking of homosexuality as something that was forced on them by their genes, that they can't help, something that they'd reject if they could, and that they would never have chosen. For men especially I believe that this is connected to the stigma of being a faggot, with all its degrading associations.
Savage fastened onto his target's argument to "a radio interviewer that gay people shouldn’t be covered by the [British Columbia] Human Rights Act because being gay is 'a conscious choice.'" Why counter his falsehood with another falsehood (that is, that we didn't choose to be gay, our genes made us do it)? In the first place, no one ever doubted that women and "racial" minorities are born that way, but it didn't shield them from discrimination; the same lousy science that is used to claim that homosexuality is inborn was also used to claim that women and "racial" minorities were incapable of functioning as full citizens. In the second place, why not point out that the BC Human Rights Act also forbids discrimination based on religion, which is surely a conscious choice? To say nothing of marital status, political belief, lawful source of income, criminal or summary convictions, and other conditions that are either chosen or the result of choice. If the law protects someone who consciously chose to become a Christian, why shouldn't it protect someone who chose to become gay?
I think this is a stronger argument. I don't know effective it would be in affecting people's opinions, since bigotry is not based (as some people seem to believe) on mistaken assumptions: the mistaken assumptions are based on the bigotry. But I think it should be tried, if only because it happens to be true.
Labels:
born gay,
choice,
dan savage
Majority Rules!
I stumbled on this today while looking for something else. The Advocate ran a review of Edward Stein's The Mismeasure of Desire (Oxford, 1999) in February 2000, and ran two letters commenting on the review a month later. It was the second one that caught my attention. It read:
No amount of introspection can tell you that anything about you is "determined by genetics." That's something that can only be settled by research into genes and what they do. At present, it is pretty clear that homosexuality is not determined by our genes; if there is any genetic influence at all, no one knows what it is. But whatever may eventually be discovered, it won't be settled by opinion polling.
Stein's theory that gay sexual orientation is probably not biologically determined is not supported by most gays. A 1995 poll of Advocate readers revealed that three quarters of the respondents are convinced that their sexual orientation is indeed determined by genetics. Who is Stein to say these lesbians and gay men do not know the reality of their own existence?Three quarters of Americans believe that they are above average, but that doesn't mean they are. According to this site, 69 percent of American men believe that they are physically fit, while only 13 actually are. For that matter, six out of ten Americans reject Darwin's theory of evolution; who am I to say that these people do not know the reality of their own existence? (No monkey ancestors for them!)
No amount of introspection can tell you that anything about you is "determined by genetics." That's something that can only be settled by research into genes and what they do. At present, it is pretty clear that homosexuality is not determined by our genes; if there is any genetic influence at all, no one knows what it is. But whatever may eventually be discovered, it won't be settled by opinion polling.
Labels:
born gay
Majority Rules!
I stumbled on this today while looking for something else. The Advocate ran a review of Edward Stein's The Mismeasure of Desire (Oxford, 1999) in February 2000, and ran two letters commenting on the review a month later. It was the second one that caught my attention. It read:
No amount of introspection can tell you that anything about you is "determined by genetics." That's something that can only be settled by research into genes and what they do. At present, it is pretty clear that homosexuality is not determined by our genes; if there is any genetic influence at all, no one knows what it is. But whatever may eventually be discovered, it won't be settled by opinion polling.
Stein's theory that gay sexual orientation is probably not biologically determined is not supported by most gays. A 1995 poll of Advocate readers revealed that three quarters of the respondents are convinced that their sexual orientation is indeed determined by genetics. Who is Stein to say these lesbians and gay men do not know the reality of their own existence?Three quarters of Americans believe that they are above average, but that doesn't mean they are. According to this site, 69 percent of American men believe that they are physically fit, while only 13 actually are. For that matter, six out of ten Americans reject Darwin's theory of evolution; who am I to say that these people do not know the reality of their own existence? (No monkey ancestors for them!)
No amount of introspection can tell you that anything about you is "determined by genetics." That's something that can only be settled by research into genes and what they do. At present, it is pretty clear that homosexuality is not determined by our genes; if there is any genetic influence at all, no one knows what it is. But whatever may eventually be discovered, it won't be settled by opinion polling.
Labels:
born gay
I Was a Teenage Closet Case
Another good bit from Alan Sinfield's Cultural Politics - Queer Reading on gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay:
LeVay, like many born-gay advocates, thinks that if homosexuality is somehow caused by the environment, if it's an acquired rather than an inborn condition, then it can be reversed by therapy. For born-gay advocates, the failure of change therapy is itself evidence, indeed proof, that homosexuality must be inborn. That doesn't follow either: psychiatry has a very poor track record in most cases. And even religious conversion is notoriously hard to undo, though it's a choice if anything is.
Also assumed is that if we can be changed, we must be changed, partly because who would reject the chance to be normal, to be spared the misery and persecution of gay life? I feel a terrible sadness when gay people talk like this. I don't feel that I'm missing out on anything by not being heterosexual, anymore than I feel I'm missing out by being an atheist. Maybe Homo-Americans don't really believe that desiring their own sex is being stuck with second-best -- which doesn't even make sense, when you think about it, since it would mean that heterosexuality was also settling for second-best. (If men are second-best, then straight women are stuck with second-best, and should turn to other women -- but wait! then they'd be lesbians, and stuck with second-best, just straight men are, so they should turn to other men, but wait!...)
Even when I was a teenage closet case, gulled by heterosexual-supremacist propaganda, I knew that other males were what I wanted; and a crucial turning point in my coming out was the day I realized (admitted to myself?) that if I never got to touch a woman's body intimately, I wouldn't feel I'd missed anything, but if I never got to touch a man, I'd be haunted by the loss forever. The next crucial turning point was when it dawned on me that there was no reason why I shouldn't want to touch a man's body, and why I shouldn't do so if I could find a man who wanted me to touch him. The reason I'm gay is that the beauty of men takes my breath away -- not all men, but many men. Since the "science" of "sexual orientation" doesn't address that fact, which may be just as well (it's actually a mechanical theory of insertors and receptors), it's simply irrelevant.
The drawback is illustrated in an exchange between LeVay and his father -- who is entirely persuaded by his son's work. So how does LeVay senior see gay men now? He says he regards Simon as he would a child born with spina bifida, a hare lip, or some other developmental deficit. LeVay finds this "pretty humiliating" -- though I don't see why he should, since it is a logical consequence of his theory. Indeed, the attraction of stigmatization is depressingly apparent; people with spina bifida may well feel their civil rights are violated when they are appropriated as the awful other by LeVay, senior and junior [70].The exchange between the LeVays comes from a documentary, Born That Way?, which I haven't been able to track down. As Sinfield says, his father's attitude is perfectly reasonable. All that you establish if you prove that homosexuality is inborn is that homosexuals are not morally responsible for our condition: you haven't begun to touch the question of its moral status. And even that is doubtful, since human beings have so often managed to pass moral judgment on inborn conditions. Dark skin, for example, like other "racial" markers, has been read as the visible mark -- the stigma -- of inner wickedness. Most adults, at least, who throw around the word "retarded" as an insult are aware that mental retardation is a congenital condition, not a moral choice, but that knowledge hasn't had any evident effect on the word's popularity among our culturally-sensitive elites. For that matter, the word "sick" itself is commonly used as a moral cussword: just imagine someone spitting it out with ripe disgust.
LeVay, like many born-gay advocates, thinks that if homosexuality is somehow caused by the environment, if it's an acquired rather than an inborn condition, then it can be reversed by therapy. For born-gay advocates, the failure of change therapy is itself evidence, indeed proof, that homosexuality must be inborn. That doesn't follow either: psychiatry has a very poor track record in most cases. And even religious conversion is notoriously hard to undo, though it's a choice if anything is.
Also assumed is that if we can be changed, we must be changed, partly because who would reject the chance to be normal, to be spared the misery and persecution of gay life? I feel a terrible sadness when gay people talk like this. I don't feel that I'm missing out on anything by not being heterosexual, anymore than I feel I'm missing out by being an atheist. Maybe Homo-Americans don't really believe that desiring their own sex is being stuck with second-best -- which doesn't even make sense, when you think about it, since it would mean that heterosexuality was also settling for second-best. (If men are second-best, then straight women are stuck with second-best, and should turn to other women -- but wait! then they'd be lesbians, and stuck with second-best, just straight men are, so they should turn to other men, but wait!...)
Even when I was a teenage closet case, gulled by heterosexual-supremacist propaganda, I knew that other males were what I wanted; and a crucial turning point in my coming out was the day I realized (admitted to myself?) that if I never got to touch a woman's body intimately, I wouldn't feel I'd missed anything, but if I never got to touch a man, I'd be haunted by the loss forever. The next crucial turning point was when it dawned on me that there was no reason why I shouldn't want to touch a man's body, and why I shouldn't do so if I could find a man who wanted me to touch him. The reason I'm gay is that the beauty of men takes my breath away -- not all men, but many men. Since the "science" of "sexual orientation" doesn't address that fact, which may be just as well (it's actually a mechanical theory of insertors and receptors), it's simply irrelevant.
Labels:
alan sinfield,
born gay,
simon levay
I Was a Teenage Closet Case
Another good bit from Alan Sinfield's Cultural Politics - Queer Reading on gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay:
LeVay, like many born-gay advocates, thinks that if homosexuality is somehow caused by the environment, if it's an acquired rather than an inborn condition, then it can be reversed by therapy. For born-gay advocates, the failure of change therapy is itself evidence, indeed proof, that homosexuality must be inborn. That doesn't follow either: psychiatry has a very poor track record in most cases. And even religious conversion is notoriously hard to undo, though it's a choice if anything is.
Also assumed is that if we can be changed, we must be changed, partly because who would reject the chance to be normal, to be spared the misery and persecution of gay life? I feel a terrible sadness when gay people talk like this. I don't feel that I'm missing out on anything by not being heterosexual, anymore than I feel I'm missing out by being an atheist. Maybe Homo-Americans don't really believe that desiring their own sex is being stuck with second-best -- which doesn't even make sense, when you think about it, since it would mean that heterosexuality was also settling for second-best. (If men are second-best, then straight women are stuck with second-best, and should turn to other women -- but wait! then they'd be lesbians, and stuck with second-best, just straight men are, so they should turn to other men, but wait!...)
Even when I was a teenage closet case, gulled by heterosexual-supremacist propaganda, I knew that other males were what I wanted; and a crucial turning point in my coming out was the day I realized (admitted to myself?) that if I never got to touch a woman's body intimately, I wouldn't feel I'd missed anything, but if I never got to touch a man, I'd be haunted by the loss forever. The next crucial turning point was when it dawned on me that there was no reason why I shouldn't want to touch a man's body, and why I shouldn't do so if I could find a man who wanted me to touch him. The reason I'm gay is that the beauty of men takes my breath away -- not all men, but many men. Since the "science" of "sexual orientation" doesn't address that fact, which may be just as well (it's actually a mechanical theory of insertors and receptors), it's simply irrelevant.
The drawback is illustrated in an exchange between LeVay and his father -- who is entirely persuaded by his son's work. So how does LeVay senior see gay men now? He says he regards Simon as he would a child born with spina bifida, a hare lip, or some other developmental deficit. LeVay finds this "pretty humiliating" -- though I don't see why he should, since it is a logical consequence of his theory. Indeed, the attraction of stigmatization is depressingly apparent; people with spina bifida may well feel their civil rights are violated when they are appropriated as the awful other by LeVay, senior and junior [70].The exchange between the LeVays comes from a documentary, Born That Way?, which I haven't been able to track down. As Sinfield says, his father's attitude is perfectly reasonable. All that you establish if you prove that homosexuality is inborn is that homosexuals are not morally responsible for our condition: you haven't begun to touch the question of its moral status. And even that is doubtful, since human beings have so often managed to pass moral judgment on inborn conditions. Dark skin, for example, like other "racial" markers, has been read as the visible mark -- the stigma -- of inner wickedness. Most adults, at least, who throw around the word "retarded" as an insult are aware that mental retardation is a congenital condition, not a moral choice, but that knowledge hasn't had any evident effect on the word's popularity among our culturally-sensitive elites. For that matter, the word "sick" itself is commonly used as a moral cussword: just imagine someone spitting it out with ripe disgust.
LeVay, like many born-gay advocates, thinks that if homosexuality is somehow caused by the environment, if it's an acquired rather than an inborn condition, then it can be reversed by therapy. For born-gay advocates, the failure of change therapy is itself evidence, indeed proof, that homosexuality must be inborn. That doesn't follow either: psychiatry has a very poor track record in most cases. And even religious conversion is notoriously hard to undo, though it's a choice if anything is.
Also assumed is that if we can be changed, we must be changed, partly because who would reject the chance to be normal, to be spared the misery and persecution of gay life? I feel a terrible sadness when gay people talk like this. I don't feel that I'm missing out on anything by not being heterosexual, anymore than I feel I'm missing out by being an atheist. Maybe Homo-Americans don't really believe that desiring their own sex is being stuck with second-best -- which doesn't even make sense, when you think about it, since it would mean that heterosexuality was also settling for second-best. (If men are second-best, then straight women are stuck with second-best, and should turn to other women -- but wait! then they'd be lesbians, and stuck with second-best, just straight men are, so they should turn to other men, but wait!...)
Even when I was a teenage closet case, gulled by heterosexual-supremacist propaganda, I knew that other males were what I wanted; and a crucial turning point in my coming out was the day I realized (admitted to myself?) that if I never got to touch a woman's body intimately, I wouldn't feel I'd missed anything, but if I never got to touch a man, I'd be haunted by the loss forever. The next crucial turning point was when it dawned on me that there was no reason why I shouldn't want to touch a man's body, and why I shouldn't do so if I could find a man who wanted me to touch him. The reason I'm gay is that the beauty of men takes my breath away -- not all men, but many men. Since the "science" of "sexual orientation" doesn't address that fact, which may be just as well (it's actually a mechanical theory of insertors and receptors), it's simply irrelevant.
Labels:
alan sinfield,
born gay,
simon levay
I Don't Know How You Were Inverted
But back to Thomas Serwatka's Queer Questions, Clear Answers, as I promised. I read it all the way through, though I admit to skimming at times. I had to keep reminding myself that although most of what Serwatka writes is familiar to me, it won't be familiar to some (most?) of his other readers, who may not have read a book on this subject before. But that makes Serwatka's errors and misrepresentations all the more harmful.
As you'd expect in a book like this, Serwatka devotes quite a bit of space to the question of cause: why are some people drawn erotically to persons of their own sex, and others not? It's a very popular question among both straights and gays nowadays, and it might be worth mentioning that it wasn't always. During the 1970s, in the circles I moved in, it wasn't on our radar. The dominant theory at the time was the psychiatric absent-father / dominant mother theory of the neo-Freudians, and I already knew that it was largely discredited even before the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was not (no longer?) a disorder. (They didn't address the question of cause, however.) Alfred Kinsey was the scientific figure who loomed large for us then, and he hadn't concerned himself with causes.
Still, we weren't the only homosexuals in the world, and what didn't matter to us mattered to others. It must have been during my first year at IU, working in a branch university library, that I found a clipping that quoted a gay or pro-gay minister to the effect that homosexuals are born homosexual. That startled me, because I knew about the 19th century third-sex theories about the (male) homosexual as the soul of a woman in the body of a man, but I thought that those theories had also been discredited. The clipping was brief and didn't point to any support for the claim. Still, that was the last I heard of the "born-this-way" theory for several years. It made its big comeback in the 1990s, with the work of Simon LeVay, Dean Hamer, and Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard. I associate it with the Gay Rights Movement (as opposed to Gay Liberation) and the gay churches, where it's a pillar of their position, though there are plenty of apolitical and non-religious gays who agree with it. As Serwatka's exposition shows, it's also associated with the professional / therapeutic wing of gay male life.
Serwatka sums up the controversy as follows, in terms of a "summer flick":
There is a band of nomadic queer theorists ("you can't oppress me through your manmade heterosexist labels") shooting flaming arrows at the Brotherhood of Gay Essentialist [sic] (the "it's biology" group), while a clan of lesbian deconstructionists ("I will not be confined by society's expectations; I am free to create new categories") are hurling spears everywhere, tragically and unintentionally wounding a butch dyke ("I am what I am"). To make the battle even more chaotic, we add in bands of marauding conservative Jews, Christians, and Muslims ("It's a sin against Yahweh or the Trinity or Allah") railing against each other and everyone else on the field, including the moderately religious who are praying for peace and consensus as well as everyone's soul [34].I've already mentioned Serwatka's "hearty, preacher's chalk-talk style," and I bet you can guess which group represents Serwatka in this scenario!* Not to belabor an already overdone caricature, the queer theorists I'm aware of are not "nomadic" but well-ensconced in the Master's House (Queer Theory arose in the academy); the Brotherhood of Gay Essentialists works in university counseling departments as well as freelancing as therapists, and plays in the Radical Faerie movement (a reminder that Essentialists can be assimilationist and anti-assimilationist). The same is true of lesbians: surely some "butch dykes" are also deconstructionists. And of course no conservative Jew would ever pronounce the name of Yahweh, and I've never heard any Christian call homosexuality a sin against the Trinity. Someone got a little carried away with his rhetoric here, and things never get much better.
Instead of traveling the earth looking for pages from an ancient text, our scientists are studying ancient and contemporary civilizations, using technologies to decipher parts of the human genome, and employing a host of research models to discover the secrets of our origins written into the earth's past and into our cells. And their hard work is yielding results, albeit still preliminary results. And all of this is going on while we are subjected to a cacophony of differing voices, each vying to win the public relations war over how sexual orientation should be viewed and "handled" in the culture [34-5].That's right, those results are "preliminary," but they are publicized as if they were final, and many gay people point to them as though they had settled the question for once and all, and only irrational anti-scientific Christians could reject them. (It seems to me that a prudent gay movement wouldn't want to hitch its wagon to merely "preliminary" results that might be demolished later -- and, in fact, have been.) As I pointed at the end of my previous post on this book, the gay and lesbian scientists who have criticized the born-gay research are absent from Serwatka's tale. They do so, not because they are nomadic queer theorists, but because they are scientists criticizing other scientists' flawed work. But acknowledging that would complicate the simple good guys / bad guys story Serwatka wants to tell.
It's easier for Serwatka to focus on another group:
In the 1990s, queer theorists told us that there were no homosexuals; at least there were none until we labeled them as such in the 1890s. Strongly influenced by philosopher Michel Foucault, lesbian feminism, and the social constructionist movement, queer theory proposed that before we created the label there were no homosexuals; all we had were people who engaged in different forms of same-sex behaviors. In some societies these behaviors were condemned and punished; in some societies these behaviors were accepted and even honored. But in both sets of socities, the actions didn't define the person. People weren't divided into homosexuals and heterosexuals or into homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals. They were just people who did or did not engage in specific behaviors [49-50].Now, I have my own disagreements with queer theorists and social constructionists (is "movement" the right word for them, though?) and many of them get things as wrong as Serwatka does: in general, their tendency to treat Foucault's writings as a kind of scripture, to be harvested for prooftexts rather than as a goad to further thought of their own; their confusion of terminology with the reality to which it refers; their misuse of the social constructionist model to draw invidious distinctions between the present and the past, or between "The West" and other cultures; or confusing social construction with cultural determinism, the belief that human beings are blank slates on which their culture writes. In particular, I should point out that social constructionism has nothing to say about the cause question. No one, as far as I know, doubts that the anatomical signs of "race" (skin color, eye color, hair texture, etc.) have biological roots, but there is a large literature on the social construction of race. In the US, for example, a white woman can give birth to a black child, but a black woman can't give birth to a white one; but in other countries it can be the other way around. So even if it were proven -- and it hasn't been -- that homosexuality is genetically determined, that would not prove that it isn't socially constructed.
What bothered me first about Serwatka's discussion is that he kept using the term "sexual orientation" as if he knew what a sexual orientation is, and especially as if he knew that it is some kind of biological mechanism in our body that directs us to male or female erotic partners. This is just what no one knows. "Orientation" doesn't necessarily imply an inherent, unchangeable state; the compass-point orientation of a building, though it can be difficult to change after it is completed, is a choice, decided by its planners. The orientation of a parked car can be changed much more easily, as can my own spatial orientation as I write this. I wasn't born facing north, but even if I was, that doesn't doom me to face north forever, and I have faced in many different directions during my lifetime. It's true, when people speak of "sexual orientation" they're not thinking of such examples, but they're usually assuming what they need to prove: that "sexual orientation" is inborn and unchangeable. I've encountered numerous people who argue the point in circles: it's an orientation because it's inborn, and we know it's inborn because it's an orientation, and orientations are inborn ... I think that's what Thomas Serwatka is doing, though he may not be aware of it.
Still, Serwatka knows he needs some evidence, so he points to the past two decades' worth of research on the origin of sexual orientation. Numerous scientists and other critics, some of them gay or lesbian, have pointed to the flaws in this research, which has led to severe qualification of the born-gay advocates' claims, though they usually revert to certainty as soon as the critics have left the room. From triumphant cries of "We now know we're born gay!" they had to retreat to, "Well, at least we know there's a genetic predisposition to be gay," and Serwatka's own grudging "Is lifelong homosexuality biological? Yes, at least in part. How much of the biology is genetics and how much is hormonal is still to be determined, but there is definitely a genetic component, and most likely, both play a role" (65).
(Those interested in the question should look at Anne Fausto-Sterling's Myths of Gender [Harper, 1992]; Edward Stein's The Mismeasure of Desire [Oxford, 1999]; Roger Lancaster's The Trouble with Nature [California, 2003]; and now Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Difference [Harvard, 2010]. Evelyn Fox Keller's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture [Duke, 2010] does a good job of showing what is wrong with the whole nature vs. nurture debate; it's a short book though admittedly fairly technical. But if I could get through all these, surely my readers can!)
But even Serwatka's even-handed conclusion is wrong. The fact that he declines to consider scientific (as opposed to queer-theoretical) objections to the research he describes doesn't help. He likes the research on "finger-length ratio" so much, for example, that he gives it a text box of its own:
One of the physical traits that has been linked to difference in sexual orientation among women is finger-length ratio for the index (D2) and ring (D4) fingers. When D2 and D4 are similar in length, it is more likely that a woman will be heterosexual, whereas homosexual women's index fingers tend to be shorter than their ring fingers, as are men's. Studying this phenomenon, Lynn Hall and Craig Love ... found that when monozygotic twins were discordant for sexual orientation, the heterosexual and the homosexual twin would have different finger-length ratios, with the heterosexual sister having little to no difference in the length of the two fingers, their finger-length ratios were also concordant [60].Serwatka couldn't have read Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's new book Brain Storm, which has just been published, but she surveys research that he could have examined:
There have been seven studies comparing 2D:4D in gay and straight men, and the findings are all over the map. Three studies find higher (feminized) ratios in gay men ..., but two other studies found gay men to have lower (hypermasculinized) ratios ... and two found no difference in digit ratios between gay and straight men. ... Among women, two studies have found lesbians to have "masculinized" digit ratios ... , but one small study ... and the two largest studies ... found no difference compared with heterosexual women. Only one study has reported a link between 2D:4D and gender identity, and this found a "feminized" pattern in male-to-female transsexuals, but no difference between female-to-male transsexuals and other genetic females. ... In sum, if there is any link between digit ratio and sexual orientation or gender identity, it appears to be very small, and to be limited to (genetic) men. The evidence is similarly mixed for other indicators [101; italics in original].To be fair, Jordan-Young doesn't discuss Hall and Love's study (though she cites a 2000 paper by Hall elsewhere), but judging by the rest of the research, it probably doesn't matter because the link between sexual orientation and finger length is so tenuous. Serwatka also declares that Simon LeVay's claims about homosexuality and the brain have been supported by "Animal studies comparing rams who displayed same-sex and opposite-sex attraction [!] found similar patterns in hypothalamic development in heterosexual and homosexual rams" (61). That's intriguing, but it's a big jump from rams to human beings. (What is a "homosexual ram," anyway? Does he adore Lady Gaga?)
But all of this really misses the point. As I've pointed out before, the contemporary research on the origins of sexual orientation is not about sexual orientation (or even sexual behavior) at all, but about gendered behavior and roles. It is based on the assumption that there is really only one "sexual orientation," namely heterosexuality. What seems to be a homosexual man is really a man with a little woman hidden in his brain, who is attracted to people with little men hidden in their brains. This is shown by the way these researchers jump to the conclusion, without any evidence, that "feminization" of males, either through brain fibers or hormones, equals male homosexuality; but they don't even ask who is having sex with those feminized males.
There is a great deal of folklore among gay men and lesbians which makes the same assumption: many gay men around the world are repulsed by the idea of having sex with other gay men, and liken the very idea to "lesbianism" or even "cannibalism." And who knows? They might be right. The point is that if they are right, then the educated and supposedly science-informed discourse about sexual orientation is wrong. Sexual orientation is not, as the American Psychological Association defines it,
... an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).Nope; sexual orientation is really the desire some men have to stick their rear ends in the faces of other men, in hopes of being mounted by them; or the desire some women have to mount other women. Far from being "easily distinguished from other components of sexuality", in reality it is inseparable from them. In which case the whole public-relations project of the mainstream gay movement to distance us from "stereotypical" (that is, gender-nonconformist) queers who present themselves as the opposite sex is radically misconceived: we should rather embrace our inner drag queens/kings. At the very least, the mainstream gay movement will have to grapple with this problem a lot better than it has up till now.
The question of the cause of sexual orientation is a red herring, though, that has distracted gay people and our movement for too long now. Especially since, given the current state of the research, we cannot honestly claim that we were born gay. In the first place, it is false that there's an opposition between "biology" and "choice." As I've pointed out before, contemporary science and much philosophy take the position that there is no such thing as choice in human beings, but this leads to hopeless contradictions. Leaning on biological determinism not only deprives gay people of our choices, but our opponents as well: they are hostile to us, not because they are wicked, but because it's in their nature. And that leaves us nowhere.
Even if there were much better evidence that homosexuality was caused by our genes, it wouldn't settle the dispute we're engaged in. Inborn conditions aren't necessarily good: we don't think that people born with genetic conditions like sickle-cell anemia should be left to suffer because Mother Nature made them that way and She doesn't make trash. Genetic determinism has been used (and still is) to deny the humanity and limit the options of people with differing skin color, or differing reproductive organs. The Civil Rights movement didn't argue that it was wrong to discriminate against the Negro because Negritude was in his genes; nor did the women's movement take such a line. Nor did the US Supreme Court overturn state laws against "interracial" marriage in 1967 because Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving suffered from (or boasted) a genetic condition that forced them to marry someone of a different race -- it affirmed that people have the right to choose their partners.
We need to start challenging our opponents about it: If being gay is a choice, so what? But many gay people don't want to, because they believe they can only defend their sexual orientation if it's something they are stuck with, despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I once asked another speaker on a GLB panel what he would do if it were proven, scientifically and unquestionably, that he had chosen to be gay. He thought for a moment, then said that in that case, some psychiatrist would make a lot of money helping him undo that choice. I was stunned, not least because earlier he had been talking about how he'd helped younger gay kids come out and feel good about being gay; yet he himself clearly felt quite bad about it. He was also wrong in assuming that all choices can be reversed. This doesn't mean he is a bad person; it does show how deeply miserable and wrong many of us have been made to feel about ourselves, our desires, and our loves. "Would someone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated, persecuted, and called a sinner?" -- it's amazing how many of us and our allies think that rhetorical question constitutes a defense. It's not. It's almost an altar call, the kind of cry one makes just before throwing one's sinful self into the arms of the Lord. And I'd be the last person to tell such gay people that they're wrong to hate themselves and to despise and dishonor their loves, but their attitude is not a great foundation on which to build a movement.
I haven't worked out myself how best to realize a position of proud choice for the gay movement. It would need to be done gradually, in response to the way our enemies try to exploit it. But it would start with the declaration that if homosexuality is a choice, so is heterosexuality, so is Christianity (whether pro- or antigay), and a fortiori being antigay is a choice. And go from there.
More on Queer Questions, Clear Answers later.
*You peeked. Serwatka is presumably one of "the moderately religious who are praying for peace and consensus as well as everyone's soul." Evidently those "moderately religious" are working through the state universities to further their theological agenda.
Labels:
biological determinism,
born gay,
thomas serwatka
I Don't Know How You Were Inverted
But back to Thomas Serwatka's Queer Questions, Clear Answers, as I promised. I read it all the way through, though I admit to skimming at times. I had to keep reminding myself that although most of what Serwatka writes is familiar to me, it won't be familiar to some (most?) of his other readers, who may not have read a book on this subject before. But that makes Serwatka's errors and misrepresentations all the more harmful.
As you'd expect in a book like this, Serwatka devotes quite a bit of space to the question of cause: why are some people drawn erotically to persons of their own sex, and others not? It's a very popular question among both straights and gays nowadays, and it might be worth mentioning that it wasn't always. During the 1970s, in the circles I moved in, it wasn't on our radar. The dominant theory at the time was the psychiatric absent-father / dominant mother theory of the neo-Freudians, and I already knew that it was largely discredited even before the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was not (no longer?) a disorder. (They didn't address the question of cause, however.) Alfred Kinsey was the scientific figure who loomed large for us then, and he hadn't concerned himself with causes.
Still, we weren't the only homosexuals in the world, and what didn't matter to us mattered to others. It must have been during my first year at IU, working in a branch university library, that I found a clipping that quoted a gay or pro-gay minister to the effect that homosexuals are born homosexual. That startled me, because I knew about the 19th century third-sex theories about the (male) homosexual as the soul of a woman in the body of a man, but I thought that those theories had also been discredited. The clipping was brief and didn't point to any support for the claim. Still, that was the last I heard of the "born-this-way" theory for several years. It made its big comeback in the 1990s, with the work of Simon LeVay, Dean Hamer, and Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard. I associate it with the Gay Rights Movement (as opposed to Gay Liberation) and the gay churches, where it's a pillar of their position, though there are plenty of apolitical and non-religious gays who agree with it. As Serwatka's exposition shows, it's also associated with the professional / therapeutic wing of gay male life.
Serwatka sums up the controversy as follows, in terms of a "summer flick":
There is a band of nomadic queer theorists ("you can't oppress me through your manmade heterosexist labels") shooting flaming arrows at the Brotherhood of Gay Essentialist [sic] (the "it's biology" group), while a clan of lesbian deconstructionists ("I will not be confined by society's expectations; I am free to create new categories") are hurling spears everywhere, tragically and unintentionally wounding a butch dyke ("I am what I am"). To make the battle even more chaotic, we add in bands of marauding conservative Jews, Christians, and Muslims ("It's a sin against Yahweh or the Trinity or Allah") railing against each other and everyone else on the field, including the moderately religious who are praying for peace and consensus as well as everyone's soul [34].I've already mentioned Serwatka's "hearty, preacher's chalk-talk style," and I bet you can guess which group represents Serwatka in this scenario!* Not to belabor an already overdone caricature, the queer theorists I'm aware of are not "nomadic" but well-ensconced in the Master's House (Queer Theory arose in the academy); the Brotherhood of Gay Essentialists works in university counseling departments as well as freelancing as therapists, and plays in the Radical Faerie movement (a reminder that Essentialists can be assimilationist and anti-assimilationist). The same is true of lesbians: surely some "butch dykes" are also deconstructionists. And of course no conservative Jew would ever pronounce the name of Yahweh, and I've never heard any Christian call homosexuality a sin against the Trinity. Someone got a little carried away with his rhetoric here, and things never get much better.
Instead of traveling the earth looking for pages from an ancient text, our scientists are studying ancient and contemporary civilizations, using technologies to decipher parts of the human genome, and employing a host of research models to discover the secrets of our origins written into the earth's past and into our cells. And their hard work is yielding results, albeit still preliminary results. And all of this is going on while we are subjected to a cacophony of differing voices, each vying to win the public relations war over how sexual orientation should be viewed and "handled" in the culture [34-5].That's right, those results are "preliminary," but they are publicized as if they were final, and many gay people point to them as though they had settled the question for once and all, and only irrational anti-scientific Christians could reject them. (It seems to me that a prudent gay movement wouldn't want to hitch its wagon to merely "preliminary" results that might be demolished later -- and, in fact, have been.) As I pointed at the end of my previous post on this book, the gay and lesbian scientists who have criticized the born-gay research are absent from Serwatka's tale. They do so, not because they are nomadic queer theorists, but because they are scientists criticizing other scientists' flawed work. But acknowledging that would complicate the simple good guys / bad guys story Serwatka wants to tell.
It's easier for Serwatka to focus on another group:
In the 1990s, queer theorists told us that there were no homosexuals; at least there were none until we labeled them as such in the 1890s. Strongly influenced by philosopher Michel Foucault, lesbian feminism, and the social constructionist movement, queer theory proposed that before we created the label there were no homosexuals; all we had were people who engaged in different forms of same-sex behaviors. In some societies these behaviors were condemned and punished; in some societies these behaviors were accepted and even honored. But in both sets of socities, the actions didn't define the person. People weren't divided into homosexuals and heterosexuals or into homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals. They were just people who did or did not engage in specific behaviors [49-50].Now, I have my own disagreements with queer theorists and social constructionists (is "movement" the right word for them, though?) and many of them get things as wrong as Serwatka does: in general, their tendency to treat Foucault's writings as a kind of scripture, to be harvested for prooftexts rather than as a goad to further thought of their own; their confusion of terminology with the reality to which it refers; their misuse of the social constructionist model to draw invidious distinctions between the present and the past, or between "The West" and other cultures; or confusing social construction with cultural determinism, the belief that human beings are blank slates on which their culture writes. In particular, I should point out that social constructionism has nothing to say about the cause question. No one, as far as I know, doubts that the anatomical signs of "race" (skin color, eye color, hair texture, etc.) have biological roots, but there is a large literature on the social construction of race. In the US, for example, a white woman can give birth to a black child, but a black woman can't give birth to a white one; but in other countries it can be the other way around. So even if it were proven -- and it hasn't been -- that homosexuality is genetically determined, that would not prove that it isn't socially constructed.
What bothered me first about Serwatka's discussion is that he kept using the term "sexual orientation" as if he knew what a sexual orientation is, and especially as if he knew that it is some kind of biological mechanism in our body that directs us to male or female erotic partners. This is just what no one knows. "Orientation" doesn't necessarily imply an inherent, unchangeable state; the compass-point orientation of a building, though it can be difficult to change after it is completed, is a choice, decided by its planners. The orientation of a parked car can be changed much more easily, as can my own spatial orientation as I write this. I wasn't born facing north, but even if I was, that doesn't doom me to face north forever, and I have faced in many different directions during my lifetime. It's true, when people speak of "sexual orientation" they're not thinking of such examples, but they're usually assuming what they need to prove: that "sexual orientation" is inborn and unchangeable. I've encountered numerous people who argue the point in circles: it's an orientation because it's inborn, and we know it's inborn because it's an orientation, and orientations are inborn ... I think that's what Thomas Serwatka is doing, though he may not be aware of it.
Still, Serwatka knows he needs some evidence, so he points to the past two decades' worth of research on the origin of sexual orientation. Numerous scientists and other critics, some of them gay or lesbian, have pointed to the flaws in this research, which has led to severe qualification of the born-gay advocates' claims, though they usually revert to certainty as soon as the critics have left the room. From triumphant cries of "We now know we're born gay!" they had to retreat to, "Well, at least we know there's a genetic predisposition to be gay," and Serwatka's own grudging "Is lifelong homosexuality biological? Yes, at least in part. How much of the biology is genetics and how much is hormonal is still to be determined, but there is definitely a genetic component, and most likely, both play a role" (65).
(Those interested in the question should look at Anne Fausto-Sterling's Myths of Gender [Harper, 1992]; Edward Stein's The Mismeasure of Desire [Oxford, 1999]; Roger Lancaster's The Trouble with Nature [California, 2003]; and now Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Difference [Harvard, 2010]. Evelyn Fox Keller's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture [Duke, 2010] does a good job of showing what is wrong with the whole nature vs. nurture debate; it's a short book though admittedly fairly technical. But if I could get through all these, surely my readers can!)
But even Serwatka's even-handed conclusion is wrong. The fact that he declines to consider scientific (as opposed to queer-theoretical) objections to the research he describes doesn't help. He likes the research on "finger-length ratio" so much, for example, that he gives it a text box of its own:
One of the physical traits that has been linked to difference in sexual orientation among women is finger-length ratio for the index (D2) and ring (D4) fingers. When D2 and D4 are similar in length, it is more likely that a woman will be heterosexual, whereas homosexual women's index fingers tend to be shorter than their ring fingers, as are men's. Studying this phenomenon, Lynn Hall and Craig Love ... found that when monozygotic twins were discordant for sexual orientation, the heterosexual and the homosexual twin would have different finger-length ratios, with the heterosexual sister having little to no difference in the length of the two fingers, their finger-length ratios were also concordant [60].Serwatka couldn't have read Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's new book Brain Storm, which has just been published, but she surveys research that he could have examined:
There have been seven studies comparing 2D:4D in gay and straight men, and the findings are all over the map. Three studies find higher (feminized) ratios in gay men ..., but two other studies found gay men to have lower (hypermasculinized) ratios ... and two found no difference in digit ratios between gay and straight men. ... Among women, two studies have found lesbians to have "masculinized" digit ratios ... , but one small study ... and the two largest studies ... found no difference compared with heterosexual women. Only one study has reported a link between 2D:4D and gender identity, and this found a "feminized" pattern in male-to-female transsexuals, but no difference between female-to-male transsexuals and other genetic females. ... In sum, if there is any link between digit ratio and sexual orientation or gender identity, it appears to be very small, and to be limited to (genetic) men. The evidence is similarly mixed for other indicators [101; italics in original].To be fair, Jordan-Young doesn't discuss Hall and Love's study (though she cites a 2000 paper by Hall elsewhere), but judging by the rest of the research, it probably doesn't matter because the link between sexual orientation and finger length is so tenuous. Serwatka also declares that Simon LeVay's claims about homosexuality and the brain have been supported by "Animal studies comparing rams who displayed same-sex and opposite-sex attraction [!] found similar patterns in hypothalamic development in heterosexual and homosexual rams" (61). That's intriguing, but it's a big jump from rams to human beings. (What is a "homosexual ram," anyway? Does he adore Lady Gaga?)
But all of this really misses the point. As I've pointed out before, the contemporary research on the origins of sexual orientation is not about sexual orientation (or even sexual behavior) at all, but about gendered behavior and roles. It is based on the assumption that there is really only one "sexual orientation," namely heterosexuality. What seems to be a homosexual man is really a man with a little woman hidden in his brain, who is attracted to people with little men hidden in their brains. This is shown by the way these researchers jump to the conclusion, without any evidence, that "feminization" of males, either through brain fibers or hormones, equals male homosexuality; but they don't even ask who is having sex with those feminized males.
There is a great deal of folklore among gay men and lesbians which makes the same assumption: many gay men around the world are repulsed by the idea of having sex with other gay men, and liken the very idea to "lesbianism" or even "cannibalism." And who knows? They might be right. The point is that if they are right, then the educated and supposedly science-informed discourse about sexual orientation is wrong. Sexual orientation is not, as the American Psychological Association defines it,
... an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).Nope; sexual orientation is really the desire some men have to stick their rear ends in the faces of other men, in hopes of being mounted by them; or the desire some women have to mount other women. Far from being "easily distinguished from other components of sexuality", in reality it is inseparable from them. In which case the whole public-relations project of the mainstream gay movement to distance us from "stereotypical" (that is, gender-nonconformist) queers who present themselves as the opposite sex is radically misconceived: we should rather embrace our inner drag queens/kings. At the very least, the mainstream gay movement will have to grapple with this problem a lot better than it has up till now.
The question of the cause of sexual orientation is a red herring, though, that has distracted gay people and our movement for too long now. Especially since, given the current state of the research, we cannot honestly claim that we were born gay. In the first place, it is false that there's an opposition between "biology" and "choice." As I've pointed out before, contemporary science and much philosophy take the position that there is no such thing as choice in human beings, but this leads to hopeless contradictions. Leaning on biological determinism not only deprives gay people of our choices, but our opponents as well: they are hostile to us, not because they are wicked, but because it's in their nature. And that leaves us nowhere.
Even if there were much better evidence that homosexuality was caused by our genes, it wouldn't settle the dispute we're engaged in. Inborn conditions aren't necessarily good: we don't think that people born with genetic conditions like sickle-cell anemia should be left to suffer because Mother Nature made them that way and She doesn't make trash. Genetic determinism has been used (and still is) to deny the humanity and limit the options of people with differing skin color, or differing reproductive organs. The Civil Rights movement didn't argue that it was wrong to discriminate against the Negro because Negritude was in his genes; nor did the women's movement take such a line. Nor did the US Supreme Court overturn state laws against "interracial" marriage in 1967 because Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving suffered from (or boasted) a genetic condition that forced them to marry someone of a different race -- it affirmed that people have the right to choose their partners.
We need to start challenging our opponents about it: If being gay is a choice, so what? But many gay people don't want to, because they believe they can only defend their sexual orientation if it's something they are stuck with, despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I once asked another speaker on a GLB panel what he would do if it were proven, scientifically and unquestionably, that he had chosen to be gay. He thought for a moment, then said that in that case, some psychiatrist would make a lot of money helping him undo that choice. I was stunned, not least because earlier he had been talking about how he'd helped younger gay kids come out and feel good about being gay; yet he himself clearly felt quite bad about it. He was also wrong in assuming that all choices can be reversed. This doesn't mean he is a bad person; it does show how deeply miserable and wrong many of us have been made to feel about ourselves, our desires, and our loves. "Would someone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated, persecuted, and called a sinner?" -- it's amazing how many of us and our allies think that rhetorical question constitutes a defense. It's not. It's almost an altar call, the kind of cry one makes just before throwing one's sinful self into the arms of the Lord. And I'd be the last person to tell such gay people that they're wrong to hate themselves and to despise and dishonor their loves, but their attitude is not a great foundation on which to build a movement.
I haven't worked out myself how best to realize a position of proud choice for the gay movement. It would need to be done gradually, in response to the way our enemies try to exploit it. But it would start with the declaration that if homosexuality is a choice, so is heterosexuality, so is Christianity (whether pro- or antigay), and a fortiori being antigay is a choice. And go from there.
More on Queer Questions, Clear Answers later.
*You peeked. Serwatka is presumably one of "the moderately religious who are praying for peace and consensus as well as everyone's soul." Evidently those "moderately religious" are working through the state universities to further their theological agenda.
Labels:
biological determinism,
born gay,
thomas serwatka
Choose Life
While working on a long and difficult post about the gay-teen-suicide issue, I found this passage from Jennifer Terry's book An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago, 1999, pp. 393-4).
Gay scientists and some gay leaders argue that homosexuality is an immutable characteristic, which they liken to race or skin color. Thus the reasoning follows that homosexuals, like African Americans, ought to be protected from discrimination. In the first place this way of thinking ignores the scientific consensus that clear-cut or mutually exclusive racial differences do not exist at the genetic or biological level; race, it is agreed, is primarily a social or demographic concept that at best describes cultural groups with arbitrary and varying boundaries. But in a larger political sense, the use of race as an analogy to sexual orientation relies on a strange and limited reading of the civil rights movement as well as of the current status of racial minorities. The civil rights movement, after all, focused its anti-racism efforts on grassroots actions, public marches, demonstrations, and the courts. The main goal was equality and respect for all people, regardless of race, religion, or creed; arguments valorizing the biological immutability of race were by no means central. The civil rights movement was most effective through championing social diversity and promoting humane respect for cultural differences, not by African Americans beseeching those in authority to see them as biologically different. In the 1960s, biological arguments about race had long been seen as the handmaidens of racism, just as those about gender were identified to be a central part of the architecture of sexism.Those gay people who think that proving or claiming that we are born this way and can't help ourselves, whimper whimper, will win over bigots, are forgetting that no one doubted that black people are born that way, but that didn't deter racism in the slightest. The same goes for women, as Terry indicates. It says something about how little most people think through important matters that "not a choice" has become the mantra of the gay movement today.
Labels:
born gay,
not a choice
Choose Life
While working on a long and difficult post about the gay-teen-suicide issue, I found this passage from Jennifer Terry's book An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago, 1999, pp. 393-4).
Gay scientists and some gay leaders argue that homosexuality is an immutable characteristic, which they liken to race or skin color. Thus the reasoning follows that homosexuals, like African Americans, ought to be protected from discrimination. In the first place this way of thinking ignores the scientific consensus that clear-cut or mutually exclusive racial differences do not exist at the genetic or biological level; race, it is agreed, is primarily a social or demographic concept that at best describes cultural groups with arbitrary and varying boundaries. But in a larger political sense, the use of race as an analogy to sexual orientation relies on a strange and limited reading of the civil rights movement as well as of the current status of racial minorities. The civil rights movement, after all, focused its anti-racism efforts on grassroots actions, public marches, demonstrations, and the courts. The main goal was equality and respect for all people, regardless of race, religion, or creed; arguments valorizing the biological immutability of race were by no means central. The civil rights movement was most effective through championing social diversity and promoting humane respect for cultural differences, not by African Americans beseeching those in authority to see them as biologically different. In the 1960s, biological arguments about race had long been seen as the handmaidens of racism, just as those about gender were identified to be a central part of the architecture of sexism.Those gay people who think that proving or claiming that we are born this way and can't help ourselves, whimper whimper, will win over bigots, are forgetting that no one doubted that black people are born that way, but that didn't deter racism in the slightest. The same goes for women, as Terry indicates. It says something about how little most people think through important matters that "not a choice" has become the mantra of the gay movement today.
Labels:
born gay,
not a choice
Sexual Orientation And Its Discontents
A couple of months ago I wrote here that there might be “a flaw in the concept of ‘sexual orientation’ that needs to be thought about some more.” The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that my gentle suggestion was a riot of understatement.
I’ve been critical for a long time of what is called “sexual orientation research.” Some years ago I was invited to review a book called Gay Science (Columbia, 1999) by Timothy F. Murphy, a Professor of Philosophy in the Biomedical Sciences, Department of Medical Education, University of Illinois College of Medicine at
This is the kind of scientific fundamentalism that makes me want to issue mischievous satirical calls against science, but not just now. What I want to point out now is that there is not, as far as I can tell, any research actually being done on the causes of “sexual orientation.” As the American Psychological Association explains it,
Sexual orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).
But all of the current research on “sexual orientation” that I’m aware of is actually about biological sex and gender identity. I’d go so far as to say that it was meant to eliminate the concept of sexual orientation altogether, if it weren’t so obvious that the scientists involved are completely unaware of the distinction: they simply assume that “sexual orientation” equals biological sex. This can be seen in the infamous research of the gay neurologist Simon LeVay, who found that gay men have the hypothalamus of a woman in the body of a man. (I almost wrote “straight woman” there, but LeVay evidently assumed heterosexuality as the baseline.) Since LeVay’s research was published, to great publicity, other studies have purported to find that lesbians have masculine ring fingers, that gay men and straight women respond similarly to male body odor, and so on. Michael Bailey, the even more controversial professor of psychology at
Which brings me to Marc Breedlove, also a participant in the CBS News report. Breedlove, a psychologist and neuroscientist at
explained that male rats, including one he showed [Leslie] Stahl called “Romeo,” will mount any rat that comes their way. In the mating process, the female performs something called lordosis, where she lifts her head and rump.
If Romeo goes after a male, Dr. Breedlove says the male will seem profoundly indifferent.
But Breedlove says he can change all that. He gave a female rat a single shot of the male sex hormone testosterone at birth. Now grown up, she will never perform lordosis.
But a male rat did. He was castrated at birth, depriving him of testosterone.
"So you created a gay rat?" Stahl asked.
"I wouldn't say that these are gay rats. But I will say that these are genetic male rats who are showing much more feminine behavior," he explained.
It’s big of Professor Breedlove to point out that his lordotic rats are not gay. But a few other things need to be pointed out. One is that none of this is new. Researchers have been playing around with rats’ hormone levels since at least the 1930s. That work was summarized and discussed as long ago as 1951, when Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach published Patterns of Sexual Behavior (Harper & Brothers). (There’s a good recent account of this in Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body [Basic Books, 2000], especially Chapter 8, “The Rodent’s Tale.”)
But the underlying notion of receptive males as female-like is even older. In his book Roman Homosexualities (
The other man asked what principle it was that had brought tribads and soft men into being. The old man explained, “That same Prometheus, the creator of the pottery race that is broken as soon as it comes up against its fate, had spent a whole day fashioning the private parts that modesty hides under clothes, making them separately so that he could later attach them to the appropriate bodies. After receiving an unexpected invitation to dinner from the wine-god Liber, and having flooded his veins with a good deal of nectar, he stumbled home late at night and in a drunken stupor attached the maiden's organ to the male sex and male organs to women. And so it is that lust now enjoys its depraved pleasure.”
For some reason Williams (who’s evidently as confused as his scientific counterparts) comments that “Phaedrus’ soft males … were mistakenly given a pseudo-vagina by Prometheus.” In the fable, they were given a real vagina, and the anus (which both males and females have) is not a “pseudo-vagina.” The hormonal theory of sexual receptivity in males is basically just an updated version of Phaedrus’ fable.
Lordosis is not part of the human behavioral repertoire anyhow: excited human females do not try to shove their rumps into the faces of males with whom they want to copulate. (Imagine what a pop concert would look like if this were the case.) Nor do gay men. Yet pushers of “sexual orientation research” keep bringing it up, probably because it’s visually striking and fits the stereotype of gay men as feminized.
A more important point is that this behavior has nothing to do with “sexual orientation,” if that term refers to a pattern of sexual desire for persons of one sex or the other. Feminized male rats will permit mounting by females or other males, and “normal” male rats, as Breedlove says, “will mount any rat that comes their way” regardless of its sex.
In an article published in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1997, neuroanatomist and psychiatrist William S. Byne pointed out (page 75) that
In the paradigm of the neuroendocrine laboratory, the male rat that shows lordosis when mounted by another male is considered the homosexual. But it is important to note that lordosis is little more than a reflex, and that the male that displays lordosis when mounted by another male will also display the posture if its back is stroked by a researcher. We cannot infer much about the sexual motivation of the male that exhibits this posture. Ironically, however, the animal that does display sexual motivation – the male that mounts another male [Breedlove’s “Romeo”, for instance] – escapes scientific scrutiny and labeling as does the female that displays lordosis when mounted by another female.
Suppose, though, that it were proven that some human males had been exposed to “female” hormones, causing them to want to be penetrated by other men. These would be the men explained by the research of LeVay, Breedlove, Bailey, and others. But what about the men who have sex with these receptive men, particularly men who prefer to penetrate men instead of women? Contemporary researchers not only can’t explain them, they don’t even seem to be aware that they exist. According to their model, there are no homosexuals or heterosexuals, just tops (penetrators, assumed to be male) and bottoms (the penetrated, presumed to be female). “Straight” men should know that they can penetrate as many men as they wish without becoming gay – they only need to be alert to any emergent desire to present their bottoms to anyone, male or female. But woe betide any penetrator who feels those stirrings in his rear end – he may have a “predisposition” to be gay. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee wrote in The DNA Mystique (Freeman, 1995, page 136),
A claim about predisposition after the fact … has the rhetorical advantage of being both unfalsifiable and irrefutable. No experiment could disprove the existence of such a predisposition, for the outcome of “proof” of its own cause. By employing this sort of circular argument, genetic predisposition can be invoked to explain any behavior ….These researchers have often been criticized for making assumptions about the sexual orientations of their subjects, but what can they do? There is no way to measure “sexual orientation.” Some of the researchers have fallen back on inviting their subjects to rate themselves on the Kinsey scale, which is like classifying subjects’ intelligence by asking them to guess their IQs. Some administer a version of Kinsey’s sexual history interview (which is interesting, considering how often I’ve heard that Kinsey’s protocol is obsolete and no one nowadays knows how to take a history by his method). But a sexual history is not a “sexual orientation.” LeVay, whose subjects were all dead, assumed that any male whose records said he had contracted AIDS through sexual contact must be homosexual, and that any male whose records showed that he had contracted AIDS through drug use must be heterosexual. Again, it’s hard to say what else he could have done, but it doesn’t speak well for “sexual orientation research” that such work passed peer review.
So there you have it: “sexual orientation research” is not about sexual orientation at all, but about one’s role in sexual activity. These researchers have a revealingly crude and mechanistic conception of human sexuality that reduces males to plugs and females to jacks. Their work has no bearing on the love and desire for people of their own sex that many gay people confidently claim they were born with – about that we’re as ignorant as ever. Strangest of all to me is that the GLBTQ+π supporters of this research, who in my experience are desperately insistent that we are “normal” except for what we do in bed, and are eager to appease bigots by condemning gender nonconformity among gay people, have bought into a scientific model which asserts that we are essentially and by nature gender non-conformists. A gay man in drag, a lesbian with cigar and tuxedo, are according to the LeVays and Baileys simply acting as Nature wants them to. But not to worry. The internal contradictions of the scientific model ensure that it’s unlikely to go anywhere.
Labels:
born gay,
innies and outies,
tops and bottoms
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