Beyond “Born This Way” — When Homosexuality is a Choice
Musings from the most-closeted LGBT sub-group
As if pretending to deeply consider a modern art piece, Emily leaned back slightly, squinted her eyes at me, and confided, “I don’t see you ending up with a guy.”
I had just finished explaining for the tenth time, that yes, I do still consider myself a bisexual. The message seemed to have been lost yet again in the nebulous void between perception and identity. Calmly remembering we’ve been friends for twenty years and that bisexuality won’t be defended in a day, I took her “sage insight” in stride and just let it pass.
Several months later, lounging on a new friend’s couch, shoes off, massaging my feet against the coffee table’s edge, I entered into a similar conversation. It was 3AM, a carnitas quesadilla sat in my lap pooling grease, and with an uninhibited but foggy mind I began, “I personally identify as bisexual.” This revelation seemed to have no effect on his equally inebriated mind; he had already decided my sexuality for me.
“Hmm, I don’t see you with a girl,” he countered with more conviction than curiosity.
I tried to explain myself between soggy bites of taco-truck-plunder, diving deep into contemporary theories on sexual fluidity and social constructs that define sexual behavior. Proud of my eloquence, I endeavored to meet his gaze hoping to confirm progress. Naturally, he hadn’t heard a word. He was quite safely asleep, chin collapsed into his shoulder crook, oblivious to the world.
“I don’t see you ending up with a guy.”
“Hmm, I don’t see you with a girl.”
These conflicting statements from two well-meaning friends of mine are a brief glimpse into the type of unsolicited judgement bisexual men can and will face if they are open about their sexuality. That a large majority of people assume bisexuals are transitioning, lying or confused about their sexuality begins to explain why a mere 12% of self-identifying bisexual men are out to the important people in their lives, making it the most repressed LGBT sub-group considering 33% of bisexual women, 71% of lesbians, and 77% of gay men are open about their sexuality (this study doesn’t mention “out” trans numbers). I don’t want that number to be passed over quickly, so let me reiterate. That’s twelve-measly-percent of bisexual men that are comfortable expressing who they are to the important people in their lives. Not to the public. But to their close circle of friends and family they are supposed to trust most.
While a large part of me wants to spend this time defending bisexuality and dissecting the particulars of every prejudice, I’ll save that for another post and instead explain why all of my personal issues as a bisexual are just symptoms of a systemic societal problem that affects a much larger swath of humanity. It’s the same problem that created “Don’t ask Don’t Tell” and the more subtly counter-productive “Born This Way” movement; they’re all created by pseudo-tolerance. I don’t think anyone set out to intentionally repress bisexuality, it is simply the last frontier of sexual tolerance because of the pseudo-tolerance transitions that any social justice movement inevitably goes through. Change is difficult for humans. So it happens in small increments that slowly chip away at intolerance — usually setting up complicated discrimination loopholes in the process — such that the most minimal amount of change is necessitated.
“Born This Way” and “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”
By this time I think the majority of America agrees that the repealing of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” was a great step in the right direction. Just in case you need a refresher: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was an asinine idea because by suppressing identities to fabricate a sense of peace, it catered to people’s intolerances instead of challenging them. The real solution, of course, is: ask, tell, and get over it.
Right, so, how is “Born This Way” — the amazingly effective, powerful campaign that has improved so many lives — in any way, shape, or form comparable to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”? First let me clarify I don’t disparage the spirit in which the campaign was created nor the activists who worked so hard to see it through. Rather, I have a problem with the reason the campaign was so successful, the reason why America was so receptive to its message: because it allows for a moral cop-out, one of those loopholes I was referring to earlier. The way you were born should really have nothing to do with gay rights. Sex between consenting adults shouldn’t be of anyone’s concern regardless of whether they were born that way. “Born This Way” is a faux-progressive crusade similar to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” because saying “Oh we’re cool with it as long as no one talks about it,” is pretty much the same as saying, “We’re cool with it seeing as you have no other choice, because you were born that way.” That’s a moral cop-out. It’s hacking the emotional prerogative of pity. Worse, it sets up a dangerous precedent that gay men and women are somehow incomplete or born with something missing — so we must feel sorry for them — but I don’t think pity will earn equality.
The premise of “Born This Way” suggests that gayness is an affliction, a secondary position in life. It’s not an affliction! It’s not something that needs to be excused! It’s your body and I don’t care if it’s how you were born, or if you’re sexually fluid and it’s what you choose later on in life. I’m saying it should be your human right to have consensual sex with whomever you want.
“Born This Way” allows people the loophole of begrudging equality on the pretext that gay people have no other choice. It’s essentially someone saying, “Bless his heart, he’s gay, poor child, I support him, but God would I never wish it on any child of mine.” I’ve heard this condescending sentiment again and again from people who are empathetic and supportive of gay rights, yet still maintain a patronizing view of it as something inferior. Now people always want to counter this with, “well, am I supposed to wish that my child is gay?” No, stop. Why are you projecting sexuality onto your unborn child? If you want to wish something you should probably just wish that your child is born into a world where he or she is free to express themselves in whichever way they see fit. And you should maybe contribute to making that world a reality.
In my mind the ultimate goal of gay rights is for people to see homosexuality or any sexuality (or lack thereof) as a completely equal alternative free of the condescension implied by support conditional on the idea that none of the “better” options were available. When you think about the idea that bisexuals “have a choice” per se, you might begin to see why this mentality is a problem that most certainly contributes to that twelve-percent figure. People are so wrapped up in the idea that homosexuality is inferior in some way that bisexuality confuses them because they can’t comprehend why you would choose homosexuality when heterosexuality is on the table. Their unsurfaced prejudice makes them assume you’re secretly gay, because in their minds no rational being would choose the inferior sexuality unless of course, they had no other choice.
But what is implied by having a choice? Why is that so threatening?
Because bisexuality implies that homosexuality is not inferior. If bisexuals fluidly and indifferently switch between homosexuality and heterosexuality, it suggests that heterosexuals might — god forbid — be missing out on something. It undermines the heteronormative superiority assumption that society’s foundation happily rests on. Basically, bisexual erasure is just a FOMO defense-mechanism. By denying bisexuals exist, heterosexuals are able to maintain their comfortable superiority fantasy. As a geneticist and amateur anthropologist, I’m pretty convinced that humans are hard-wired to resist anything that could compromise the virility of the herd. The resistance to bisexuality, because of its implications for the legitimacy of homosexuality, is one in the same with society’s negative impulses toward abortion, asexuality, and “child-free” couples. Our lizard brains demand reproduction, dammit!
Therefore, it seems to me that addressing bisexual prejudice is simply furthering gay rights and the positive (or ideally, just neutral) perception of homosexuality. It would undeniably benefit homosexuality in its perception as a pitied defect to just another equal manifestation of the human experience. This is why I find it particularly frustrating when gay people are dismissive of bisexuality. They don’t realize they are furthering the same prejudice to which they are subjected.
And I know this is true because by standing at the crossroads of sexualities I’ve been put in a unique position to hear what would otherwise go unsaid in any other social dynamic. Multiple self-identifying gay men have confided in me that they are sometimes sexually attracted to females (implying some degree of bisexuality), but, fearing ridicule, are too scared to talk about it openly in the gay community. It hurts me to think that gay people have fought so hard to free themselves from a cage just to build one of their own design. It seems strange that a community forged around the right to self-expression would gain that freedom just to deny it to others.
It hurts me to think that gay people have fought so hard to free themselves from a cage just to build one of their own design.
In the straight community it seems that nothing exposes homosexual prejudice quite like coming out as bisexual. For instance, a bisexual friend of mine, who has otherwise liberal parents, told me that after coming out his mom confessed, “Being bisexual is almost worse than being gay, because now I’ll always have the hope you’ll pick a girl.” His dad also said, “I support and love you, but do you expect me not to root for you ending up with a girl?” Whether their direct belief is that homosexual relationships are inherently inferior, or that they fear because of society’s perceptions of homosexuality the relationship will be more difficult — the implications are clear: heterosexuality is the superior “choice”.
And that’s what people can’t seem to understand about bisexuals: they disagree with that assumption. People keep implying that if I end up with a man I’ll have lost something — the opportunity “to be normal”, the chance at life “as it was intended to be”. They act like my dating life is a game with a clear crowd favorite. But never have they stopped to look at it from my perspective, because not only do I not see superior/inferior dichotomies, I don’t even see sides. So the next time you think about pitying homosexuality, understand that any perceived inferiorities are social constructs, and your pity only perpetuates the charade. It’s not inferior for the people that have no other choice, and it’s not inferior for the people who actively choose it even when “better options” are on the table.
I’ll leave you with an example provided by a very polarizing character: Ayn Rand. Infamous for her economic conservatism, Rand was in her own weird way a very socially liberal person, especially for her time. She was passionately anti-violence, condemned racism strongly, was pro-choice, and would have supported gay marriage. Why I bring all of this up has nothing to do with Rand herself or my feelings about her, but because of how representative her thoughts on homosexuality are to my argument. In her early years she considered homosexuality to be legal yet not moral.
Loophole #1:
“I do not approve of such practices or regard [homosexuality] as necessarily moral, but it is improper for the law to interfere with a relationship between consenting adults.” — Ayn Rand
But as scientific evidence began to suggest homosexuality may be genetically determined, she revised.
Loophole #2:
“A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality” — Ayn Rand
To translate, she asserts, if you don’t have a choice, it can’t be immoral. She considered sex a very moral act, so in her mind choosing abstinence isn’t a viable option as it would actually be immoral to deny yourself sexual pleasure.
While I am happy Rand was able to adjust her views over time, at the bottom of all her morality conjecture, there still lies an ugly truth. She skirted the responsibility of checking her prejudice against homosexuality by ascribing it to a realm without choice and therefore without morality in general. Decades later, this sentiment persists in our discomfort with bisexuality yet our general acceptance of the “Born This Way” movement.
So today I’m here to ask you to go a step further. Consider homosexuality as a choice: bring it back into the realm of morality so that your tolerance can truly be tested. And ask yourself, “Is homosexuality as a choice, moral?” Because equality for all, and not just the pretense of it, depends on how you answer.
