IGF CultureWatch

After more than fifty years of the formal struggle for equality, we are at a stage where we can exercise some of the privileges of success.  One of those is a more open discussion about homosexuality as a choice.

Cynthia Nixon, who had a 15-year relationship with a man, is now engaged to a woman.  She rejects being categorized as bisexual.  Frank Bruni takes advantage of that to explore some of the biological terra incognita of sexual orientation.

This has long been a touchy subject because homosexual activity has historically been viewed as illness, sin and crime.  The first is objectionable (at best) because it deprives us entirely of the ability to be perceived as healthy human beings.  The last two are both reasonably described as voluntary (unless you’re on the very far left, which few around this site are), but amount to the “choice” of activities that are inherently wrong.   Those of us who are homosexual don’t view love, affection, or even consensual sex as wrong, so this view of choice is unacceptable, and at the very heart of the argument we have been making to be treated equally under the law.

Bruni argues that sexual orientation can be viewed as another sort of choice, the constitutionally protected ones of religion and gun ownership.  Neither possesses any biological prerequisite; they are both freely chosen and fully recognized parts of American citizenship.

Bruni uses a well crafted phrase to capture the decision point more appropriately: “the right to love whom you’re moved to love.”

This is something heterosexuals have always understood for themselves.  Long before the sexual revolution in the 1960s, young people rebelled against parental choices and even preferences about their marriage partners.  Not all of those children were able to act on their choices, but they certainly had them.  They needed no help, and were subject to no steering in recognizing whom they were moved to love.

Some of us know for a fact that that private, purely internal movement is only toward members of our own sex.  That is as resistant to change as was Romeo’s love for his Juliet.  Heterosexual adults, too, like Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, know about the imperatives of the heart.

It is true that those four heterosexuals had a choice about whether to act on their love.  Romeo was quite the dog in Verona; Juliet knew the parentally sanctioned Paris was ready to go; Mrs. Simpson had already made a marriage choice (two, actually); and no one can plausibly claim that the King of England would have lacked other options.

But the conversation changes and narrows dramatically when it turns to homosexuality.  People mean something very different and much smaller when they talk about whether homosexuality is a choice.  They’re not talking about whom, in particular, we are moved to love; they are talking only about the gender of people we are moved to love.

That is the discussion we have had for a couple of generations now.  Bruni helps move the debate forward, and that is worth taking advantage of.  We are not likely ever to understand the origins of something as complicated, — as human — as the impulse toward love.  It’s time lesbians and gay men (and bisexuals, too) stopped being required to answer that unanswerable question in order to obtain equality.