Story here.
While I agree with her that only she can define her own orientation, it does provide ammunition for those who want to limit gay rights. Personally I agree with those who say that she should differenciate between orientation and preference. IOW, her sexual orientation may be bisexual but her preference is for women. However, I am again torn because I still think that only she can define her own orientation.
She says she has been straight and gay, and merely prefers gay. I guess I’m not seeing why this should have any impact at all, one way or the other. It’s like me saying ‘well, I prefer white women to Hispanics’ and using that as a basis for or against mixed race marriages. It means nothing…I just prefer (plump, well curved) white women over Hispanic women (this is merely an example btw…I’m an equal opportunity scrumper, and the only requisites are ‘plump’, ‘well curved’ and ‘women’. I suppose ‘alive’ and ‘somewhere between 30 and 50’ needs to be in there too, for full accuracy :p)
Someone who has had bi-sexual experiences can certainly state a preference without it meaning anything. Or, at least IMHO.
-XT
The danger of such a statement is that many opponents of gay rights insist that it’s just a choice, and gay people should have chosen to be straight. In the majority of cases, this is just nonsense: Most gay people don’t choose to be gay, any more than most straight people choose to be straight. Someone saying that they did, in fact, choose to be gay makes it easier for the bigots to argue that everyone made that choice.
Your post reminds me of one by a poster here who once said in a discussion of black superiority in athletics that once we acknowledge any physical difference between the races it gives ammunition to those who want to claim differences in intelligence as well. My position is that things are what they are and I’m not going to pretend otherwise because someone may pervert the use of that truth for illegitimate purposes. The proper response to claims of black intellectual inferiority is facts and data which empirically prove those claims to be false (well that, or one could simply point them to posts by the black posters here at the Dope :)).
I remember the days too the days when feminists were insisting that apart from the ability to get pregnant there was no difference in the physical capabilities between men and women at all, and anyone who dared to question that ridiculous premise was excoriated as an evil, sexist, chauvinistic pig. It is nonsense like that which gives opponents tbeir best ammunition because such nonsense is easy to refute and its proponents look like loons.
Thus in my opinion Nixon should be free to define herself as she sees fit and believes to be true, and no consideration at all should be given to whether attempts should be made to suppress that truth because of who it may give ammunition to. The correct response is to fight that ammunition with empirical evidence and not by pretending that the truth that gave rise to those false allegations simply does not exist.
On the other hand, I’ve always been uneasy about the search for the “gay gene” that would prove that homosexuality is genetic, and presumably this means that society shouldn’t discriminate against them.
The problem with this is - what if we find out that it’s not genetic? Does that mean that the bigots should be free to oppress them? Hell no - it doesn’t matter whether it’s genetic or not - that’s who they are, and there is zero reason to hold it against them. I’ve never heard of Cynthia Nixon, but whether it’s genetic, environmental, whether it’s a choice or that’s who she is down in her core, it doesn’t give the bigots any ammunition.
Choice has always been a red herring. I choose what to say; speech is still protected.
Those same people ignore the folks who say they DON’T choose to be homosexual. They’re bot looking for truth or evidence, just sound bites and if they don’t get one from Ms. Nixon, they’ll get one from somewhere else.
I’ve know plenty of gays that chose to be straight. Mostly for religious reasons, sometimes for fear they’ll loose their family or job. Usually they’re miserable.
I’ve never known a straight person that chose to be gay. Hummm.
I take it you’re straight? 
As long as these people choose full-out, in-the-life partners and don’t just run off with Sally from book club or Steve from bowling league, what does the community care? They’re embracing it, not diluting it.
I fail to see how any of this changes anything. It doesn’t give anyone “ammunition” for their irrational thoughts, because irrational thoughts have nothing to do with facts . . . including the fact that she claims to be “gay by choice.” People will continue to believe what they choose to believe.
The issue isn’t one person being “gay by choice”; the issue is all the people who are “homophobic by choice.”
Isn’t this just a roundabout way of saying she’s bisexual?
Exactly. This a moral issue not an empirical one, and the empirical fact is that we really do not know why some people are gay and most are straight.
I am old enough to remember when the progressive, anti-bigotry stance on this was that sexuality is (at some deep level) a matter of choice, that deep down we are all polymorphously perverse, and have all equally chosen a sexuality to keep that under control. Thus (so the argument went) society should not discriminate against gays because really we are all the same, and gay people are not some alien ‘other’. In recent decades the rhetoric has flipped around to “gay people are innately that way, they can’t help it, so we shouldn’t blame them or discriminate against them.” It is a simpler argument that has been quite effective (or any more true), and it really is not any more ‘liberatory’" Gay people are at the mercy of their genes apparently. I am also not convinced that it is the safest strategy in the long run. I don’t want to Godwinize here, but it did not do the Jews much good that the Nazis believed their Jewishness was innate. Likewise, if Europeans had not believed that Africans were a fundamentally different type of creature to themselves (that they had somehow just chosen to be born with black skin), they would not have been so quick to enslave them. Racists have always justified themselves by the claim of innate differences. Claiming that your group is innately different from the dominant group, although it may be an effective defense from persecution under some circumstances (in a society where bigotry is under some restraint), is really not a very safe strategy.
The right-wing homophobic rhetoric has flipped the other way: from “gays are fundamentally different from us, and thus and scary and disgusting”, to “gays have made a foolish or wicked choice to be gay and thus can (and should) be cured of it.”
I am not convinced that both sides are not being disingenuous. (These days more than formerly, perhaps. I very much suspect that homophobes really still do feel that gays are fundamentally alien and disgusting. You don’t go around beating people up just because you think they have made unwise life-choices.)
In any case, the question should not be whether gay people are different from non-gay people by choice or by compulsion (the answer to that is we really don’t know, and maybe it is a bit of both), but whether that difference does any objective harm (or a greater harm than would be done by attempting to eliminate that difference) either to society as a whole or to themselves.
So far as I can see, the answer is that the fact that there are a certain percentage of gay people in society does no objective harm whatsoever (what harm there is, is actually done by the people who think that gays, just by existing, do do harm, and those people are certainly potentially reeducatable). Thus there is no reason to treat them any worse than anybody else.
It’s an instance of bisexual erasure.
I don’t think it matters. Clearly people have a choice about which religion they belong to, or which political party they support. Does that mean that we should discriminate against Southern Baptists or against Republicans because they choose that? So, if Cynthia Nixon chooses to be gay, or even if all gays have chosen to be gay, why should we say, “No, you can only choose to be heterosexual”?
Everyone should have the right to choose who they have sex with, and who they marry. The fact that many people, for various reasons, limit their choices based on gender, religion, race, or whatever, does not mean that society or the law should interfere with their choices.
Well stated.
Bisexual what?
Which is exactly the point about ceding the argument; whether homosexuality is a choice or not, how is it that a certain segment of the population has priority to define it as inappropriate based upon a purely subjective morality? Contrarywise, there are many behaviors that clearly compulsive–say, as a random example, Newt Gingrich’s serial philandering–but that we don’t expect that to serve as carte blanche for such behavior.
What is ironic is that the “gay activist” community is just as kneejerk reflexive, and in their own way, conservative (in the sense of drawing absolute boundaries), on the issue as the “ban the gay” crowd; if a prominent homosexual doesn’t toe to their line, they are just as critical and outspoken. Witness the repeated criticism by gay activists of Jodie Foster for not publically vetting her sexual orientation (whatever it is) for the world’s perusal, and instead preferring to keep it as her own private affair.
Stranger
I don’t think it is as much a matter of reflexiveness or conservatism, as it is of engaging in cynical realpolitik and “staying on message”. Certain sectors in the community at least nominally (a) think homosexuality is wrong but (b) think people should be treated justly, and are consequently stymied from disadvantaging gays if they think gays have no choice. Gay campaigners recognise the tactic and try to shape and trim the public discourse accordingly.
After Michael Glatze turned from a gay advocate to an anti-gay advocate, plenty of people came out of the woodwork and accused him of merely “pretending to be gay”.