It was a weird week for the Gay Agenda.  The New Hampshire marriage thing took a sudden, shocking turn, didn't it?  The legislature rejected a bill that would have legalized it because of the pro-marriage-equality camp's objections to added protections the governor has insisted on for religious groups.  According to the New York Times:

As originally passed, the bill exempted members of the clergy from having to perform same-sex weddings. But Mr. Lynch said last week that he would veto the bill unless the legislature added language also exempting religious groups and their employees from such ceremonies.

The governor also wants the bill to protect religious groups and their employees from having to provide same-sex couples with religious counseling, housing designated for married people and other services relating to “the promotion of marriage.”

The end result — that marriage equality legislation has not passed in New Hampshire — may have been the intention of insisting on the "added protections" in the first place. As the Times reports: the "director of Cornerstone Policy Research, a group that opposed the bill, said he saw a new chance for [the bill's] defeat" in the latest developments.  

The chatter in the comment threads at boston.com was just as dispiriting.  Discussion of the New Hampshire plot twist got bogged down when one commenter snarked*:

...since all reseach shows its a Choice, then once we can remove paid for politicians, who put money first rather than the will of the people it will exist. Sad state even worse knowing every politician who voted yes, will be held accountable for giving Choice special privledges, Homosexuals are not a minority, anyone in a class of people who can make a choice Anyone shows it is a choice, once you can show a Down syndrome person choosing to be without it for a day, or black person who can choose to be white, then you have a case, but as long as you have homosexuals who can Choose and Choice does Not make you a Minority

Now, only in cyberspace could that gobbledeegook elicit any kind of serious response, which is what makes boston.com's comment threads such a hoot. Several readers took the bait, as shriveled and bitter as it was.  The issue was choice, and many gay readers chimed in to straighten this one out on that count.  The whole dreadful debate was depressing.  Just reading it made me feel dirty. Comments like this from the pro-gay camp didn't exactly do our team proud:

I would have PREFERRED to be straight, as my life would certainly be a heck of a lot easier, not having to constantly deal with ignorant people like you, but I am not...I am gay. I have CHOSEN to accept this and to make my life as fulfilling as it can be...DESPITE PEOPLE LIKE YOU.

It reminded me of what I assumed was supposed to be a pro-gay tee-shirt I saw for sale online recently:


Talk about mixed messages. 

The pleasing reductionism of the "born gay" versus "chose gay" dichotomy allows us to take sides easily enough, and essentialism allows us to plug into the existing model of "ethnic politics", but for gays it also steamrolls over a long, hard process, as historian John D'Emilio put it, "through which a group of men and women came into existence as a self-conscious, cohesive minority."  We can forget sometimes that gay identity — "being gay" — is more than a sexuality.

It's hard for kids nowadays to conceive of a time when the gay movement largely took a social constructionist view of sexuality, but that's how they rolled back in the seventies.  That we have reached a point where essentialism seems, well, essential to the furtherance of gay rights in America, shows how far towards the mainstream we've moved, and how far to the right the mainstream itself has.  The rigidity of flat-out essentialism diminishes the possibility of empowerment inherent in social constructionism.  It has the sad effect of placing us in a passive, disempowering position at odds with who we really are and how we really got to this point. 

In the arena of civil rights, gays may have earned our victim status.  But we have always had our revenge on society in our absolute cultural dominion over it.  And a rich history of domination it is, that counts among its acknowledged figures some of the greatest conquerors and statesmen, the wisest sages, the most revered artists and craftsmen.  It's not a history of losers.  It's not a history of victims. 

Whatever strange brew of nature and nurture makes us what we are, it's a shame many gays today seem to think that they have to essentially claim a birth defect to gain the same basic rights and protections enjoyed by those who identify as straight.  The fact is, the battle for marriage equality is not about orientation at all — since there are still, and always will be men (mostly of the Republican persuasion), who identify as straight, are straight-married, but who have sex with other men in hotel rooms and airport toilets, declaring in public "I am not, and never have been gay!" — it's about identity.  About those who seek to identify publicly and live openly as gay.  It's not about sex, as it is with men who merely have sex with other men, it's about self and community, and the extraordinary history and culture that gay people share.

The truth of sexual orientation and the expression of sexuality, the interplay of genetic and social identity leaves a lot of wiggle room.  There are certainly cultural factors at play that some proponents of marriage choose to disregard in their strenuous insistence that all homosexuality is genetic. There is arguably such a thing as situational sexuality, common examples of which are prisons, fraternity houses, and pirate ships.  We ignore this aspect of the equation at our own risk.  Just remember: without situational sexuality, porn would be awfully boring. No more "gay-for-pay," no more straight jocks spreading it for Corbin Fisher and Sean Cody. No more sex on pirate ships.  And we don't want that. 

But we don't need porn to make a point.  Anyone who has ever been in love, or even had a mad crush, knows that human attraction is an uncrackable code.  We don't know what we're feeling half the time, and why we feel it the other half.  Complicating matters is the plain fact that attraction is only one of many reasons people engage in acts commonly regarded as sexual.  Sexual acts run the gamut from pure play to savage violence.  From reinforcing social hierarchy to breaking it down.  It is as powerful a tool for humiliation and the destruction of a human being as it is a force of affirmation and new life. 

The role of sex in the irreducible complexity of human relations is the reason every human society has methods to contain sexuality, partly by contextualizing, categorizing, and codifying sexual acts. The difference in postmodern societies is that that process of contextualizing, categorizing, and codifying is exposed, and itself comes under critical scrutiny.  But we risk hubris by thinking that by cataloging sexualities we have mastered one of the deepest, most enduring mysteries of life.  We may know what people are doing, but we don't know why, and neither do they most of the time.  Is it attraction, affection, boredom? Money, power, play? 

I have a feeling that even if we find a gene for homosexuality, and could somehow excise it, you could never eliminate man-on-man sex.  Boys will be boys.  Partly it's anatomy.  Penises are far too accessible, fairly indiscriminate, and lots of fun to play with.  And  too many situational factors lead to casual sex.  And where we draw the boundaries between bromance and true romance is clearly cultural.  In some cultures men embrace, hold hands, and kiss without it being seen as sexual.  In other cultures even the possibility of being seen naked by another man seems to compromise a guy's sexuality (I'm thinking of some of the poor sods in my gym locker room here).

I'm not sure it's as useful or healthy to parse and compartmentalize the components of personality as obsessively as we do in our culture, but it certainly reflects our faith in science to reveal the secrets of the universe.   We are picking apart the genome to find the circuitry and switches of human identity, but the sense of self, and the soul, is an indivisible whole, not merely the sum of its parts.  Its mystery will endure as long as we do.

My sexual consciousness came late, I think, and maybe as a consequence I experienced and conceptualized my otherness — the sense of alienation and isolation we all feel in greater or lesser degrees of intensity at various points in life— in much broader terms than sexuality.  I had begun to think about being "queer" long before experiencing it sexually.  People often ask: "when did it dawn on you that it was because you were gay?" But I suspect (with the social constructionists)  that locating the primary source of difference in sexuality may be peculiar to our place and time.  I find it reductionist and in some ways beside the point.  Sexuality is just one component of personal ontology. 

In my personal history of otherness, sexuality — one of several ways we encounter, communicate, and relate to others — was actually a countervailing force.  It was in intimacy with other men that I felt my first true, open, unobstructed intercourse with the other.  This has grown more complicated with age as my consciousness of the nearly infinite nuances of isolation has impinged on my experience of intimacy, and as the thrill of sex as revelatory I-Thou has given way to the sexual encounter as slog — yet another locus for revealing and reinforcing the rude architecture of social hierarchy, and too often an exercise in dueling egos rather than wild ids. 

Still, my sexuality has given me a valuable mode of experience, an arena for empathy and emotional exploration, and, well, a laboratory for information-gathering.  My life would have been immeasurably less rich and real had I not felt the complex of urges and intuitions that led me into the light, where my humanity could flourish.  But my attraction to and affection for men — again — has always been much more than merely sexual.  It's gotten to where even sex isn't something separate, distinct and momentous — it's another way of communicating who and what we are to one another.  Think of it as conversation, with a happy ending.

Personally, while occasionally I've felt the intensity and persistence of desire itself as an affliction, I've really never regretted I could feel it for men.  Wished I could turn it down a notch?  Yes.  Turn it off?  Never.  My cosmology would collapse.  I've never felt my sexual orientation was an affliction.  It was actually, for the kind of life I was drawn to, an unalloyed asset. Far from making my life more difficult, it was the last piece that made it all fall into place. 

If being gay were just a way of coping with an unfortunate birth defect I suppose we could justify keeping out of sight, as the physically and mentally handicapped were not so long ago expected to do, along with women and queers, all of whom were beaten, bullied, and deprived of a public self. Even if it were just about sex, we could be content with airport toilets.  But here again the essentialist stance, while expedient on some levels, fails to explain why gay rights represent a profoundly positive development in the history of personal freedoms. By assuming and asserting that protections are afforded only the basis of an immutable trait, we essentially accept assimilation over substantive social change.

But if we must, let's at least amend that noxious t-shirt to say: "Homosexuality is a choice: like being tall, dark, and handsome," or "being born a Brahmin," shall we?
_______________________________________________
*As always, punctuation and spelling have been left as I found them.