Let’s consign the “gay is a choice” debate to the dustbin of irrelevance
“Being gay is a choice”. This line of argument continues to be a hobby horse for conservatives, and for people opposed to queer liberation. For conservatives, such an viewpoint is greatly appealing. It seems to offer a way of disaggragating the stuggle for gay equality from earlier struggles for civil rights, and offers a rationale for differentiating sexual equality from far more universally accepted principles of racial equality.
It is perhaps unsurprising then that the ‘inherent’ nature of homosexuality has become and an important point of argument for quite a few progressives and gay rights activists in Britain and America. The was somewhat reflected in the furious reactions to what Pink News called “accusations from Governor Sarah Palin that sexual orientation is a choice”. My emphasis.
Yet I for one am comfortable taking an agnostic position on the issue. For one thing ‘individual choice’ and ‘inherentness’ are both clunky concepts which are of limited use in illuminating social and sexual activity. Secondly, and with this in mind, I really do not feel I have the expertise to explain the complexities of sexual orientation. Yet most importantly I refuse to accept that the question of whether homosexuality is a choice is of any political relevance.
The struggle for gay rights is not simply about making sure that people are not disadvantaged by an accident of birth. To engage so uncritically in the ‘gay is a choice’ debate detracts from the real issues of liberation, pluralism and freedom from persecution. If, like me, you believe that people have an a priori right to deviate from those cultural and sexual mores, and that defending such rights is politically important, then ‘nature versus nurture’ really doesnt matter. To assert people are ‘just born like that’ takes us back to the bad old days of appealing for tolerance and forebearance.
Reader Comments
The Nazis thought gay people were born like that – it didn’t make them very tolerant though. “I didn’t choose to be like this” doesn’t wash as a defence against bigotry.
At the end of the day I agree with you. Do we ask the nature nurture question of tossers? Priests? cowards? Comedians? No, even though we could, because why would we bother, it makes no difference – same with homosexuality…
However, I would say that you don’t need a great range of expertise to know that different societies don’t just have different “rates” of homosexuality they have very different understandings, if any, of the very concept.
The category itself is a socially constructed one, but when people like Palin talk of ‘choice’ they basically mean that gay people are doing it to be annoying and should just pull themselves together.
True about Palin, the idea that homosexuality is a choice is used to imply that “our young peeople are at risk.” At risk of what exactly I can never make out but the implications are clear.
The socially constructed aspect of it is very difficult to approach too. Most people just assume that the past is much like the present and that their sexuality is normal in that context. Not only that, but people tend to believe that the terms in which they define their sexuality are universal in the same way.
For example I saw a recent article on India and gay rights in The Graun. The writer couldn’t acknowledge the existence of a third sex, the hijra. It didn’t fit into the hetero/homosexual wo/man binary system which is so accepted in the modern world.