I'm sitting here, feeding Snuggle-Bug and reading the news on-line when I spot an article titled: The day I decided to stop being gay. To say the least, the title raised an eyebrow and I was curious. As I read the article, I found myself inwardly sighing with disappointment. It's clear that the author has been struggling with the same binary perspective of human sexuality as so many other people in Western society (among many others) has for generations.
I was disappointed to see the mixture of ambivalence to heterosexuality and mild antagonism to homosexuality peppered liberally thru out his piece. Oh, the writing is very good and this is an editorial, thus an entirely appropriate place to express biases and opinions. I'm not complaining on that front at all. He wrote an excellent article and did a very good job making it both entertaining and easy to read. Two things that I believe are very important in writing a good opinion article. He clearly has a strong grasp of the written word and did a very good job using it to express himself. The author may want to consider doing some more writing on the side of his job as a teacher.
It doesn't change my disappointment, however. I guess I was foolish to think that perhaps he would have taken a more... understanding perspective on sexuality. The perspective he did take was clearly more reasonable then that of people like Pat Robertson and even more reasonable then that of several of my neighbors. Perhaps understanding is not the correct word but rather compassionate.
I am firmly of a mind that being homosexual or heterosexual is not a choice but rather following the inclinations that one has within them. We're built to be attracted to a certain type of person and gender is a component in this attraction. Is it possible for a gay man to be attracted to women? Yes, there may be other factors that override the strong pull of attraction to other men and that is not a bad thing. I don't think this automatically make the gay man heterosexual. Nor do I think that the 'reverse' of a heterosexual being attracted to a person of the same gender as themselves is going to automatically make them homosexual. The terms homosexual and heterosexual are designations of opposite ends of a spectrum.
I think it is rare to find the person who is completely heterosexual or homosexual. I think it is far more common to find people who identify more with the heterosexual or homosexual end of the spectrum because that is the more dominant of their appetites. I also don't think that hetero- and homosexual are going to make up the only spectrum to describe sexuality. I believe that sexuality is an extremely complex and beautiful thing.
There are many, many different aspects to it that we need to accept are just there and it can't be boiled down to a single 'one or the other' point. Even the example of the spectrum is going to fail at some point because there's just going to be too many different factors to keep it all organized. Trying to pinpoint where a person is in their sexual orientation in comparison to everyone else may be possible for that one person. When you start trying to do so for an entire population, let's not even look at the whole of humanity just a group of people, you encounter the same problem that you get when trying to place where each and every electron is around the nucleus of an atom.
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