Zach Howe: Against Being Born This Way

 Full title of Howe's column on Blunderbuss is: "I’m Queer & So Are You: Against Being Born This Way." An excerpt:

What a travesty we have made of a movement for sexual liberation! By refusing to question our sexuality—I was born this way, now leave me alone!—queers are often just as resistant to deviance as the straights we’re supposedly freeing ourselves from. Gay men talk a lot about our sexual development—when did you come out, what did your parents say, did you ever sleep with a woman? Countless men, learning that I have not only slept with a woman but was desperately in love with one for four years, have challenged me to prove I’m really gay—when was the last time you slept with a woman? Are you still into that? You’re not like bi are you?

Listen to yourselves. You sound like straight people.

Cynthia Nixon on homosexuality as a choice

From the wonderful blog, A Paper Bird.

Recently, Cynthia Nixon gave a speech in which she said that her sexuality (gay) is a choice. This set off a lot of criticism from within the LGBT community. A Paper Bird defends here. Here are some excerpts.

"First of all, no one should be forced to surrender their personal identity to political obligation. That’s the antithesis of a liberal society, and has nothing to do with any campaign for human rights. Second, no one has the right to decide or define anybody else’s sexuality for them — to select, for God’s sake, what you can say about yourself...

The problem is that, in the US, we — the LGBT movement — have staked all our rights claims on the analogy with race. We are a people; we have our own culture and history, even though the categories that define us (so we contend) don’t; and, most importantly, our selves, like our skin colors, cannot change. Sexual orientation is something deep, unalterable, basic. It’s because it’s unchangeable that discrimination predicated on it is so wrong. And so we’re not defending people’s freedom; we’re defending their imprisonment in themselves.

It’s when people try to escape that prison, even for a day’s parole, that we treat them as traitors to the cause.

Of course, this kind of argument is absurd — even about race. It ignores the innumerable historical experiences of “passing,” the different ways that white as well as black people have been defined, the differences in race’s definition around the world...

supposing “sexual orientation” is unchangeable ignores the fact that the category itself has changed since it was invented, and that it was only invented a hundred years or so ago. Sexuality, as Foucault grasped, doesn’t reveal some “truth” about us...

In the politics of identity, bisexuals are hated because they stand for choice. The game is set up so as to exclude the middle; bisexuals get squeezed out. in the “LGBT” word, the “B” is silent...The business of “outing,” of which Aravosis has been an eloquent proponent, also revolves around the excluded middle...

What, moreover, if sexual orientation itself is not “a deep trait felt to be at the core of one’s being,” one that people miraculously started feeling in 1869, when the word “homosexual” was coined?...

What if our model for defending LGBT people’s rights were not race, but religion? What if we claimed our identities were not something impossible to change, but a decision so profoundly a part of one’s elected and constructed selfhood that one should never be forced to change it?"