The booklet Love Your Enemy? picked up on the debate in the UK, the central argument being that heterosexuality might well be enforced as a tool of patriarchy. “We think serious feminists have no choice but to abandon heterosexuality,” the manifesto reads. “Only in the system of oppression that is male supremacy does the oppressor actually invade and colonise the interior of the body of the oppressed.”
Many feminists considered sexuality purely a matter of innate desire, and the idea that lesbianism could be in any way a choice crazy. I understood that one did not “choose” to be gay or lesbian as such, more that if true choice for women existed, we may well be open to act upon our desires.
In her 1999 book Generations of Women Choosing to Become Lesbian: Questioning the Essentialist Link, Australian academic Lorene Gottschalk interviewed three different generations of lesbians, asking whether or not they believed in biology as the root cause of sexual attraction. Gottschalk found that those who became lesbians in the 1970s believed they chose their sexuality, but those who became lesbians in the 1990s thought it was biology.
I can see why today young lesbians are far more likely than their older counterparts to insist that being gay is biologically determined: feminism in its heyday provided women with the vision that it was possible to leave a miserable heterosexual existence, and many of them did. By the 1990s, however, the development of queer theory led many lesbians to identify more with gay men than with second wave feminists, and thereby adopt the “please tolerate us, we can’t help it” line.
The men of the 1970s-era Gay Liberation Front understood that homophobia came out of a desperation to maintain strict gender roles, and many believed that heterosexuality was oppressive to women and that all anti-sexist men worth their salt should be gay. But to say, as did the singer Tom Robinson in 1978, that we were “glad to be gay” invoked horror from many gays, and terror from straights. After all, many gay men wanted to be “tolerated” and believed they would illicit sympathy if they could convince people that they “could not help” how they were.
Heterosexuals on the other hand were comforted by the idea that we did not “recruit”, and therefore their offspring were safe — unless, of course, they happened to be born with the rogue gene.
Unfortunately, immutability has never helped black people, Jews or women escape bigotry and oppression, and it won’t save us, either. The determinist case is often used to argue against Christian gay conversion therapy, in which so-called therapists “pray away the gay”, the logic being that if we have no control over our sexuality, what’s the point of trying to change it?
But as I know only too well from my undercover investigation into the practice, which goes on in Britain as well as the US< the bigots who promote conversion therapy neither know nor care whether we are born or choose to be gay — they just want us to live a heterosexual lifestyle, or failing that become celibate and remain in the closet.
It is also argued that some of us only “realise” we are gay later in life, while others remain in the closet through fear or shame. For instance, Sex And The City actor Cynthia Nixon came out as lesbian in her 40s, having previously been in a long-term relationship with a man, and she was vilified by a number of gay men. “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better,” she said, invoking the wrath of the biological determinists.
Nixon, despite being an excellent role model for young lesbians, was accused of playing into the gay-hater’s hands. If you can choose to be gay, they said, homophobes will argue that we can choose not to be.
Most recently un 2019, the largest ever study of its kind examined data and DNA information of 500,000 people and found there were thousands of genetic variants linked to same-sex sexual behaviour, most of the them having a minor impact. There is no “gay gene” as such, but many different mutations might play a small role — yet the researchers said that non-genetic factors, including upbringing, personality and nurture, had far more influence on a person’s choice of sexual partner.
I appreciate that scientists have instinctive wonder as why things are as they are, and to seek answers. But I cannot deny that the incessant search for the gay gene offends me, because of the underlying and unspoken implications. My sexuality is not a problem waiting for a cure, and nor is it an oddity which needs explaining. Lesbians and gay men should not have to rely on (slim-to-non-existent) evidence that we “can’t help it” in order to be tolerated.
Knowing there are scientists spending huge amounts of time, money and effort in an attempt to ascribe a biological basis to our sexual orientation makes me, and countless others, feel like a specimen under a microscope as opposed to a person deserving of rights and respect. To the governments and other bodies funding such research I say this: pour that money into challenging anti-gay prejudice and support for young people struggling with life. As the Alix Dobkin song goes: Every woman can be a lesbian.
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