sexual identities and choice

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Wed, 11 Mar 1998 00:40:37 -0500

Very interesting discussion on many aspects of sexuality/identity issues,
especially the cross-perceptions, and mythologies, of the imaginary
gay/straight divide. (It's imaginary in the Lacanian sense as a conceptual
construct, and imaginary also in the ideological sense of serving socially
dysfunctional and covert ends, though it is also real to the extent that
some people identify with a gay community, and those who do not do so react
to it _as_ a community or subculture.)

I was especially intrigued by the points about "choice". As I think I'd
noted once before, there was a big political struggle in the 80s over
whether "being gay" was a matter of choice or inevitability, a "preference"
or an "orientation". Some christian theologians, and a lot of
fundamentalists, seemed to think that if it was a choice it was sinful, but
if it wasn't it was just a misfortune. What then became sinful was not
being celibate; if you can't help wanting, you can at least not do anything
about it. Interesting data on the fundamentalist minority subculture.

People have studied the life-histories of individuals who have wound up
identifying as "gay" by one definition or another. Some retrospectively,
some during the critical transitional years, thought to be the early teens,
though I've heard many people claim they were pretty clear at least about
the objects of their desire at much younger ages. My sense from all this
(and there is not enough yet to generalize too much), is that some people
at first feel "different", and are perhaps made to feel that way by how
others treat them or react to them, or react to what they say and do, or
their manner (cf. the story told here about the young girl who wanted a
girlfriend as a "husband").

Knowledge of the cultural categories for sexual identity is systematically
kept from children, though it leaks through via the peer group, usually in
negative form. The connection between being different and berated for it,
and sexuality itself, is more elusive, and perhaps recognized only later.
The sense of desire, as orientations or preferences, is often earlier,
though many people go through different phases in which desire is not
definitively attached to sex or gender (if it ever is -- few people find
others sexually attractive just because of their sex or gender category,
what is actually desired is usually more specific and often more
idiosyncratic).

But eventually society offers a "non-choice" in its own narrow terms to
people who do not make an explicit choice for a non-default sexual identity
or orientation: you are assumed heterosexual until proven otherwise, and
encouraged at every turn to make the "easy" non-choice to go along with the
heteronormative practices that are nearer 99.9% of what one sees (and more
so until quite recently) and hears about than the 80-90% that would be more
realistic even in these dichotomous terms. The gay option is kept distant,
nearly invisible, stigmatized, and in semiotic terms "marked" -- you have
to make a definite choice or decision. An interesting analogy here arises
again in christian theology: if you grow up, say, Roman Catholic, it is
just assumed that you are a christian, it is the unmarked path; if you are
a Protestant fundamentalist, however, you are supposed to make a strongly
marked "decision for Christ", and not just follow the path of least
resistance into taken-for-granted, guess-I-must-be christianity.

To even privately, much less publicly, self-identify as gay tends to
require, in society's learned terms, a fair bit of soul-searching and
decision. Thus, traditionally in modern European societies, only fairly
strongly self-identifying people registered themselves as definitively gay.
A lot more were lackadaisically heterosexual with some homoerotic desires.
Some were fiercely heterosexual, and homophobic, with (maybe) suppressed
homoerotic desires (an artifact of the stigma, the dichotomy, and the
danger being or being thought to be not heterosexual). Many were probably
bisexually-capable and simply found it easier to live heterosexually. The
higher society set the choice threshold and its associated costs, the more
people who just found it easier to "be" or "pass for" straight.

But that is just "choice" in the sense that a categorization decision is
forced on you which may or may not easily fit your experience and feelings.
It is a bit more paradoxical to ask whether people have a choice about what
they desire, or what they spontaneously feel. Here again falls the shadow
of a lot of christian theology which maintains that people morally ought to
_want_ only what is socially accounted as the good or the right ("sinning
in your heart", the basis of the christian guilt-culture), as opposed to
other moral theories which say that it's ok to want something nasty as long
as you _do_ only the right thing. Many fundamentalist christians believe
that commitment to Christ in their special sense alters what we desire
(this may even be so, for some of them). One can explore these issues
introspectively by asking whether you feel you have a choice as to whether
you find someone sexually attractive or not. We may have some conscious
ability to modulate these desires, or even to talk ourselves out of (more
rarely into?) desiring someone, but the initial sense of desire, or more
generally of emotional-physical response to someone, does seem to me rather
spontaneous and un-chosen (though just as culturally mediated as any other
feeling or perception).

Further complicating this issue are the linkages which communities create
among desires, actions, lifestyles, subcommunity membership, and subculture
identification. There are those who desire but do act on the desire, at
least not to the point that a community counts as definitively sexual.
Those who desire and act, but otherwise are indistinguishable in all other
aspects of their lives. Those who adopt a lifestyle, but do not participate
in a subcommunity. Those who participate but do not identify with the
dominant subculture of that subcommunity. Every step in this chain is a
different kind and degree of being Gay, and the latter ones are more
clearly matters of choice than the primary ones. Note again that while the
same linkages exist for heterosexuals, the entire complex is unpresented as
a non-choice.

Historically and cross-culturally there has been no agreement (not
surprisingly) about what the core criteria for sexuality categories are. As
discussed here before, they are multi-dimensional in practice, but
ideologies privilege some dimensions and assume that all the others line up
dependently and in parallel, when in fact they are often independent and
contradictory. The dominant modern eurocultural ideology is based on the
one-sex/one-gender oversimplification, so that heterosexual is like/unlike
and homosexual is like/like. This falls apart when you discover that there
are many more than just two categories for each of: biological sex (by
chromosome, by sex organs, by brain dimorphisms), psychosocial gender (by
desire, by identity, by social categorization, by behaviors; all crossed
with class, age, ethnicity), and criteria of desire (sexual phenotype,
behavior style, somatotype, age, ethnicity, personality, sexual orientation
identification, etc., etc.).

In some social classes, and some (including European) cultures, behavior is
more important than desire, and different behaviors are centrally
criterial: active vs. passive roles or position-preferences (bizarre again
to dichotomize anything so varied and complex!), or behavioral style
(voice, mannerisms, dress, social role choices). There are many cultures,
and from what I've read it was the dominant view in all European social
classes until the last century or so) in which only the combination of
'effeminacy' and 'anal/oral receptive' behavior counted as [the 'queer'
category] in males. Perhaps it is just less studied, but few societies seem
to have made equally specific ado over what does or does not make one a
lesbian. Perhaps not surprisingly men only considered the behavior of other
men to be of so much importance. Where homophobia is a social tool to
enforce conformity on males, its consequences may have been historically
more critical (e.g. keeping young working class males oriented towards war
and hard manual labor to 'prove' their manhood/masculinity in the face of
the possibility that one could be male but still 'not a real man'
otherwise). One wonders if in societies where there was a shortage of
available and appropriate women for dominant males to possess and/or breed
with (forgive the atavism), lesbianism was more precisely defined,
saliently stigmatized and sanctioned? Or perhaps during periods when women
were beginning to infiltrate traditional male preserves (e.g. the famous
post-war 1940s and 50s, when in the U.S. "Rosie the Riveter" was sent back
to the Pillsbury kitchen)?

All the inherent contradictions in these normative systems of categories
regarding sexuality leaves plenty of room for denial and slippage and
resistance. Studies of male-for-male hustlers show that most of them claim
to be heterosexual, many have girlfriends, and some consider that the
active (i.e. insertive, if not always assertive)role is is no way gay.
Ditto sailors, prisoners, male-on-male torturers, etc. etc. Yet equally
many if not most of them have full sexual response with and to other males.

When you consider all the ways in which it is possible to be sexually
'abnormal' by desire or action, even in heterosexual contexts (anal sex,
sado-masochism, fetishism, desiring people too old or too young, desiring
the wrong race, or people who are too fat/skinny, or deformed/paraplegic;
wanting sex too often or not often enough, being too loud or too quiet
about it, preferring videos or masturbation to or with partners; liking it
underwater or on airplanes, or in public places; etc., etc.) ... it seems
pretty certain that the vast majority of all of us must have at least some
'queer' desires of one sort or another ... and that the definition for
being completely sexually 'normal' describes at most a rather small
minority. Clearly such definitions serve other social functions.

JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
---------------------------