queerbychoice (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
queerbychoice) wrote2003-06-04 12:08 am
queerbychoice) wrote2003-06-04 12:08 am
Dr. Awkward and Tsenft Interview Me
First, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
drawkward interviews me:
1. Do you believe people are ever born homosexual or is it always a choice?
Neither. I do not believe that people can be born predisposed to any particular sexual preference, but I wouldn't say most people make a choice because most people aren't taught to realize they have any choice. Most people are just taught, "You'd better be heterosexual, and if you aren't then there's something horribly wrong with you!" Then sooner or later something in their environment provokes them to realize that they're capable of more possibilities than that, and they immediately feel that they've been labeled "queer." Since being "heterosexual" in this society is basically defined as "not having realized you're capable of being anything else" (most heterosexuals do NOT view ex-gays as anything but pathetic self-hating gays who are not really as good as REAL heterosexuals), a person who has realized they're capable of having queer feelings can never again truly fully meet the society's definition of "heterosexual." In this sense they do have no choice but to be queer. However, if it were only a matter of learning how to be attracted to a different gender in the present, instead of trying to forget they ever realized they were capable of anything else, then I think sexual preferences can be re-learned to the same extent and in the same ways that fashion preferences, food preferences, political preferences and all kinds of other preferences can be re-learned: having your parents threaten to disown you for your fashion, food, political or sexual preferences isn't going to change your preferences at all (although it might intimidate you into pretending to have changed preferences), but choosing to read a lot of political writings arguing in favor of a particular political stance can often persuade a person to develop more agreement with the stance in question, and manny meat-eaters who became convinced that eating meat was unethical have found that the act of mentally associating the taste of meat with the thought of murder has actually caused them to stop liking the actual taste of meat, and some experience eating vegetables more often and trying new ways of preparing them has often caused new vegetarians to start actually liking the taste of vegetables far more than they ever previously did. I believe that having a sexual preference for a particular type of person simply means that you've acquired the conviction on a deep-down level that people of this particular type are more likely to make you happy sexually or romantically. It's not always a deliberately chosen conviction at all, but just a pattern that our individual life experience has tended to fall into - and the conviction can be changed to the same extent and in the same ways that any other conviction can be changed, by searching for evidence which contradicts the conviction.
2. Why did you choose to be bisexual?
I felt it was an intolerably horrific insult to the whole concept of "falling in love" for someone's mere physical body to be able to prevent me from falling in love with them no matter how worthy and deserving and well-matched their mind was.
3. Do you prefer female to male?
The Implicit Association Tests I took last week claimed that I do, but I don't consider myself to. I do, however, tend to prefer people who identify with gender identities that are fairly androgynous but slightly more feminine than masculine. Currently, most of my closest friends actually have male bodies but gender identities which are somewhat feminine (to varying extents).
4. What was the last activity which you would describe as "activism" that you took part in?
In March I wrote and printed out my own antiwar stickers and stuck them up around town. Since then, I've posted political links on LiveJournal and updated my website - nothing big, but it's still something.
5. Were you raised by religious folk?
No. I was raised by two agnostic parents. In nursery school I heard people talking about someone called God and I went home and asked my mother who this God person was. She said, "Some people believe there's a magic person in the sky who created the world and has magical power to do anything at all. You can decide for yourself whether to believe that or not." I said, "That's ridiculous, everybody knows magic isn't real!" She said, "Well, you might change your mind later." I said, "That's ridiculous, I certainly will not ever change my mind later!" And I never have.
6. Do you tend to be judgmental?
I believe it's perfectly normal and healthy to have opinions and to view certain behaviors as being ethically superior to other behaviors, so to that extent I certainly make judgments. On the other hand, making judgments does not preclude sympathizing with people who've done things I don't agree with, and I tend to sympathize quite a lot with the pain of even people who very few others seem to sympathize with.
7. What do you dislike about yourself most?
I'm not often very good at forcing myself to do excruciatingly unpleasant things that I really ought to do.
Second,tsenft interviews me:
1. First, WHO ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE? Your journal has more characters than a Mexican telenovella. They appear to be a mix of online and offline friends, from what I can gather. Do you find that to be a bug or a feature of your life, or perhaps both? Like, it's nice to have everyone "in the loop" online, but issues like privacy and whatnot probably get mangled.
My journal has more characters than a Mexican telenovella?? Your friends list has nearly four times as many people on it as mine has! And actually, there's only one person on my LiveJournal friends list who I've ever met offline, and he lives halfway across the U.S. from me and we only met because of LiveJournal. It's true that I've known quite a large number of my LJ friends from years before I joined LiveJournal, but that just means I knew them from other online contexts (my mailing list, in almost all cases). I haven't had any privacy problems at all, and I haven't really got any offline friends these days anyway, so I haven't had to even contemplate whether to invite them to LiveJournal.
2. Tell me a little about how the idea of Queer by Choice became important enough for you to organize over. I assume some things led up to that decision, as one doesn't generally wake up and say, "Hey, I'm queer by choice, dammit" and start doing activism that way. I guess I'm asking who the pre QBC Gayle was, and how identifying as QBC altered who you are today.
Actually, to quite a large extent I rather did just "wake up one day" like that. I guess I should start the story back in the summer between ninth and tenth grades, though, when I was trying to decide (yes, it was always a decision for me, I never viewed being attracted to people as anything other than a decision) whether or not to develop a reciprocal crush on the boy who'd proclaimed himself to have a crush on me at the end of ninth grade. He was black, and I found this terribly startling and felt a need for extensive careful consideration before deciding whether I was prepared to deal with this business of his having an unexpected skin color. After having several months to think it over during summer vacation, I eventually decided that yes indeed, I was ready and willing to be attracted to him. Unfortunately, since I hadn't given him any particular response the previous school year, he'd spent the summer losing all interest in me and no amount of trying to win him back over during tenth grade ever succeeded in regaining his interest at all. This left me terribly, terribly frustrated with myself for having wasted my first and thus far only chance at a boyfriend, just by being irrationally slow to realize that love should not depend on superficial physical traits.
So one day in the spring of tenth grade, when I'd spent a good six months highly frustrated at not being able to regain his interest, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the reason my best friend had kept stubbornly insisting for the whole four years I'd known her that she had never ever liked any boys ever might be that she liked girls instead. And if she liked girls, I was the logical one for her to like - she'd never expressed any comparable interest in any other girls, and if I were the one she liked, that would help explain why she hadn't ever dared to tell me who she liked. So, bearing in mind the painful lesson I'd learned by waiting too long to reciprocate the last crush, I resolved that this time around, I would not allow any silly prejudices about physical body types to cause me to waste what could be the greatest love of my life. I'd never felt the slightest attraction to any females before, but the second it occurred to me that one might be attracted to me, I was instantly determined to develop reciprocal attraction. There was no question in my mind that I would succeed - the possibility that love could be limited by mere physical body types was simply too horrifying to contemplate.
Unfortunately my best friend denied having any romantic interest in me or in any other females, but my newfound opposition to the idea of restricting my love to one gender remained. As far as I knew, I'd never met any queer person but myself, so I wondered what other queer people were like. I'd certainly heard lots on TV about how gay people were always proclaiming "It's not a choice!" but I wasn't sure how seriously to take those reports. Perhaps it was just a vast heterosexual media conspiracy to pretend that gay people were like that when really they'd all made choices just like mine? I found the media images of gay people terribly unappealing and desperately hoped they were a lot more like me than they were presented as. In the evenings I sneaked into the family room alone to watch the local GLAAD TV show on cable, and was relieved to find that the gay people on GLAAD TV were usually shown saying things that had nothing to do with the causes of queerness, which was at least better than the mainstream news where gay people were only ever shown saying nothing but "It's not a choice!" all day long; but the GLAAD TV people still never said anything whatsoever to indicate that they were annoyed by all that "It's not a choice!" yelling on the mainstream news and wished to correct that image of themselves by reasserting that it was too a choice. I kept hoping they'd get around to doing that. Eventually near the end of 12th grade, a substitute teacher came out to my history class one day in response to some students making homophobic remarks - that substitute teacher was the first person I'd ever met who I knew was queer. I immediately left a note on his desk as I left the classroom, which said simply, "Thank you. I'm gay too." At lunch that day, I sneaked away from my friends and went to his classroom to beg him to tell me what other gay people were really like. He was a pretty stereotypical young blonde yuppie mainstream gay guy studying to be an actor - you know the type, the classic target audience that The Advocate is aimed at. During the conversation at lunch, he said something which vaguely implied he didn't see his gayness as being anything he had any control over. I instantly interrupted him and demanded in a tone which very clearly announced my own opinion on the subject, "Do you actually believe that stuff about people being born gay and not having any choice????"
It is immensely to his credit (and I shall be forever grateful to him for it) that rather than expressing horror at my views and attempting to force his views onto me, he instantly stopped talking and said, "Tell me about what you think." So I did tell him, and he heard me out, and he didn't try to contradict me at all, and although he didn't express agreement either and I could tell from what he'd already said that he didn't agree, he did his very best to be as supportive of my right to hold my views as he possibly could, and to minimize his own, and in other words to treat me with precisely the kind of delicacy that a 17-year-old who's never knowingly met any other queer person in the whole world except you and is desperately counting on you for her entire sense of connection to "the gay community" at large ought to be treated. It still made me sad to know that between his views and experience of gayness and mine there lay a chasm so deep I could hardly begin to imagine what his experience could be like, but at least I didn't have to feel that the gay community was going to hate me for being different. I felt sympathized with. However, I left that conversation feeling simultaneously less lonely (because he did understand and relate to my fear of coming out) and yet more lonely (because he didn't understand or relate to my notion of what it was I was coming out about, and I had to increasingly face the prospect that this same chasm would stand between me and who knew how overwhelming a percentage of the rest of the queer community).
I got reasonably lucky in that none of the queers I met for the first several years thereafter ever reacted really negatively to my saying I chose to be queer, and several of them came at least somewhat closer than the substitute teacher did to actually understanding and relating to my experience. In my next-to-last semester of college, however, I took a psychology class on homosexuality in which the professor was the most extreme born-that-way proponent imaginable, and putting him and me in the same tiny classroom two days a week for 16 weeks gave rise to such intense levels of mutual hatred that few college classrooms have ever witnessed. So although I was very outspokenly queer by choice from the first day I turned queer, my already existing strong desire to spread queer by choice ideas was even further intensified by the evil professor (who, incidentally, gave me an A in his class, but it was only because I was so determined to show him the error of his ways that I wrote 30-page research papers every time he asked for a 3-page homework assignment, and he couldn't very well give me anything other than an A with the immense volume of work I was doing).
3. If I were to give you the power to eliminate one bad thing about the world today, what would it be?
I would redistribute the world's wealth equally among all individual human beings.
4. If I were to give you the power to eliminate one bad thing about your current living situation today, what would it be?
I would ask for a free house. Just a small one, but free.
5. If I gave you the power to eliminate one bad thing about your character today, what would it be?
I'd like to understand people better than I do.
6. If you had to choose between books and films, which would you choose? What would you miss most about the one you choose to leave behind, do you think?
Hahahaha, that's an easy one . . . I've never had any films in my life in the first place. They got left behind from the day of my birth.
drawkward interviews me:1. Do you believe people are ever born homosexual or is it always a choice?
Neither. I do not believe that people can be born predisposed to any particular sexual preference, but I wouldn't say most people make a choice because most people aren't taught to realize they have any choice. Most people are just taught, "You'd better be heterosexual, and if you aren't then there's something horribly wrong with you!" Then sooner or later something in their environment provokes them to realize that they're capable of more possibilities than that, and they immediately feel that they've been labeled "queer." Since being "heterosexual" in this society is basically defined as "not having realized you're capable of being anything else" (most heterosexuals do NOT view ex-gays as anything but pathetic self-hating gays who are not really as good as REAL heterosexuals), a person who has realized they're capable of having queer feelings can never again truly fully meet the society's definition of "heterosexual." In this sense they do have no choice but to be queer. However, if it were only a matter of learning how to be attracted to a different gender in the present, instead of trying to forget they ever realized they were capable of anything else, then I think sexual preferences can be re-learned to the same extent and in the same ways that fashion preferences, food preferences, political preferences and all kinds of other preferences can be re-learned: having your parents threaten to disown you for your fashion, food, political or sexual preferences isn't going to change your preferences at all (although it might intimidate you into pretending to have changed preferences), but choosing to read a lot of political writings arguing in favor of a particular political stance can often persuade a person to develop more agreement with the stance in question, and manny meat-eaters who became convinced that eating meat was unethical have found that the act of mentally associating the taste of meat with the thought of murder has actually caused them to stop liking the actual taste of meat, and some experience eating vegetables more often and trying new ways of preparing them has often caused new vegetarians to start actually liking the taste of vegetables far more than they ever previously did. I believe that having a sexual preference for a particular type of person simply means that you've acquired the conviction on a deep-down level that people of this particular type are more likely to make you happy sexually or romantically. It's not always a deliberately chosen conviction at all, but just a pattern that our individual life experience has tended to fall into - and the conviction can be changed to the same extent and in the same ways that any other conviction can be changed, by searching for evidence which contradicts the conviction.
2. Why did you choose to be bisexual?
I felt it was an intolerably horrific insult to the whole concept of "falling in love" for someone's mere physical body to be able to prevent me from falling in love with them no matter how worthy and deserving and well-matched their mind was.
3. Do you prefer female to male?
The Implicit Association Tests I took last week claimed that I do, but I don't consider myself to. I do, however, tend to prefer people who identify with gender identities that are fairly androgynous but slightly more feminine than masculine. Currently, most of my closest friends actually have male bodies but gender identities which are somewhat feminine (to varying extents).
4. What was the last activity which you would describe as "activism" that you took part in?
In March I wrote and printed out my own antiwar stickers and stuck them up around town. Since then, I've posted political links on LiveJournal and updated my website - nothing big, but it's still something.
5. Were you raised by religious folk?
No. I was raised by two agnostic parents. In nursery school I heard people talking about someone called God and I went home and asked my mother who this God person was. She said, "Some people believe there's a magic person in the sky who created the world and has magical power to do anything at all. You can decide for yourself whether to believe that or not." I said, "That's ridiculous, everybody knows magic isn't real!" She said, "Well, you might change your mind later." I said, "That's ridiculous, I certainly will not ever change my mind later!" And I never have.
6. Do you tend to be judgmental?
I believe it's perfectly normal and healthy to have opinions and to view certain behaviors as being ethically superior to other behaviors, so to that extent I certainly make judgments. On the other hand, making judgments does not preclude sympathizing with people who've done things I don't agree with, and I tend to sympathize quite a lot with the pain of even people who very few others seem to sympathize with.
7. What do you dislike about yourself most?
I'm not often very good at forcing myself to do excruciatingly unpleasant things that I really ought to do.
Second,
tsenft interviews me:1. First, WHO ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE? Your journal has more characters than a Mexican telenovella. They appear to be a mix of online and offline friends, from what I can gather. Do you find that to be a bug or a feature of your life, or perhaps both? Like, it's nice to have everyone "in the loop" online, but issues like privacy and whatnot probably get mangled.
My journal has more characters than a Mexican telenovella?? Your friends list has nearly four times as many people on it as mine has! And actually, there's only one person on my LiveJournal friends list who I've ever met offline, and he lives halfway across the U.S. from me and we only met because of LiveJournal. It's true that I've known quite a large number of my LJ friends from years before I joined LiveJournal, but that just means I knew them from other online contexts (my mailing list, in almost all cases). I haven't had any privacy problems at all, and I haven't really got any offline friends these days anyway, so I haven't had to even contemplate whether to invite them to LiveJournal.
2. Tell me a little about how the idea of Queer by Choice became important enough for you to organize over. I assume some things led up to that decision, as one doesn't generally wake up and say, "Hey, I'm queer by choice, dammit" and start doing activism that way. I guess I'm asking who the pre QBC Gayle was, and how identifying as QBC altered who you are today.
Actually, to quite a large extent I rather did just "wake up one day" like that. I guess I should start the story back in the summer between ninth and tenth grades, though, when I was trying to decide (yes, it was always a decision for me, I never viewed being attracted to people as anything other than a decision) whether or not to develop a reciprocal crush on the boy who'd proclaimed himself to have a crush on me at the end of ninth grade. He was black, and I found this terribly startling and felt a need for extensive careful consideration before deciding whether I was prepared to deal with this business of his having an unexpected skin color. After having several months to think it over during summer vacation, I eventually decided that yes indeed, I was ready and willing to be attracted to him. Unfortunately, since I hadn't given him any particular response the previous school year, he'd spent the summer losing all interest in me and no amount of trying to win him back over during tenth grade ever succeeded in regaining his interest at all. This left me terribly, terribly frustrated with myself for having wasted my first and thus far only chance at a boyfriend, just by being irrationally slow to realize that love should not depend on superficial physical traits.
So one day in the spring of tenth grade, when I'd spent a good six months highly frustrated at not being able to regain his interest, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the reason my best friend had kept stubbornly insisting for the whole four years I'd known her that she had never ever liked any boys ever might be that she liked girls instead. And if she liked girls, I was the logical one for her to like - she'd never expressed any comparable interest in any other girls, and if I were the one she liked, that would help explain why she hadn't ever dared to tell me who she liked. So, bearing in mind the painful lesson I'd learned by waiting too long to reciprocate the last crush, I resolved that this time around, I would not allow any silly prejudices about physical body types to cause me to waste what could be the greatest love of my life. I'd never felt the slightest attraction to any females before, but the second it occurred to me that one might be attracted to me, I was instantly determined to develop reciprocal attraction. There was no question in my mind that I would succeed - the possibility that love could be limited by mere physical body types was simply too horrifying to contemplate.
Unfortunately my best friend denied having any romantic interest in me or in any other females, but my newfound opposition to the idea of restricting my love to one gender remained. As far as I knew, I'd never met any queer person but myself, so I wondered what other queer people were like. I'd certainly heard lots on TV about how gay people were always proclaiming "It's not a choice!" but I wasn't sure how seriously to take those reports. Perhaps it was just a vast heterosexual media conspiracy to pretend that gay people were like that when really they'd all made choices just like mine? I found the media images of gay people terribly unappealing and desperately hoped they were a lot more like me than they were presented as. In the evenings I sneaked into the family room alone to watch the local GLAAD TV show on cable, and was relieved to find that the gay people on GLAAD TV were usually shown saying things that had nothing to do with the causes of queerness, which was at least better than the mainstream news where gay people were only ever shown saying nothing but "It's not a choice!" all day long; but the GLAAD TV people still never said anything whatsoever to indicate that they were annoyed by all that "It's not a choice!" yelling on the mainstream news and wished to correct that image of themselves by reasserting that it was too a choice. I kept hoping they'd get around to doing that. Eventually near the end of 12th grade, a substitute teacher came out to my history class one day in response to some students making homophobic remarks - that substitute teacher was the first person I'd ever met who I knew was queer. I immediately left a note on his desk as I left the classroom, which said simply, "Thank you. I'm gay too." At lunch that day, I sneaked away from my friends and went to his classroom to beg him to tell me what other gay people were really like. He was a pretty stereotypical young blonde yuppie mainstream gay guy studying to be an actor - you know the type, the classic target audience that The Advocate is aimed at. During the conversation at lunch, he said something which vaguely implied he didn't see his gayness as being anything he had any control over. I instantly interrupted him and demanded in a tone which very clearly announced my own opinion on the subject, "Do you actually believe that stuff about people being born gay and not having any choice????"
It is immensely to his credit (and I shall be forever grateful to him for it) that rather than expressing horror at my views and attempting to force his views onto me, he instantly stopped talking and said, "Tell me about what you think." So I did tell him, and he heard me out, and he didn't try to contradict me at all, and although he didn't express agreement either and I could tell from what he'd already said that he didn't agree, he did his very best to be as supportive of my right to hold my views as he possibly could, and to minimize his own, and in other words to treat me with precisely the kind of delicacy that a 17-year-old who's never knowingly met any other queer person in the whole world except you and is desperately counting on you for her entire sense of connection to "the gay community" at large ought to be treated. It still made me sad to know that between his views and experience of gayness and mine there lay a chasm so deep I could hardly begin to imagine what his experience could be like, but at least I didn't have to feel that the gay community was going to hate me for being different. I felt sympathized with. However, I left that conversation feeling simultaneously less lonely (because he did understand and relate to my fear of coming out) and yet more lonely (because he didn't understand or relate to my notion of what it was I was coming out about, and I had to increasingly face the prospect that this same chasm would stand between me and who knew how overwhelming a percentage of the rest of the queer community).
I got reasonably lucky in that none of the queers I met for the first several years thereafter ever reacted really negatively to my saying I chose to be queer, and several of them came at least somewhat closer than the substitute teacher did to actually understanding and relating to my experience. In my next-to-last semester of college, however, I took a psychology class on homosexuality in which the professor was the most extreme born-that-way proponent imaginable, and putting him and me in the same tiny classroom two days a week for 16 weeks gave rise to such intense levels of mutual hatred that few college classrooms have ever witnessed. So although I was very outspokenly queer by choice from the first day I turned queer, my already existing strong desire to spread queer by choice ideas was even further intensified by the evil professor (who, incidentally, gave me an A in his class, but it was only because I was so determined to show him the error of his ways that I wrote 30-page research papers every time he asked for a 3-page homework assignment, and he couldn't very well give me anything other than an A with the immense volume of work I was doing).
3. If I were to give you the power to eliminate one bad thing about the world today, what would it be?
I would redistribute the world's wealth equally among all individual human beings.
4. If I were to give you the power to eliminate one bad thing about your current living situation today, what would it be?
I would ask for a free house. Just a small one, but free.
5. If I gave you the power to eliminate one bad thing about your character today, what would it be?
I'd like to understand people better than I do.
6. If you had to choose between books and films, which would you choose? What would you miss most about the one you choose to leave behind, do you think?
Hahahaha, that's an easy one . . . I've never had any films in my life in the first place. They got left behind from the day of my birth.
no subject
I think I live the chasm between your views and those of the "mainstream." I don't really believe I was born queer, but I also don't really believe I had a choice in it.
I don't feel I have a choice in who I fall for. My feelings take me over like a wave in the ocean. That had always been about boys until one glorious woman. I had no choice. I couldn't decide to not like her.
The only choice I had was whether or not to act on it. Not whether or not the feelings were there or whether or not the feelings were "acceptable," only whether or not to act on them.
I couldn't choose the queerness, the queerness took me over. But I hadn't felt queer before, so it'd be hard for me to argue that I was born with it.
Queerness happened to me. And I let it.
no subject
I don't think of choices as necessarily being direct immediate ones "Shall I be attracted to this person or not?" Sometimes it works that way, but other times it's more accurate to say that attraction resulted from a pre-established pattern of, as I said in the first FAQ, "dams and channels" built up through years of tiny indirect choices made in the past. Once the actual moment arrives and a person is standing in front of you, you don't necessarily have time anymore to stop the pre-established patterns of attraction that the persn happens to fit into.
This is why I said in the first interview above that I wouldn't say most people make a choice exactly. I think there are choices possible, but they're often made so indirectly that calling them choice to be queer would just be ridiculously oversimplistic and inaccurate.
no subject
My case would be that I was born queer and decided to act on it (and finally realized it was there) when I met my girlfriend.
So it's a birthright and a choice?
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If you're attracted to something that's that, and if you're not, then fine. Maaaaybe you'll get hit in the face by a stray dodgeball today, maybe not. As long as you don't care, there's no conceivable reason why the source of queerness should matter at all.
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And I thought you just finished saying in the previous comment that you didn't believe you were born queer?
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Maybe I misunderstood the things you're saying on your website, though. But that's what it sounded like to me. And if one takes the belief that we all have this ability to be queer in us at a core level, then it is "born" in us, not something developed later. So, using what seems to be your belief from your writing, I was born queer, but I didn't really realize it was a choice to act on until I met my girlfriend.
no subject
Plus, choosing to be queer was exactly the same type of experience for me as choosing to be an English major, and everybody insisted that queerness couldn't possibly be a choice yet nobody in the least questioned that English majorness was a choice. The completely opposite labeling reactions to exactly the same decision-making process was thoroughly weird and couldn't help but make me more determined than ever to make people stop filtering everything I say through their weird preconceptions.
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What I am saying is that all human beings are born with this same equal ability to be queer in us. Does that clarify?
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And then things influence us and we make choices and eventually some of us realize some or all of the queer potential inside us and allow it to come out into the light. Others are not so lucky and end up marching along doing what society has told them is "right" without realizing the potential within.
no subject
Sure, but I'm saying that all humans are equally born with that potential, and the potential can equally be limited to heterosexuality or homosexuality, so the potential for each of those is also present in all of us.
no subject
I think we agree fully on most of this issue, but not the words to describe them, actually.
For me, it was not a "choice" (using my definition of the word) in the least to be queer, but using your logic and definitions it I am "queer by choice."
I think we all do have the potential to end up with any number of different sexualities inherent our core beings. You seem to believe this as well. We all are some shade of queer, though some much more to one end of the spectrum than others in action. The potential is born in us. We are "queer at birth," and society (and other stuff) trains us otherwise. But you wouldn't refer to it as "queer at birth."
I think it's both. Or neither. I think we're queer at birth in that we have the potential to be anything. And I think we're queer by choice because things happen to steer us that way and eventually we choose to let it ride.
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But don't you think it's possible for some people to have some sort of queer-biology as well as this choice? Like . . . ummmm . . . some people are never ever ever ever going to be good at math. They just aren't left-brained (or is that right-brained?) enough. They can theorize, practice, and "choose" to be good at math, but they cannot actually become good at trig.
I suspect there are people for whom this is true for gayness. Not necessarily a "gay gene" but maybe something in hormones or brain chemistry or something. And for them there basically is no "choice" about it. They are gay. Or bi. Or trans.
no subject
I do believe there are aspects of biology which within a particular cultural context can make someone more likely to be queer, such as if someone is born looking extremely androgynous so everybody they meet all their lives tends to think of them as queer, then all the people's assumptions about them could make them much more likely to question their sexual preference and just stop bothering to fight the assumptions.
But while a baby's still in the womb, when it has the ability to be born into any culture at all - no, I don't believe anyone's DNA is the slightest tiniest bit more predisposed toward any particular sexual preference than anyone else's.
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I also believe people can be born with an inclination toward rebelling against social norms, but a different society could theoretically have queerness as it's norm, so in that society a rebellious child would be more likely to be straight, not queer. And I also believe people can be born more compatible with a particular gender role, but gender roles I believe are again dependent upon which society a child is born into. Even if most or all existing societies have certain patriarchal qualities in common (and males being physically bigger may make it more likely that societies would be patriarchal than matriarchal), that doesn't mean that a society couldn't theoretically exist that would be different.
So to be born predisposed to be attracted to a particular sex regardless of cultural context, the DNA would have to create some sort of specific aesthetic preference for the shapes of penises or something, and I don't believe we're born programmed for anywhere near such specific aesthetic preferences as that (if we were, styles of painting and standards of beauty wouldn't vary so hugely from culture to culture).
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I don't believe that math is an accurate analogy for sexual gender preference. I believe there is an area of the brain specifically designated to handle math, and therefore this area can be stronger in some people (although I still think the humongously vast majority of math skills differences are attributable to culture rather than genetics). I believe there is an area of the brain specifically designated to handle sexual attraction too, but I do not believe that this area is genetically divided into attraction-to-males versus attraction-to-females. I do not believe that there is anything biologically preset about the notion that a person's possession of innie or outie type genitalia would have any bearing on their attractiveness whatsoever. It seems entirely equally reasonable to me to imagine a culture in which people's attractiveness is routinely determined by whether their pubic hair is the same color as yours or not. Yet nobody in our society goes around writing tortured letters to advice columnists begging, "Please help me! I can never know whether I'm capable of being attracted to someone until I find out whether or not their pubic hair is blonde or red! Any other color of pubic hair I just can't feel attracted to, yet nobody is willing to tell me what color their pubic hair is unless I've first romanced them and led them to believe a relationship is in the offing. You have no idea how many redheads and blondes' hearts I've broken after finding out that their pubic hair isn't at all the same color as the hair on their heads! I can't stand to break any more hearts. Please, please, please tell me a polite way that I can make inquiries into pubic hair colors with casual acquaintances before getting more deeply involved!"
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Not all depressed people fit in that category (prob'ly nowhere near "most" even in the current culture), but a lot do.
I guess I think the queerness is like that. Some people can choose (or not choose, which is a choice in and of itself, I suppose). But other people because of the makeup of how their brain works or the way their hormones run through their body or something else I know absolutely nothing about predisposes them to one sexual inclination over another.
I also suppose there is in some people, a basic instinct to go for the opposite gender. Not because of societal norms, but because of the plain ole natural instinct to procreate. There's a reason that most animals only engage in heterosexual activities. I think human instincts have been muted and crushed and stamped on, but they're still under there somewhere.
Sure, for some women, the "biological clock" is fueled by societal expectations, but for others I believe there is a hardcore instinct in their urges that pushes them to make baby make baby make baby. Must make baby now.
(side note: I'm really enjoying this conversation with you. It's giving me a lot to thing about.)
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!!!!!!!???????!!!!!!!!
Uh, most animals certainly do not only engage in heterosexual activities. You couldn't possibly be more mistaken. Read Bruce Bagemihl's book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, please. I own it. Trust me on this: if there's any species anywhere that only engages in heterosexual activities, we don't know what it is yet. The huge majority of species engage in LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS of homosexual activities, often even more frequently than they engage in heterosexual activities.
There is not the slightest evolutionary disadvantage to liking same-gender sex, as long as an animal also likes opposite-gender sex just as much. If anything, there's an advantage to liking both, because it gives a way for animals to get along and make each other happy. And since it's infinitely easier for our bodies to evolve sex organs that simply feel good when touched by anybody, and a mental urge to get them touched by anybody, than to evolve some weird mental fixation upon getting them touched only by some specific other shape of sex organs, I simply do not believe that humans, or any mammal species, or probably any species with brains at all, has ever developed a biological sexual preference for one gender over the other. There are some insects (fruit flies, most famously) that do have a sort of instinctive heterosexuality, which can be turned into homosexuality under certain circumstances, but for just about any species more advanced than insects I do not see those behavioral patterns.
A fair number of mammal species do clearly distinguish between their hetero- and homo- sexual behavior, such as engaging in them during different seasons or with differing rates of promiscuity or with different mating rituals; but these differences frequently vary between one geographical group of animals and another geographical group of the same species somewhere far away, so I believe these differences are part of the animals' culture rather than their DNA. In any case, bisexuality is definitely the norm in brain-possessing species.
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Anyway, I think it's somewhere between what I stated, and what you've stated. What I've learned is that most or all species have bisexual beings in them. What you've learned is that all species are all bisexual. (And, hell, the heterosexists proclaim that no animals are bisexual at all.) I reckon it's somewhere in between.
But no matter. Let's just set that aside as something we'll disagree on. No point in each of us thumping our own bibles and declaring our own god to the the one and only god.
I do stand by my analogy between sexuality and depression, though. Much as I believe circumstances and culture can bring about queerness and depression, I also believe that some people just plain have no choice. These people can choose not to act depressed or not to act on their queerness (or straightness), but they can't choose for the depression or queerness not to exist.