On choosing to be gay
I chose to be gay.
I don’t mean that I necessarily chose to have the particular desires, inclinations, or preferences that I do (although I certainly don’t regret those). But acting on them – which means having sex with men, pursuing relationships with them, taking part in some of the various social and sexual subcultures that make up gay life, cultivating an overwhelmingly queer social life – all of these are choices, and they are choices I happily continue to make in my life.
It’s understandable why some might be hesitant to join me in this claim. The slogan that we are ‘born this way’ was and is, partly, a strategic one meant to refute the belief that underpins conversion practices: that people can be trained or coerced away from gayness with no negative repercussions. From a Christian perspective, the insistence that gayness is innate and not a choice seems to carry particular theological weight: if God, who fearfully and wonderfully made me in Their image, made me like this, then (the thinking goes) it can’t be simply dismissed as inherently sinful and destructive; it must have some larger significance.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that its practical applications and consequences still tend to leave queer people in the lurch. Grace E. Lavery once pointed out, in an essay for her now-defunct Substack newsletter, that, in the hands of many Christian communities, ‘born this way’ is a way of recasting homosexual desire as something to be regulated and managed, in a way that places it in disturbing proximity to something like pedophilia. (At the time, Lavery and her husband, the writer Daniel M. Lavery, were at the forefront of a whistleblowing campaign against Daniel’s father, John Ortberg, popular theologian and then-pastor of San Francisco’s Menlo Church, due to Ortberg’s coverup and dangerous mishandling of a pedophilia scandal at the church.) As an apologetics for queer inclusion in the church, a ‘born this way’ stance may require queer people to disavow any pleasure or enjoyment we might derive from our desires or from pursuing their fulfilment, reassuring the rest of the congregation that of course we wouldn’t choose to be gay, no one would choose that, but doesn’t the church have a responsibility to accept us for who we are regardless?
At best, the response this strategy most often generates from straight people is resignation – gee, they tried their best to be normal but they just can’t seem to help themselves (the poor dears!) so we might as well accept them! At worst, as the Menlo Church scandal showed in devastating detail, it serves to both extend a view of homosexuality as a sexual pathology, and excuse a multitude of real and potential abuses by equating them with queerness. (That the Laverys both describe themselves as transsexual was used, implicitly in official statements by the church and more explicitly by many who took part in harassment campaigns on the church’s behalf, as grounds to minimize and dismiss their case against Ortberg.)
In college the most common ‘progressive’ stance on homosexuality that circulated around my insular Christian campus was that being gay wasn’t sinful, but as far as acting on gay desires was concerned, people were split. It was a topic anxiously debated in dorm hall common rooms, ethics seminars, and in a poetry seminar where one brave professor assigned us a collection of homoerotic verse to study (Richard Siken’s Crush, if you’re curious). At college chapel services, anonymous prayer request after anonymous prayer request confessed ‘struggles with homosexuality’, and a fear of mentioning this to any friends at the risk of ostracism.
In the late spring of my sophomore year, when my parents came up to Pennsylvania to help me move my things back down to South Carolina for the summer, the campus was awash with media controversy over the brutal mistreatment of a gay student by their classmates and even some college staff. Closeted as I was at the time, even to myself, the extent to which these events upset me surprised me; it certainly surprised my parents, who tried to gently reaffirm to me, over pancakes at Baker’s diner, their stance that while gay people should be treated more kindly, Christianity taught that homosexual behaviour was sinful. Surely the student should have known that before enrolling at Messiah? ‘Some Christians don’t believe that!’ I blurted out, once again surprising myself and feeling like some threshold I wasn’t ready to cross had been breached. In my mind at the time there was me and then there were gay people; I could remember well the times that my parents had expressed visceral disgust at any sign of affection displayed between gay couples on TV. While my mom’s stance on gayness would soften considerably a couple of years later, and my dad would follow suit a few years after that, conditioned as I was by such an environment, how could living a gay life be anything other than a conscious choice?
To affirm that I chose to be gay is to bear witness to the fact that coming out takes effort, that there is meaningful work involved in naming and pursuing gay desires in a society that pressures people towards straightness. It is to recognize that being gay, by any reasonable metric applied in society at large, consists in large part in acting on gayness. It is to choose to align myself with those I once considered ‘others’. I still remember the first time I said ‘we’ rather than ‘they’ in reference to queer people in a conversation, how it felt strange and terrifying and invigorating on my lips. To go a step further and say that even if I had complete agency over all my desires that I would choose gayness, is also to reject the notion that queerness is a bad or less preferable outcome than straightness. It is to willingly give up the ‘struggle’ with homosexuality to see what possibilities other than struggle might emerge.
In the face of renewed legal attacks on queer existence and right-wing smears against queer people that paint us as ‘groomers’ trying to turn children gay, or trans, one strategy adopted by online queers has been to try to assuage straight people’s fears. ‘We’re not trying to turn your straight kids gay,’ one Instagram infographic responding to Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law proclaimed; ‘we’re trying to make sure gay kids survive.’ ‘Queerness isn’t about sex’, and ‘drag isn’t inherently sexual’ go other popular online refrains, attempting to protect queerness from accusations of sexual excess and promiscuity.
To which I say (in my best Natasha Lyonne impression): bullshit. The truth is that living in a straight society, in which every person is presumed straight until proven otherwise, means that to be gay necessitates choices, actions, and life changes that often look from the outside – and might even feel from the inside! – like ‘turning gay’, regardless of what age we are when those acts take place. And how are we to know that such things are viable, and that they can be part of a livable life, without the influence of someone else to show us? And is that so bad? Would it be so terrible for there to be more gay kids in the world?
Queer people are right to dispel accusations of grooming and pedophilia and to distance our public practices of our sexualities and gender presentations from them; that much I want to make clear. But if queerness isn’t about sex, or at the very least our relationship to broader systems of sex/gender classification, then I struggle to see what it’s about. (And what’s so bad about promiscuity, anyway?) My own very delayed coming-out was spurred on by a straight-passing relationship that was moving much too fast for my comfort, during which it suddenly occurred to me that sex with another man, if it was the right man, might be something I’d be open to. I was hit by a sudden wave of sadness that I might never experience sex with men, and gradually realized that sex with men was something I wanted very much. Men were beautiful, and I wanted to have sex with them, and not voicing that desire and acting on it became unbearable.
The older I get, I’m less interested in questions of who I essentially ‘am’ (if that even exists) and more interested in what I want in my life, what shapes those wants, and how to build a life that enables me to honour and potentially pursue those desires. That many of the social contexts I have existed in have sought to affirm a nebulous sense of ‘being gay’ while still regulating and discouraging certain forms of gay behaviour signals to me that my gayness, and the stigma that haunts my gayness, is not primarily about who I am or even ‘who I love’: it is about the things I want and the things I do to get them; in other words, about the fact that I want to have sex with men, the fact that I do, and the fact that I enjoy it.
These questions of what we want and how we build lives around them came up recently in a lengthy car-ride with my husband and some close friends back to Glasgow from the Highlands near Oban where we’d been spending the weekend with some other friends. As the winding, hilly road unspooled before us we talked about our relationships, how we navigate them, how we discuss the shapes we want them to take with our respective partners, the myriad complicated ways those wants interface with the state and the legal system and immigration. ‘Light chat for a Sunday afternoon drive!’ one of my friends joked. My friends’ car wound through wooded stretches of road, small villages, and sprawling lochs. From behind the wheel, my other friend, who had a similar evangelical upbringing to mine, reflected on the trepidation she and her siblings felt about sharing big life decisions, and how this behaviour corresponds to the immense weight that evangelical culture places on choice and commitment. To evangelicals, she said, every commitment rises to the status of sacred, eternally binding covenant; even small choices and personal changes signify massive and permanent declarations of who we are, what we value, what life will be like from now on. To make the ‘wrong’ choice, even a small one, is catastrophic.
My friend’s insights allowed me to reflect with more clarity on the anxiety and hesitation that has sometimes seized me in the past when it comes to actually acting on my gay desires. I thought about my initial reluctance to get on the apps when I first came out; the hookup I backed out on even though he seemed like a sweet man and looked like kissing him would’ve been amazing; romantic overtures from older men that I wilfully ignored despite my curiosity; the times I’d shut down when affection with boyfriends seemed to be progressing towards sex; the times I felt unable to say what I wanted or liked even during sex. Moments when I was unable to say or pursue what I wanted because those momentary desires pressed on me with the weight of covenant – and the significance of covenants within the evangelical purity culture that shaped my relationship to sex in particular – rather than as things I could explore or learn through trial and error. I definitely also dodged some bullets in some of these moments of hesitation … but maybe not for the right reasons.
The logic of ‘born this way’ narratives of queer acceptance implies that we should be given rights, livelihood, a seat at the table, because we were born this way, leading to the further implication that we would not deserve those things if this were not the case. Trans people already know the consequences of this line of reasoning all too well, given the steep financial, legal, and medical barriers to some aspects of transition and the recent widespread attempts to block reforms and crack down even more draconically on access to healthcare and public space. If both gayness and transness are often demonized as ‘unnatural’, homosexuality’s response has often been, tragically, to distance itself from transness by declaring itself as natural. Transness, perhaps especially trans healthcare, more visibly bears witness to the reality that biology is not destiny, that the body and identity as defined by hegemonically-inscribed views of ‘nature’ are in fact mutable. Because of this, it comes under fire for the ways it insists upon desire for a certain type of life as a shaping force in identity formation, and demands greater agency in the pursuit, experimentation with, and fulfilment of those desires.
In a recent op-ed for The Guardian reflecting on the benefits of his transition, Jackson King speculates that one of the reasons for the current anti-trans moral panics in the UK and the U.S. is that
when queer and trans individuals choose not to abide by the rigid rules of cisheterosexuality, it throws into relief just how many people are unhappy adherents to behavioural norms thrusted upon them […] a bit like accepting you can’t have your cake and eat it, while someone next to you scoffs down Victoria sponge and loudly smacks their buttercream-laced lips. You can either more rigidly follow and enforce the rules handed down to you, or question what’s so wrong with having your cake and eating it in the first place.
I’m cisgender, but King’s comments resonate with my understanding of queerness and transness as not synonymous, but necessarily interconnected in their contentious relationships to sex/gender norms. The seeds for my emerging sense of gay selfhood and queer politics were sown by conversations with a trans friend in my study group during my Master’s degree over coffee and cake, and my queer social life continues to be enriched by trans community. So many of the material and legal barriers and oppositions that face queer and trans people stem from a fear of choice. The reality is that if something doesn’t seem to fit your life, you can try to change it; if you’re curious about something, you can try it, even if it breaks with what you think you know about yourself. You can go on a date or have sex with someone of the same gender. You can explore going on hormones. You can paint your nails or wear a skirt or cut your hair short. You can kiss a stranger at a club. You don’t need to demand a seat at that table; you can sit with us, our table is long and it is wide and it is bountiful. You can still find ways to surprise yourself. You can pursue a different kind of life. Not everything you try might be your cup of tea, and not all of the paths you can choose will be easy – some of them may be very costly indeed. But what you find might be worth the costs.
In the car, with my husband and my friends, I also thought about the weekend I had just had, watching the Eurovision final in its campy glory with friends of all different ages who were all different varieties of queer, wearing a leather fetish harness that previously, only my husband had ever seen me wear, over a black mesh see-through top. In spite of my inhibitions and my tendency to get in my own way, I’ve managed to cultivate a pretty gay life regardless, and it’s a life I’ll continue to choose and defend.