An interesting discussion.
First point to be made is that everyone is a unique individual, with personal tastes based on heredity, environment, interests, and so on. So every statement that begins “every … is …” is false on its face, and true only to the extent that it accurately describes a stereotype based more-or-less accurately on the “average” individual who belongs to the category.
That said, you are far more likely to find someone interested in discussing Jeff Gordon’s driving skills at a NASCAR track than a gay bar; conversely, in discussing whether he has a sexy body at a gay bar than a NASCAR track. Stereotypes and categories exist because they do provide useful generalizations.
Now, having gotten that far, let’s examine the OP. The question is asked whether “being gay is ever a choice.” By way of example, the question of whether any Lesbians choose to be so, based on women who come out after ostensibly happy marriages, is set before us.
Now, gay men share with Lesbians the characteristic of being sexually attracted to the same sex, and the status of being in a minority orientation which is sometimes severely condemned or persecuted. However, it is one of those useful true stereotypes that men and women are different. They operate with differing levels of various hormones, follow different bodily cycles, are culturally differentiated from birth, and so on. No element of this may be true for some particular individual, and I don’t want it to seem to be a stupid sexist remark, but there is validity to it as a generalization. How many of you have noted that a male poster is far more likely to take umbrage with an abstract assertion than a female, with the interesting exception that lady lawyers, with both initial interest and training in a field where polemic argumentation is the norm, will react in a ‘male’ manner. (One of those classic cases of “exceptio regulam probat,” as Cecil would say.)
So let’s examine this. Most out gay men and Lesbians will tell you that their sexual orientation is not a choice, that they felt “different” from age X, when they first noticed the idea that “one is supposed to feel thus and so, and I don’t” on.
In same-sex friendship bonds, women tend to be much more emotive, demonstrative in their feelings, than do men. Faced with a friend’s encountering a traumatic emotional shock, women (as a stereotype) are inclined to embrace, comfort, and encourage the traumatized friend to cry it out and talk it out, while men, no less willing to help, will take the friend to a bar and buy him a beer and listen to him talk through it, take him aside and pray with him, or whatever works in that friendship that does not place (non-sexual) physical intimacy on the line. Again as a stereotype, (straight) men are fearful of showing intimate feelings for another man – this may be true for some gay men as well.
Now we enter into the question of individuality. Hastur asserted in the marathon game of Rook in the Pit that “nobody is exclusively straight or gay.” Though I’d disagree as a nit-pick, I take his main point: that those are extremes of a spectrum into which most people fit. Commonly a straight man had the question run through his mind in early adolescence of wondering what it would be like to get it on with his best (male) friend, was too scared by social values to act on it, and has never had another same-sex impulse. But on the standard Hastur implies, he’s “not totally straight.” And effectively, he’s right.
Which leads me to the conclusion that the average individual is in some small degree bisexual. He/she may identify as “gay” or “straight” but there exists the person with whom he/she could step out of his/her asserted category, feel attraction for and possibly have satisfactory sex with. I was in past years familiar with a young man of fairly high sex drive whose primary orientation was to women and had quite satisfactory ongoing liaisons with them but who was quite capable of responding to another man, and in fact desired sex with other men from time to time, and this primarily but not exclusively in the “masculine” role (oral-passive, anal-active, and please don’t flame me for the obsolete categorization; I’m reflecting his thinking in it). But he considered himself “straight.” And he was right. Only he can truly categorize himself, and that was the orientation with which he identified. I will allow that there was a certain amount of denial there, but I trust you take my point.
Now I am drawing the picture in this analysis that the “Lesbians-by-choice” are women who did have some bisexual tendencies, and who, coming out of heterosexual liaisons that were somewhat traumatic, were comforted in that mostly-women intimate mode, reacted sexually to the intimacy, and changed the focus of their sexuality to “save all their lovin’ for someone who’s lovin’ [them]” to paraphrase Donna Summer.
This does not contravene but rather reinforces the “not a choice” point – that those who identify as gay are so because their primary orientation and comfort zone is with same-sex relationships. Certainly any gay male poster here could go out tonight, encounter a willing woman, and have sex with her – presuming his willingness to cooperate and the natural physiological reactions of the human body, the act could be consummated, though he might, uh, need more assistance than the typical straight man. And the same would hold true for women.
This, however, does not deal with primary attraction. Whom one finds sexually attractive is the question at hand. And in general that will be some subset of humanity – I find it hard to conceive of getting inside the mind of a person who could find every other human sexually attractive. That primary attraction is to a selected category of people: buxom blondes, svelte redheads, anorexic women who wear green silk dresses, tall slender men with large penises, heavyset hairy men, blonde muscular men over 40, redheaded men who can imitate Daffy Duck, or whatever. If that category is of the opposite sex, the person identifies as straight; of the same sex, gay; and if it overlaps gender lines, bi. And this taste appears not to be chooseable. It may (is likely to) vary over time, but is not something over which the person has control. He or she may condition him or herself to find a given group to which he or she was initially attracted as beyond the bounds of attractiveness, but this is an ongoing process, not a strict question of “choice.”
