Choice as Strategy: Homosexuality and the Politics of Pity
Fairyington, Stephanie
COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Choice as Strategy Homosexuality and the Politics of Pity STEPHANIE FAIRYINGTON I came out to my mother in a letter. I was twenty-eight. “I was born this way,” I...
...It says, for one, that we don’t have a place at the table...
...If the answer is no, and I believe it is, what does it say about our self-worth and status in society if we, as gay people, must practice a politics of pity to secure our place in the world...
...As a political strategy, it has helped reap enormous benefits from antidiscrimination legislation to adoption rights in some states and civil unions in others...
...I was born this way,” I wrote, following with the most shattering high note of self-loathing I can think of: “If there were a straight pill,” I lamented, “I’d swallow it faster than you can say the word ‘gay.’” I didn’t mean either of these things...
...Five years later, my mother continues to talk about my lesbianism as if it were a genetic defect like Down syndrome—a parallel she’s actually drawn—because clearly, in her mind, no one would choose such a detestable and challenging state of being...
...That would mean God intended for them to be gay, right...
...and when colonizers measured the brains of Africans to make a case for their enslavement...
...I do not want to enter into this sad history of biological dehumanization as the basis for gay rights...
...But would my mother have been as sympathetic and tolerant if she thought I had a choice in the matter...
...Until homosexuality is cast and understood as a valid choice, rather than a biological affliction, we will never rise above our current status...
...Then came the eighties and nineties and a slew of shoddy and inconclusive scientific research on the biological origins of gayness, reinforcing the belief that sexuality is predestined...
...Forty years ago, gay activists had a similar view, taking their cues from radical lesbian feminists who believed that heterosexuality and homosexuality were products of culture, not nature...
...The reasons this model of sexuality is politically expedient and effective are threefold...
...Contrary to how I actually feel about my sexuality, it suggests that I’m drowning in a sea of self-disgust, desperately grasping for a heterosexual lifeboat to sail my way out of it...
...In the absence of oppression and social control,” writes gay historian John D’Emilio, gay liberationists believed that “sexuality would be polymorphous”—fluid, in other words...
...It says, ultimately, that it’s time to change our rhetoric...
...By choice, I don’t mean that one can choose one’s sexual propensities any more than one can choose one’s personality...
...As a firm Kinsey 6—with 6 being the gayest ranking on sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s 1–6 scale of sexual orientation—I understand the resistance to putting choice and homosexuality in the same sentence...
...My point is that most inquiries into the origins of homosexuality are suspect, and their service to us is limited, if not perilous...
...All the studies that gay sympathizers and activists invoke to justify our right to same-sex love cast homosexuality as a loud hiccup at the dinner table of normality...
...As lesbian activist Joan Nestle told me, it’s not good politics to cling to the ”born gay”edict because “The use of biological ’abnormalties‘was used by the Nazis when they measured the nostril thickness of imprisoned Jews to prove they were an inferior race...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Choice as Strategy Homosexuality and the Politics of Pity STEPHANIE FAIRYINGTON I came out to my mother in a letter...
...Exodus International, a cauldron of Christian fundamentalism and intolerance that advocates reparative therapy, encapsulates the reasons many LGBT activists are loath to wave the flag of choice...
...Third, it’s conceptually easier to understand sexuality as a permanent trait rather than the complex, evermorphing mess that it often is...
...Biology is not destiny, and I am the architect of my own life, as is everyone...
...In both news and entertainment programs this idea is often stated as fact, as something that all intelligent people believe...
...my desire for women is not one of them...
...Both psychological and medical discourses formed the dominant paradigm of today, which insists that sexuality is inborn and immutable...
...For one, if sexuality is understood as predestined and therefore fixed, it poses less of a challenge to the hetero monolith than does a shifting spectrum of desire...
...The typical conservative assault on homosexuality goes a lot like Exodus International’s: it’s a sinful choice that can be unchosen through...
...In a similar vein, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the late, great foremothers of LGBT studies, once wrote, “The research [on the biological origins of homosexuality] is invariably couched in terms of ‘excess,’ ‘deficiency,’ or ‘imbalance’—whether in the hormones, in the genetic material, or in the fetal endocrine environment...
...Back then they talked about “sexual preference,” which implies choice, as opposed to “sexual orientation,” which does not...
...It says that we are tolerated, but not accepted...
...Would conservative allies support us if they believed we could help it...
...Second, by presenting homosexuality as a biological fact as firm and absolute as race or sex, gay activists have formed an identity the law can recognize and can follow in the footsteps of civil rights legislation...
...I said them because I knew they would elicit pity and absolve my mother of the belief that her parenting was to blame for my same-sex attractions...
...But I have plenty of desires, like throwing my fists in the faces of conservative Republicans, which for one reason or another, I don’t act on...
...No matter how bumpy the ride or long the journey, choice as a political strategy is the only ride out of Freaksville...
...It wasn’t until the 1970s that the mental health establishment and its gay allies put forth the view that homosexuality is a permanent psychological condition and debunked the notion that it was a mental illness in need of a cure...
...What I mean is that it’s a choice to act on every desire we have, and that acting on our same-sex attractions is just as valid as pursuing a passion for the Christian faith or Judaism or any other spiritual, intellectual, emotional, or physical craving that does not infringe on the rights of others...
...The short answer is ‘No!’ But clearly the reigning sentiment in our society is that homosexuality is genetic...
...We will remain Mother Nature’s mistake, tolerable (to some) because our condition is her fault, not ours...
...And it should be respected as such...
...It worked...
...The LGBT activists who have helped construct this sexual framework are neither lazy nor naïve in their thinking, as D’Emilio points out in “Born Gay?,” a crisp case against the politics of biological determinism...
...and when doctors at the turn of the century used the argument that the light weight of women’s brains proved their inferiority to men...
...It protects straight people, in other words, from the threat of homosexuality...
...Studies do exist, however, showing that homosexuals who desire to change can do so...
...This is not a message I’m proud to have sent...
...My same-sex attractions were awakened in me at such a young age that they felt as much a part of me as my limbs...
...My point is not to challenge or even enter the debate as to whether or not some combination of nature and nurture contributes to the formation of an inclination toward one’s own sex...
...Under the FAQ section on its Web site, we find the following: “Many gays adamantly claim they were born that way...
...This is the ugly underbelly of our biology-centered claims to human rights...
...A politics of choice would be one that regards same-sex desire enough to announce it as a conscious decision rather than a predetermined abnormality...
...In the late nineties, when I was coming out, had someone told me that I had chosen my deepest, most tender, and passionate affections, it would have been like telling me that I had chosen the arms and legs I have...
...As such, we’re put on par with other undesirable deviations from nature’s norm, taunting eugenics with the keys to our elimination...
...But for all the success this politics has had, in the end, it’s not only shortsighted but rife with limitations—and dangers...
Vol. 57 • January 2010 • No. 1
