Leave it to andygirl to beat me to the punch. 
Esprix
[nitpick]
Esprix,
I’m not sure you want to include ol’ George in yer little list there.
After all, this is the man on record as saying he defines his sexuality by “who he’s with at the moment.” If he’s with a man, he’s gay. With a woman? Hetero. (This is per a video interview I saw with him some time ago, but I don’t remember if it was on E or MTV or where.)
Sounds pretty bi to me…
[/nitpick]
Maybe it’s my low sex drive, but you can all stop saying you’ve never heard of a person who cannot control their sexual orientation. What people need to realize is that it is something that can change. In my first post to this thread, I explained how I used to hate broccoli, but now I like it. What is a physical difference in my taste buds, or a psychological effect of growing up, or was it that I had avoided broccoli for so long that I had forgotten my opinion on the matter? Whatever the reason my vegetable orientation had changed. I never set out on a mission to start liking broccoli, I simply had to come to terms with the fact that I was a broccoli-eater. Now, I could live for a year on water an broccoli alone, and I bet I’d start hating broccoli again. In other words, I could set out on a mission to change my internal desire. Now, as you can see by the absurdity of this example, there is no reason to change it. Technically, you could argue that I cannot change the fact that I like broccoli because it’s just something I’m compelled to like, but I can change it. I have yet to see a logical reason for one to change food preference or sexual orientation, which is why it is not considered normal. What I’m talking about is that it may not be practical or probable, but it is possible.
I think people are all over the spectrum of sexuality. Some are way on the homosexual end, others are on the heterosexual end, and others are in the middle. Why is it so wrong to believe that people can move around on that spectrum. When you were a child, sex was not an issue, then you gradually developed a sex drive, which may taper off as you get old. If your sex drive can vary, why not orientation? I explained in an earlier post that I have had varying traits I look for in a partner and that continues to change. Why couldn’t gender be one of them? Now, if I deliberately worked at it, I could start preferring blondes again (but, again, there’s no practical reason to do so). BTW, proving a point on the message board by making a change in sexual orientation, which would probably take many many years to achieve, does not qualify as practical in my book.
Okay, fair enough. Good for you. But that doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone else, and an overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that it’s not true for most people.
To some extent I agree with the point you’re making. I don’t like playing the “I can’t help but be this way” card, and not because it’s not true, but because it shouldn’t matter one way or the other. But if I need to, I’ll use it, because it is true.
And I do choose to live my life, and I don’t cower like a wimp. But I didn’t choose to be gay.
Dale,
What you are missing is that you are not controlling your orientation by not having sex.
You are attracted to women, correct? (I seem to recall that you’re male…forgive me & reverse terms below if I’m wrong.)
Exclusively? You’re heterosexual, but not currently having sex.
Non-exclusively? You’re bisexual, but not currently having sex.
You aren’t attracted to women at all? You’re homosexual, but not currently having sex.
See my post above. See andygirl’s post above. Try to understand the difference between orientation and behavior. There really is one.
And I for one absolutely loathe broccoli.
George Michael?
Why oh WHY? Couldn’t you choose someone much much cooler, like, Richard the Lionhearted or Greg Louganis? George Michael is a crime against good taste!
Now that I’m at home and can more thoroughly explain my thinking (complete with diagrams…)
Dale:
Your broccoli example appears to have one continuum, so:
>Likes Broccoli ------^-------------------- Hates Broccoli<
Now, I’m guessing you’re about ^here on this chart, and I’m at the other end for sure (can’t stand the stuff).
What you’re forgetting, however, is that there’s a second continuum:
>Eats Broccoli ---------------------------- Refuses Broccoli<
Obviously, you’ve shifted yourself over to the “eats” end of this spectrum; I’m on the other end.
But wait! I can easily (well, not really) shift myself to the Eats Broccoli end without changing whether I like or loathe the stuff! Action vs. orientation.
Similarly:
(Esprix, if you don’t want me to use you in an example again, please tell me so and I won’t)
Orientation:
>Heterosexual -Dale*-------------me------------Esprix–Homosexual<
Behavior:
>Heterosexual ---------------------------------Esprix–Homosexual<
(I’ve left myself off this chart because I just don’t have sex. Ever. Similarly, I’ve left Dale off the chart because I’ve no idea what his practices are in the bedroom.)
Hetero will hereafter be abbreviated OS, homo SS.
Now, say Jeri Ryan shows up naked in Esprix’ bed. (;))
By how I’ve interpreted your thinking, your assumption is that the charts change as follows:
Orientation:
>OS -Esprix/Dale---------------me------------- SS<
Behavior:
>OS -Esprix/Dale------------------------------ SS<
But what really happens is this:
Orientation:
>OS -Dale------------------me---------Esprix-- SS<
Behavior:
>OS -Esprix/Dale------------------------------- SS<
Does this make our arguement clearer, Dale? (I hope so. Otherwise I’m not as clever as I think.)
SisterCoyote, I definitely see your point, but wouldn’t it be possible for a heterosexual like me to have gay sex for ten years and eventually start to like it. Would you say I wasn’t a true homosexual, just because of my past? Just like broccoli, imagine if I start liking something I didn’t like before. So, I’m saying that one could change their orientation, but cannot do it instantly and often not even deliberately. (The only reason you never see someone change their orientation is that there are no good reasons to intentionally do so).
I can’t hate broccoli tomorrow, but I could train my mind to hate it. In other words, if a scientist came up to me and said, “I bet I can make you hate broccoli again,” I’d believe him. I can’t help that I like broccoli right now, and I couldn’t help hating broccoli aferwards, but the change can happen.
You can’t change the way you feel about a loved one until you actually do change, then you can’t change your feelings back. Allow me to illustrate. Consider a girl who swears that her boyfriend is “the one.” She is fully committed to him and promises to never leave him. Then she sees him with another woman, storms out, never speaks to him again and declares that this is not the man for her anymore and that what seemed like “the one” was wrong for her all along. She dumps him and hunts down Mr. Right. She marries Mr. Right and finds out that her ex was really just spending time with a girl he discovered to be a sister he never knew he had, but her little fit of rage changed everything. However, in the meantime, she has developed feelings for her new husband. That devotion in her that was so genuine for him has now shifted and she has a different love. Meaning she has no disrespect for her former love, but she has changed herself, painfully and subconsciously, but it still happened.
FTR, I wonder if anyone really has deliberately changed their orientation throughout history, but I’m arguing that we can change it, but there is no need to change it.
Could Jesus change a person’s sexual orientation? Probably. I mean, he has done many miraculous things with wine and such. However, he has not made me gay yet, so I can only speculate.
You don’t like broccoli? That is so queer. 
Once again, you’re confusing orientation with action.
Gay sex != homosexual, believe it or not, (and the human animal in general does like its pleasures - even when they come from unexpected sources).
I would never presume to dictate someone’s self-label, but what I’d be more inclined to guess is that you were never exclusively heterosexual to begin with, but believed that you were, and then some charming fellow came along and changed your mind - or at least got you thinking outside how you’d previously defined yourself.
I guess the best way to explain my reaction to this as a metaphor for the whole sexual thing is this: I literally cannot eat broccoli, because the taste triggers my gag reflex. The gag reflex could be suppressed, and I then could be able to eat broccoli. That wouldn’t change the fact that I hate the stuff; it would just mean I could be far more polite about someone else serving it to me. I could, at that point, eat broccoli. I might even get to the point where I convinced myself that eating broccoli was more natural for me than not eating broccoli. That wouldn’t change the fact that my natural inclination is to avoid broccoli. Just my behaviour.
But, she wasn’t hardwired to find him “Mr. Right.” Even if she looked at him the very first time and said, “he’s the one for me,” she still was reacting to her expectations of who he was and who she was. Society conditioned her to believe there’s a Mr. Right out there (of course, that’s another debate). People fall in and out of love all the time. Love isn’t genetic (well, okay. Parental love is genetic AFAICT, but love between adults isn’t.)
A better example of orientation vs. action (as far as we know, ignoring for the moment the finer points of the nature/nurture debate, ok?) is the woman who is born with brown eyes. Now, everyone knows ( :rolleyes: ) that a woman with blue eyes is more attractive than a woman with brown eyes. Our hypothetical woman cannot change the color of her eyes; she can add contacts to change them (action), but ultimately her eyes are brown (orientation).
I can think of several people who probably would have liked to, people who went to jail or were otherwise prosecuted for their orientation and their actions. That said, I think other posters are better equipped to handle this question than I; it’s not a subject I’ve particularly researched, to be honest.
I suppose the question is, why would he? Presumably, (hypothetically), he’d be less concerned about the person’s orientation than their actions, you know, the whole “Love thy neighbor as thyself” schtick. After all, who a person is schtupping is hardly the most important thing about them, as observed by other posters earlier in this thread.
Hey, baby, I’m a pastatarian. I don’t eat most vegetables. 
Dale, you really need to go take Psych 101 or something other than pulling stuff out of your butt (to coin a phrase). Your broccoli analogy is spurious (food cravings to core sexual identity? 
), mostly because you’re talking about (and, let’s bold it for good measure), behavior modification.
I might also recommend reading any of the four links in my sig, as they contain further links to, say, peer-reviewed articles and information, for starters. Here, I’ll get you started - here’s what the American Psychological Association has to say about homosexuality. If and/or when you have as much experience as their 40 or so years of research, then maybe you’ll understand the point we’re trying to get across to you.
Esprix
The human mind is so dynamic and adaptive that it changes over time. The process of learning is what this is all about. When a person exercises their memory and keeps learning and understanding more about a subject, the electrical charges in the brain will actually re-route themselves to respond most efficiently. Essentially the person is physically re-wiring themselves (unbeknownst to them) because of an activity they have engaged in over a long period.
Without belittling the issue, what I’m referring to is a much like a Pavlovian response. When dogs salivate at the sound of a ringing bell, they are not hungry for bells of course (:rolleyes: at myself), but they have been conditioned to respond to that stimulus. I think people can be sexually conditioned, but it’s certainly far more intricate and subtle than a little bell.
I have seen my own small variations on the spectrum. Sometimes I consider myself ultra-heterosexual when I see a bunch of men huddling around a TV on Sunday night to take in all the sights and sounds of other men. A gay friend watching wrestlers practice once said “wrestling is so homo-erotic.” I think he had a point. Sports seem to be very male oriented and don’t really appeal to me. Except cheerleading, in which I participated while in college (which made people think I was gay --grabbing women by the ass and holding them over your head is gay??). Then there are times when I can answer the question, “if you were gay, who would you find attractive?” Maybe the reason I think the way I do is because I’m so cavalier about sexual orientation to begin with. I have no need to be “secure” about it Who I am is who I want to be and who I will become is who I want to be as well, regardless of who that is.
Taking a moment to breathe here, I hope no one thinks I’m trying to imply that homosexuality is wrong or even “abnormal.” I’m actually trying to say the opposite. I think it’s a shame that there are still some old timers that find it a little “fruity,” and shun people because of it. Just wanted to make that clear.
Once you’ve tried broccoli with cheese, you never go back!
Yes, I took that class since Psych 101 was a prerequisite for all Psychology majors. Interestingly enough, Behavior Modification was the title of one of my classes as well. The food example was just that, an example. I was trying to align sexual orientation with another physiological/phsychological orientation that we can all relate to and note that it can be changed. Even the cite you gave says:
Notice how environmental and cognitive factors are included. The page even mentions how orientation is shaped at an early age. Last time I checked, things that could be shaped would have to be somewhat pliable. An adult would be far less likely to change orientation than a child since they are pretty much cemented in their ways, but a strong enough influence over a long enough time should certainly have some residual effects and I wouldn’t rule out sexual orientation.
There should be no “therapy” for homosexuals or heterosexuals to “get them to” change their orientation,a s it wouldn’t work anyway. I just want to live in a world where people are free to dance around the sexual orientation spectrum as their lives progress without being told they are not a “true gay” or a “true heterosexual.” And that thought has never been in or near my butt.
I confess - I also used to hate broccoli. I’ve had to fly a lot, and sometimes it came down to a matter of eat the broccoli or the napkin. I discovered that it wasn’t all that bad! Then I realized that I love it in Chinese food, and from there it wasn’t long until I was going out of my way to eat broccoli all by itself whenever possible.
However, I don’t tingle all over when broccoli comes into the room. I don’t want to grow old with broccoli, or pick out matching curtains & dust ruffles with broccoli. No matter how much I like broccoli, it’s still just a vegetable - not a life partner.
I think that the word homosexuality itself is the source of a lot of confusion. It makes it sound as if it’s all about a sex act. It’s not. I had sex with many men and was married to one for seven years before I came out.
I didn’t find sex with men disgusting at all - it just wasn’t any more interesting than masturbation where somebody else keeps interrupting. It also didn’t matter to me if they called the next day, dated other people, or had anything in common with me at all. It truly was just recreational sex. It was easy, fun, and I never got hurt. However, I also knew that something huge was missing.
I just didn’t get what it was that other people got out of sex & relationships that made them go all ga-ga. I figured I must not be doing it right. Maybe if I just had sex on a trampoline with 10 people all at once under a full moon, I would finally feel something.
I don’t think the true test of “choice” would be whether after 10 years you could eventually learn to enjoy sex with someone of the same sex. After all, purely physical stimulation is all the same with your eyes closed. I would believe it’s simply a matter of choice if heterosexuals could learn not to be attracted to members of the opposite sex. Not just by avoiding them, mind you, but by actually being able to have sex with them without any passion or emotional feeling. I don’t think anyone could do this without making themselves completely empty inside.
The problem with saying it’s a choice is that it also justifies people in saying that they have a right to choose to discriminate against people for being gay. If it’s a choice, it naturally follows that everyone should be able to choose to be straight.
I haven’t been in a relationship for two years, but it wouldn’t make me straight if I were celibate the rest of my life. It wouldn’t make me straight if I chose to marry a man & have kids. I don’t just choose to act gay or not act gay, I am gay, every single day of my life. On the other hand, it’s not the sole defining characteristic of who I am. There is much more to me as a person than just being a gay woman.
Pardon me, and Dale, do not take this as an insult, but we have run into what is variously termed “rupture” and “invincible ignorance.”
Dale is clearly finding it nigh onto impossible to distinguish between orientation and behavior. He is far less a condemnatory, judgmental sort of person than the usual person who has this problem, so let go of it.
As I’ve noted in stuff on “ex-gays” (including a few posts up from here), it is probably possible for some people, largely of bisexual orientation, to change one’s phenotypical orientation by intense conditioning over a period of time. The underlying orientation is probably unchangeable, based on the same (inadequate) database.
And the bottom line on it was capably stated by both andygirl and Sister Coyote: Who cares?
It’s my duty to myself to live my life and judge who and what I am by the ideals I hold. It’s not my duty to judge them. And conversely.
(Although it may be my duty to call to judgment those who claim to espouse an objective standard calling for non-judgmentalism, and then proceed to judge. Particularly if they are claiming to speak for my faith in the process.)
[Yoda voice]
They? Who is they? There is no they?
[/Yoda voice]
We are human. We vary in our tastes. I am sure that neither Esprix, Sister Coyote, andygirl or Dale is attracted to precisely the group of people whom I consider attractive, nor any of them to precisely the group attractive to any of the others.
What we’re called to do is honor and support each other’s choices and help each other be most fully the people we’re called to be.
First of all, my broccoli analogy was just to show that a person may not feel like they have any control over what they are compelled to prefer, but that it can change over time. And, perhaps, that change may be brought on deliberately, though certainly not easily. Broccoli is far less significant than sex (most people could go without broccoli the rest of their lives), but if I compare sexual orientation to sexual orientation, there’s no point in the analogy.
I think I have made it quite clear that I am well aware of the blatant differences between orientation and behavior. I merely stated that orientation does not have to be a stagnant, unmoving thing. It can be quite dynamic. In fact, everyone “develops” an orientation as they mature, so they go from basically not identifying with an orientation to having an orientation (which is unique to them, wherever it falls on the spectrum).
I don’t think choices ever justify discrimination, and those who do discriminate are missing the point of freedom. I also think that this philosophy puts us at the mercy of those who discriminate. You can’t trump discrimination with a blanket statement saying “gay people are born that way and have no control over it.” That has become the new knee-jerk reaction. You can trump discrimination by pointing out that it is discrimination, which is an ignorant thing to do regardless of what is a choice and what is not. Your stereotypical redneck in a rusty pick-up may not grasp the intellect of that, but it wouldn’t be the first time. Just look at the vegetarian/non-vegetarian threads about discrimination based on a choice. It happens. The sad thing is that a gay lifestyle is apparently out of my grasp since I am an established heterosexual, because now that it’s “common knowledge” that everyone is born with their orientation, I would only be accused of faking it. Now that, I think, infringes on people’s freedoms. It really makes no difference why a person has the orientation they have, discrimination can never be justified. But that’s still no excuse to tell me that I have an orientation made of cast iron.
Dale, I have very little doubt that tastes do change over time, and that people can influence their own sense of what is appealing.
What seems to be the bone of contention between you and others here is that virtually everyone who has posted has made it clear that a change from a Kinsey-6 homosexual orientation to anything approximating a Kinsey-0 heterosexual one appears to be impossible, or so close to being so as to make no difference*. This is borne out by extensive anecdotal evidence that appears to be universal.
This is why I counseled acceptance of his orientation last year to a board member whose bisexual (about Kinsey 5) orientation caused him to experience desires that were contrary to his religious beliefs. (Poorly summarized precis of an extensive discussion.) Starting from self-acceptance and a sense of self-worth would be the only way in which he could hope to make such a transition, and the fact that it boded statistically likely to be a failure would be devastating to him if he saw his gayness as a flaw in himself.
To clarify the asterisk above, it would be my understanding that virtually every gay person alleges that it is not something he or she chose but something he or she discovered him/herself to be. There are a lot of works out there that describe people’s efforts to change to heterosexuality, many describing extensive therapy programs with hundreds participating. All failed in the long run. There are a handful of claimed successes from ex-gay ministries, but most such cases turn out to be people who “still feel those sinful desires, but praise God, Jesus has given them the strength to overcome them.”
Well, praise God, we all have the strength to live our lives as we choose. And I do not see the need for people who feel same-sex attraction to try to suppress this aspect of their nature. Unless they themselves feel the need to – and not on account of threat of divine wrath or social condemnation, but from interior motivation.
Well said Polycarp. It bothers me when people try to change their orientation out of guilt of fear. I don’t believe that is a genuine motivation. Besides, I don’t see sexual orientation as a biblical issue, only sexual activity/behavior and those laws apply to homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. See? Even God makes no distinction between the orientation of one person to the next.
I’ve been saying all along that a person has to have a good reason to make such a change. Guilt is not a good reason, it’s too forceful and impractical. In fact, don’t ask me to think of a good reason, because I can’t (besides, that would vary from one person to the next anyway).
**Dale The Bold wrote:
I’ve been saying all along that a person has to have a good reason to make such a change.**
Which is fine, but you’re still making the claim that a change is possible, which flies in the face of the evidence and the opinion of experts in the field.
Can you give us a real world demonstration of this change? Esprix, myself and others have asked to demonstrate this to us. If you can’t come up with some reliable evidence for this, then your claim is worthless.
I have yet to find any real evidence of this. Most sites online refer to the issue as unresolved. It seems more theories lean toward orientation being uncontrollable (which is different than changeable), but we need to acknowledge that these remain as theories despite the fact that they have been culturally assimilated as “facts.” At present, it seems appropriate to say that it is unchangeable in order to keep discrimination at bay, but that’s hardly scientific, so the argument remains theoretical.
Many homosexuals, upon realizing or “admitting to themselves” that they are, in fact, homosexual, will say that they never felt like they fit in and that they were somehow “different” from everyone else. I challenge you to find anybody, of any sexual orientation, who hasn’t felt that way.
Once again, I cannot change my orientation for the sake of proving a point. However, everyone who has reached an age where they have a sexual orientation has developed it. Therefore, it went through a phase of growing and changing. It is entirely plausible that a powerful external factor at one developmental stage in your life could have given you leanings to the opposite orientation that you currently have. That being said, who is to say that development ever reaches full completion. Life is a journey full of twists and surprises.
Dale
As with most gay people I know, I’ve always been gay. I didn’t one day wake up and decide I was sexually attracted to men. If there were a switch be thrown, considering what I’ve seen and been through over the last 15 years I’d almost consider throwing the switch the other way. But I can’t. My chemical computer makes me respond sexually to men. I can repress my chemical computer, but that doesn’t change the way my programming works. I will still react the same, but I will forcefully try to override it. This is not “choice”. Choice infers that I have the same reaction to more than one option, in this case that I’m attracted to both men and women. To the very best of my memory, my only interest in women was because that was what was expected of me, that’s what all the other guys were doing.
As far as your ability to control your sexuality, I think someone already pointed out that what you are talking about controlling is whether you have a sexual relationship with another person or not. This is not the same as deciding whether you are attracted to men or women. That has already been decided for you. It’s programmed into your brain. You will most likely not have a reaction to the presence of a naked man, any more than I will have one to the presence of a naked woman. I’m a dancer, I hang around with lots of beautiful women, I’ve seen them in all states of undress, I KNOW what I’m talking about.
If you can make yourself fulfill another mans sexual needs on the flip of a “switch” then I might concede this point to you. But I seriously doubt that you will ever be able to do the things I’ve done to fulfill my men, nor could you maintain a long term relationship for the same.
The only “choice” we have in our “sexuality” is the choice to try to live fulfilling lives with same sex partners, or continue to repress ourselves and hide in false lives of either unfulfilling relationships or forced loneliness.
Last point: if you have to mentally train yourself to do something that most other people attribute to natural order then your mind works differently from theirs. I applaud those people who feel that they have overcome their affliction, but I’m skeptical that they’ve truly achieved this. My test: pass two pictures, one of an attractive nude male and one of an attractive nude female, in front of these people. If you were monitoring their reactions, you’re still going to see different results from those of their “straight” peers. If any of these people pass this test they have extrodinary mental control and could probably do amazing things with their minds…