I will admit that I don’t understand the concept of “born gay”. Up until, oh, about sixth grade, I wasn’t sexually or romantically attracted to anyone, of any gender. I wasn’t heterosexual, I wasn’t homosexual, I wasn’t anything-sexual. When that changed, it still wasn’t a result of any sort of conscious choice, and it sort of happened on its own, but it still had to change.
I understood everything you wrote up until your last sentence. Are you saying that “when that changed,” i.e., when puberty hit, “it sort of happened,” i.e., you did start to feel sexual/romantic attraction to…? But then what does “it still had to change” mean?
If I’m waaay off base, do correct me. I want to understand what you posted.
Even if people aren’t “Born gay” (and I believe genetics pays a huge part in human beings), so what? Who are homosexuals hurting. How is having a consenting adult relationship with someone of the same sex hurting anyone? Unless you believe all gays are mentally ill (and they are not), they are not.
I don’t understand how gay bashers can claim only 1 - 2% of the population is homosexual, and yet be so obsessed about that 1 - 2%.
I think it’s more fundamental than that to be honest. Think about it, up until the moment that any individual publicly acts upon their urges, and/or formally comes out as gay, their entire peer group/family has just assumed that they are straight. Because that’s the norm, and they’ve had no indication, to that point, that it could be otherwise.
So it’s kind of natural to see it as a choice, when they do. Because everyone has already unknowingly taken them for straight. So, to those on the outside, there IS a change there. And it’s easier to see that as a choice, than acknowledge that everyone they assume is straight might not be. That any one of them might, actually be gay!
I think, for a lot of people, who maybe haven’t put a lot/any thought into such things, that’s going to upset their world view. And maybe it’s just easier to see it as this one individual’s choice instead.
My thoughts and opinions:
Some people assume that, if that find the reason for the behavior, they can change it. The whole psychological industry is built on this premise.
However, the only people who do things for one reason are psychopaths and sociopaths, and it’s always the same reason: It makes me feel good. No hope in changing them.
Every other human being does things for more than one reason.
Reciprocally, I did have specific attractions long before sixth grade: I was attracted to girls. And yet nevertheless I was eventually in situations where I had options and also had reasons to think maybe things would work for me better with guys. There is more to sexuality than who you are attracted to. There is also who is attracted TO you. Or attracted enough to make specific and overt overtures of a sexual nature, overtures that make a person feel sexually attractive. For a lot of cultural-social reasons (if not also built-in ones, a matter for which the jury is still somewhat out), girls between the ages of 16 and 20 do not tend to look around, discern on the basis of appearance and personality and behavior who they find appealing, and then go proposition that person anywhere near as much as they react to the people pursuing or propositioning them. I’m kind of girlish myself and was widely thought to be a gay fellow, so I’d paid a great deal of the social penalty cost anyway, so I had fewer reasons than the average male to reject male sexual interest on principle.
On some level it was a choice to let things happen and see if I liked it. And on some level it was also a choice when I concluded “uh uh, this ain’t for me”, because it was still an option if you see what I mean.
There were also feminists who were rather outspoken in the 1970s and 1980s about choosing to pursue sexual-romantic relationships with other women not because they were viscerally erotically attracted to female people but because despite having that kind of attraction to male folks, they found male people to have deplorable attitudes and horrific behaviors, whereas they had both political solidarity and better & more thoughtful treatment personally from women, and again it was an option.
And as Annie-Xmas says:
According to the really religious Christians I’ve spoken to, most gays were molested as children by older gays (shades of Anita Bryant!) and all gays are very unhappy people. Don’t call them gay, and don’t display their gay flag.
It’s the word “choose” that is gumming up the conversation!
A gay person does not choose to be gay. It is a part of the person, like eye color or flat feet.
Acceptance is a whole lot difference than choice. I have had to accept that I’m a dumpy, plain, 66-year-old hetero female. I’m never going to play professional basketball.
Frankly, I’d have a better chance of playing in pro ball than a gay person could “choose” to be straight.
The gay population has been bullied, tortured, ostracized. Far too many cannot conform to society’s expectations. The only solution that seems available is to take their own lives.
That option is reprehensible. And yet there are family members and religious leaders who prefer that “choice.”
Read “And The Band Played On,” by Randy Shiltz. You’ll see how the Reagan Administration essentially bought that POV.
I re-read that book every so often to remind me that complacency is a malignant force.
~VOW
I thought it was the word “choose” that was the subject of the conversation!?
Pardon me, but you seem to be spouting the party line (that sexual orientation is built-in and not a choice) and, in an act of intellectual dishonesty, doing so NOT because you have reason to believe it to be so but because you do not like the observed consequences associated with a belief to the contrary.
As I’ve pointed out before, establishing that a given characteristic is innnate has not proven to be an infallible protection against hateful bias. If that’s your reason for embracing the notion that it’s intrinsic, you should rethink your conclusion and your reason for having reached it. (Racist white folks have treated black folks abysmally bad, and they’re the ones who insist that race is a biologically built-in variable, one that they consider to be a genetic inferiority).
Right THERE, you lost me!
You’re saying sexual orientation IS a choice?
Who in the hell would choose that?
~VOW
BTW, according to the really religious Christians, everyone who is born again is born heterosexual.
I think it’s a shorthand for saying exactly what you said here:
except that in their case, the change was that they liked the same sex rather than the opposite one. Either way, it wasn’t a conscious, reasoned decision, and as a result, they’re making the assumption, not unreasonably IMO, that they were born that way and that it didn’t really manifest until later when such things manifest themselves.
I suspect that there’s a little bit of confusion between someone choosing their inherent sexual orientation (like someone said, it’s like shoe size, or eye color) and choosing to live a specific sort of openly gay lifestyle. The former is wholly outside of someone’s control. For example, I’m straight, and I like big boobs. I didn’t choose that- I just know what looks good to me. But if I had chosen to only date women like that, that’s a choice.
So if a lesbian says “I was born lesbian” then she knows from personal experience what she’s talking about, but if the same lesbian says - again, from her own personal experience - “I chose to be lesbian” then she is an idiot who doesn’t know what she is talking about?
That’s exactly my point, they are gay, but because of self loathing and cultural forces, they cannot admit that about themselves. Every morning, they wake up and white-knuckle being straight and they assume that the rest of us are doing the same: that being straight or gay really is a choice.
Anytime I hear some fundamentalist raging against homosexuality, I assume he’s a self-loathing closet case. It’s not an accident that you are always hearing about ministers, priests and family values Republicans caught having gay affairs: people who are ok with their own sexuality don’t spend that much time worrying about how other people enjoy sex.
a) No, I’m not saying it “is a choice”. That’s a conclusion; I haven’t reached any such conclusion and in fact I think the question itself is oversimplifying. See post #46. Including “who the hell” would choose that. I evaluated it as an option. “It” being the possibility of living my life as a person whose sexual relationships would be with other males. You could argue that that’s not the same thing as “choosing a sexual orientation” but at that point I think you’d have to concede that the question itself is more complicated than it may seem on the surface, and that there are aspects of the situation in which choice is involved.
b) I’m saying furthermore that you appear to me to have chosen your stance on the grounds that, well gee, if it’s not a “choice” then that gives us ammunition we can use in arguments against the homophobic people in the world. Or, to put it another way, you see “choice” as synonymous with homophobes being able to say “we can blame them” or, at least, with “they brought it upon themselves”. What makes your position intellectually dishonest is that you look at that outcome (the utilitarian value of the argument in the hands of homophobes who wish to blame) and then decide what to believe. I don’t think people should choose their “beliefs” on the basis of what those beliefs will or won’t let them go on to argue.
That’s a general and long-standing pet peeve of mine and has nothing to do with sexual orientation per se, by the way.
My personal experience is that there is at least some level of choice, at least in the same manner that one chooses many other preferences and likes and dislikes. It’s not a matter of waking up one day and choosing one’s preferences; it is a matter of slowly building up one’s preferences over a long period of time. When you first tried lima beans, you might have hated them. If you kept eating them, you might’ve grown a taste for them, and eventually decided you really like them. Or, you might continue to hate them despite eating them every day. It’s not clear what forms our preferences for something as banal and mundane as our taste in food; I don’t see it being clear what forms our preferences for something as meaningful in our lives as sexual attraction, either.
I say this being confident that I was straight at one time, I saw nothing attractive about men. Today, my preferences are much broader; I comfortably find many men attractive, while still also finding women attractive. Some people, I’m sure, would tell me that I was ‘always’ this way, and just ‘accepted’ or ‘discovered’ it. I don’t agree; that doesn’t match up to my personal experience, and it would be very difficult for someone to convince me this is the case.
I also hate hanging so much focus on whether or not being gay/straight/bi/etc is a choice. So what if it is? Or what if we develop the technology to just change people’s preferences without much of any fuss or danger or side-effects? At that point, since people have hung so much of the ‘reasoning’ for gay rights on ‘it’s not a choice’, it would give a lot of justification and ammunition to the people who will, at that point, go ‘well now it is, so get fixed!’
As a bisexual, is there one gender that you would be/are more inclined to gravitate towards for relationships or does it come down to individual variables?
While I’d love to be the Supreme Ruler of All, where I would cram my personal beliefs down the throats of all (not really), I concede that my POV is mine. I do not provide fodder for homophobes, or anyone else.
And I really like to think I came by this POV honestly. My parents strove to raise their children in a home where prejudice was kicked to the curb. As I grew older I came to understand that homophobic prejudice was just as ignorant as racial prejudice.
One of the finest Life Lessons my mother taught me is there are more things that can be measured which are simply “none of our business.” I certainly click that box when it comes to a person’s sexual orientation.
I used a word I really don’t care for: prejudice. I don’t like that word because it is used far too often in the following proclamation: “I’m not prejudiced, but…” (nsert eyeroll)
I AM prejudiced. I am prejudiced against trash. You see, my husband and I owned rentals for many years. We’d screen our tenants oh-so-carefully, and eventually most were taken over by alien pod people, and they morphed into trashy beings who literally lived in trash, they destroyed property, stole things, and stopped paying rent. I discovered that trash comes in all colors, too.
Oh, the war stories I could tell!
I will qualify my remarks. The above is 100% my own personal point of view.
~VOW
I tend to think that the original impetus behind the assertion that it is a choice was to place blame. There has been a reaction of asserting that it is not a choice, relying partly on some scientific evidence but mostly, I think, on the “why would anyone choose that?” tactic.
In pretty much any context other than serious scientific research (which should ask the question differently anyway) my answer is that I reject the question. There is nothing wrong with any gender combination as long as it is between consenting adults. If one does not approve of certain combinations, one is free to refrain from participating in them. Other people’s consenting adult relationships should not be anyone else’s concern. That being the case, why would it matter if someone chose to partner with one gender or another, or both, or whether their attractions were entirely innate? What is the purpose of asking the question?
I also kind of can’t stand the “why would anyone choose that?” argument. I am old enough that I had strong incentives (including fear of bodily injury) to not be out. But even then, if someone said, “here is the magic potion that will make you straight,” I would have turned it down. I knew what was wrong was society, not me. And however I got to being queer, choosing to be straight instead would be a big change in who I was, and on at least some level, an agreement that being attracted to the “wrong” gender was not OK. I would not have chosen to be someone else, or to agree that who I was attracted to was wrong.
I think you’re looking at the argument a little bit skewed. It’s intended to point out to the people who have the opinion that everybody’s secretly straight, and that gay people are making a choice to be gay for some reason, that it’s not all sunshine and roses. That it’s a choice that would set the person up for a potential lifetime of adversity, hate, bigotry and harassment. And as such, it’s not a really sensible choice, unless as we know, it’s a matter of who you inherently are. It’s definitely not some kind of path of least resistance, which is often the implication from the “gay is a choice” crowd.