Despite some activists’ outrage over actress Cynthia Nixon’s recent comments, it doesn’t really matter how we became LGBT
David Webb
The Rare Reporter
After four decades of watching people struggle to keep up with the politically correct standard of the day in discussing LGBT life, I’m beginning to think it’s time for everyone to relax a little.
I reached that decision this week when I read about activists getting in an uproar over Cynthia Nixon, an actress who starred in Sex and the City, telling the New York Times Magazine she preferred being gay to straight because she had lived both types of lives. Her remarks created a furor among those who demand we frame all of our speech in a way they think best advances the LGBT rights movement. A few days later Nixon softened her stance in a Daily Beast interview by saying she was a bisexual by no choice of her own, presumably in an effort to quell the controversy.
Frankly, Nixon’s first remarks in the New York Times Magazine article made sense to me, and so did her later remarks about believing she never made a conscious decision to be a bisexual. It’s just that I regretted she felt compelled to revise what she had said earlier to appease her critics. I got what she meant the first time without her follow-up explanation, and I imagine most other enlightened people did as well.
- Cynthia Nixon
Nixon, who gave birth to two children with a male partner, probably did make a choice to live a gay life when she became sexually involved with a woman. If someone is attracted to both the opposite and the same sex, there probably does come a point when the individual might need to make a choice in terms of permanent or semi-permanent partnership.
Certainly Nixon ought to be the best judge of what happened in her own life, so what’s wrong with her telling the truth as she sees it?
Nixon noted correctly that many LGBT activists shudder every time they hear the word “choice,” “preference” or “lifestyle” because they fear it supports conservative religious arguments that homosexuality is a perversion practiced by degenerates who get their kicks out of being wicked. As the theory goes, that gives credence to the evangelists’ claims that bisexuality, homosexuality and gender variance can be cured by the administration of a good dose of Bible verse in quantities sufficient enough to scare the holy bejesus out of the sinner.
As we all know, that doesn’t work. Actually, even most straight people realize that won’t work because most of them have also suffered the wrath of the evangelical community in condemnation of some aspect of their lives, such as the urge to masturbate or engage in sexual activity before marriage. In reality, the only ones who truly believe a pack of Bible thumpers can transform a person’s sexual orientation are people who are lying about it, have been brainwashed into believing it or are just too ignorant to understand scientific research.
Decades of scientific evidence make it clear that every aspect of a person’s physical and mental makeup — which certainly includes sexual orientation — comes about as a result of heritable genes and the impact of sex hormones on the brain and other body parts of the developing fetus.
In his 2011 book Gay, Straight and the Reason Why, neuroscientist Simon LeVay outlines decades of scientific studies that all point to the same conclusion: In essence, people are what nature made them.
LeVay, who served on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has pointed this out in various articles and books he has authored over the years. The results of a scientific study LeVay published in Science in 1991 showing marked differences in the brain structures of gay and straight men is credited with helping spur the two-decade wave of scientific research aimed at determining a biological basis for sexual orientation.
What the body of scientific evidence does for most reasonable people is confirm what common sense had already told them. There’s just no way certain people with obvious mental and physical characteristics could have been anything other than what they became — namely gay, lesbian or transgender.
With others in the LGBT community it’s a little trickier because they display either few or none of the obvious characteristics identifying them as anything other than straight. Environment might have played some role in their development, but again the scientific evidence points to biological factors. What’s more the individuals usually report experiencing feelings since their earliest recollections that set them apart from heterosexual people.
Still, the unpredictability of humans makes it impossible to categorize all people. Some members of the community undoubtedly did feel an attraction to the LGBT lifestyle and chose to embrace it for that reason. The very size and the diversity of the world’s LGBT community is so staggering that if we come across some people who are merely practicing free will, it shouldn’t be so surprising.
That’s why I liked Nixon’s earlier remarks that it didn’t matter how people came to be a part of the LGBT community. As she said, it doesn’t matter how each and every person got here, and words will never sway the opinions of bigots and opportunists. It will require life experiences — such as coming to realize they have a child or grandchild who is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender — to hopefully educate them about the realities of life.
David Webb is a veteran journalist who has reported on LGBT issues for three decades for the mainstream and alternative media. He can be reached at davidwaynewebb@hotmail.com.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition February 3, 2012.
It really should not matter if sexual orientation is “chosen” or in-born, especially since all religions are “chosen” and everyone has the Constitutional right to belong to any (or no) religion – even if followers of the majority religion consider followers of any other religion “damned” for any reason. In America, no one’s civil rights are dependent on whether that person’s beliefs or practices are accepted by any other religion. But, as almost all LGBT people know, sexual orientation and sexual identity is fixed at birth and most of us are aware of their sexual orientation or sexual identity at a very early age. While I knew nothing about sex, I knew at the age of five that other boys excited me and girls did not. Throughout my lifetime (and I am almost 60) It would neither bother nor excite me if women walked around naked. While Bisexuals might be able to “chose” whether they find a male or female attractive, their Bisexuality is also fixed at birth and will not change. I ask heterosexuals all the time when they “chose” to be heterosexual and they scoff at the idea. I ask heterosexuals all the time if someone could convincingly argue that they should not love the person they love. As Shakespeare’s plays repeatedly make clear, if you deny people the right to be with someone they are in love with, the result is often going to be suicide or violence. People do not logically select the ones they love. No one who ever claimed to have been homosexual and now claims to be heterosexual has ever passed a lie detector test. MRI tests have shown that the brains of heterosexuals and homosexuals are different. While only about 10% of the male population if left handed, about 70% of male homosexuals are left handed. There has never been any peer-reviewed and accepted study that can show that sexual orientation is attributable to any environmental factor during one’s lifetime. Straights much more likely to be sexually molested as children than Gays. Children who have been sexually molested as children are much more likely to be heterosexual than homosexual. On the other hand, those who most strongly reject homosexuals are almost always fighting their own repressed homosexual feelings and will be tormented for the rest of their lives – until they come out – as most bigots do.
It should help everyone to be honest. You are born with a sexual orientation and identity. It is not the result of anything your parents did (or did not do). It is not the result of anything anyone did to you as a child. It is not your choice. You are not possessed by demons or Satan. You are as God made you. You need to accept this, release any guilt and love yourself. You will be much happier and live a better life. Those who say otherwise are only fighting their own repressed feelings.
@John: We apologize for this and are working to address the problem. In the meantime feel free to email me your comment at wright@dallasvoice.com. Thanks.
I don’t believe our sexual or romantic orientation is a choice. There’s no problem if it was, but I just don’t believe it is.
The problem about presenting orientation as some kind of choice (stated overly simplified and leaving the complexities out of it for the moment) lies in how kids may very easily react to that. Children often blame themselves for things they have absolutely no control over: difficulties in the relationship of their parents, a family being dysfunctional, those kinds of things. They don’t know what causes those problems and they feel that maybe they are to blame, no matter how nonsensical this is.
Gay kids grow up mainly in straight families, they don’t always have someone to turn to let alone talk to about it. Because they feel different to the people around them, they are at times not at all happy with their orientation and they would prefer to be like everyone else. Suggesting to them that there is some kind of choice involved (and kids wouldn’t pick up on the nuances being suggested by Ms Nixon), I think this would make the situation worse: a sense of isolation, the likelihood that those kids blame themselves: thinking they must somehow be responsible for being gay and not understanding that we are all somewhere on the Kinsey scale and I just don’t believe that we have any choice over where that is.
I so very much wish that kids would grow up free from prejudices or bigotry by others. Gay, straight, bi, trans – we are all worthy. But unfortunately there are those forces in society that make kids feel that there might be something wrong with them – and if on top of that they feel that they somehow caused that… I just think it’s really damaging.
And even bisexual people do not really have a choice over their orientation either. We do not choose who we fall in love with, the only thing we can choose is whether we pursue a relationship with the loved one.
All in all: no-one should be made to feel bad about romantic or sexual feelings, particularly as we grow into teenagers and young people. It takes a while for us to develop self acceptance and confidence – so children need all the help they can get. Positing that there is choice when it very likely isn’t, I just feel that it makes the situation so much more difficult for those kids who struggle with who they are.
If being gay was a choice, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. Let’s just make sure that kids don’t get the wrong end of the stick about that possibility.