Straight People Answering A Question Gay People Have Been Asked For Years

Most everyone has seen this video already, but I wanted to make sure it's archived here for posterity - I found it through Upworthy, they found it at Wipe Out Homophobia.

If more straight folk thought about this question and their answer, there might be a whole lot more understanding that being gay (or bi, or straight, or poly) is not a choice or a decision - it's who a person is, at birth, as nature intended.

Watch These Straight People Answer A Question Gay People Have Been Asked For Years

Watching these straight people react to being asked a question that gay people have been asked forever is pretty delightful. If only more people were this empathetic and understanding...

Posted by Rebecca Eisenberg


ORIGINAL: By Travis Nuckolls and Chris Baker (follow Chris on Twitter). Found on Wipe Out Homophobia.

Layers of Sexual Identity - A Meditation

[The picture is of the gender-pop band, Girlyman.]

For many years there has been an interesting phenomenon in my life wherein my "straight" identified friends believe without hesitation that I am, like them, a straight male, and likewise, my gay friends believe that I am a gay man who simply has not decided yet to fully embrace my true nature. I've always found this amusing.

Generally, I do not much think about it until someone asks me if I am straight or gay. Someone asked me that the other day, someone who does not yet know me very well, and I actually had to think about the answer. Often, if asked if I am gay or straight, I answer, "Yes." This time, however, I answered, "No."

For most of the rest of the day, I thought about the various layers of sexual identity in my life. It seems that interpersonal context, social environment, and a host of other factors all play a role in how I perceive my sexual identity and how others perceive it. The reality is that the two seldom are in sync, except among close friends. What follows are a few reasons why that may be so.

(1) Culturally Straight: As far as the mainstream culture is concerned, I am a straight white male who loves sports, who is in a committed relationship with a woman, and who has none of the style skills often associated with gay men (I like athletic shorts or cargo shorts and a plain solid color tee-shirt, and getting me to dress up is on par with getting the GOP to increase taxes on the wealthy). I like to lift heavy weights, break stuff up with a sledge hammer, and watch Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad. Sounds pretty straight.

(2) Culturally Gay: Maybe this is less true now that metrosexuality has been invented, but there was a time when a male who keeps his hair pretty short, stays very physically fit, uses hair care products, uses moisturizer, and prefers to smell like something other than body odor was, by default, gay. Then there is the enjoyment of museums, cooking, poetry, and art films - none of which says straight American male. Oh yeah, AND I am a psychotherapist - a field that is 80% women and involves talking about feelings and holding space for people who are often in severe emotional pain. Sounds pretty gay (and not "gay" in the way kids use the word today).

(3) Not Bisexual: I used to identify as bisexual when I first accepted that I am attracted to men as well as to women. Over the years, however, that label has been inaccurate in a couple of ways.

(A) It feels limiting and it accepts that there are only two sexualities, gay or straight. I reject the notion of binaries in the realm of gender and sexuality (and other areas as well). It's not an either/or choice and it should never be presented as though it is. Sexuality is fluid, as is gender identity (if we allow it to be).

(B) Most of my significant relationships (with a couple of exceptions) have been with women. For a variety of reasons, I find, in general, that I am more compatible with women, probably because I am comfortable with emotions while men (even gay men) often struggle in this realm. I also tend find many more women to be attractive than I do men.

For other men, coming to the point of being able to affirm their bisexuality is a monumental moment in their lives - see this Single Dad Laughing blog post for how difficult this can be. In whatever form people "come out," and in whatever label they choose in the process, revealing a whole other part of ourselves to others is often frightening. When that part of us is still subject to shaming and inequality before the law, it is that much more challenging. Deep bow of respect to Single Dad (Dan) for the courage it took to make his coming out part of his blog.

(4) Gender Fluid: I am clearly and unambiguously a man, biologically. However, I manifest feminine energy as much as masculine energy in my daily life, both of which are context specific. I also experience myself as more gender fluid in my interpersonal relationships, as well as at work (when I am at my psychotherapy job, I sometimes forget I am male unless it becomes part of the conversation [which it does from time to time]).

I am beginning to believe that the masculine/feminine binary is more damaging than helpful. These are poor descriptors of behaviors or traits (all of the psychological or emotional traits assigned to either M or F are essentially human qualities that are available to both sexes).

[By the way: sex is the biological makeup of an individual's reproductive anatomy; gender is an individual's lifestyle, often culturally learned - just so we are clear.]

So What's My Point?

I'm not sure that I have one - but I do think that it's useful to cogitate or meditate on these ideas from time to time. It's also useful to see ourselves and our various identities as objects of awareness rather than being so embedded in them that we are unaware.

My guess is that more and more people have experiences similar to my own these days. Although the mainstream culture is only now warming up to the idea that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered (LGBT) are all real people who deserve equal rights, there are a lot of people on the leading edge of cultural transformation who are beginning to grasp the fluidity of gender and even of sexual identity.

[Another by the way: transgender is not simply transsexual, it's a much broader tent that includes anyone who feels left out by the traditional gender binary (including intersex, the third recognized sex type beside male and female): "The category transgender has no singular, fixed meaning. Rather, it is inclusive of identities and experiences of sex and gender variance, changing, and blending. Although no consensus exists about exactly whom this category includes, nearly all definitions share the use of a metaphorical umbrella, which activists agree is a useful tool for political organizing outside current understandings of binary sex and gender divisions."]

 All of this makes me wonder . . .

I do not believe in the soul or any on-going personal essence that survives death (although I will not go as far as to say there is no such thing - I'm agnostic, so sue me), but I tend to think we all have some form of intangible awareness that is available to us if we seek ways to experience it. Maybe it is a soul, or buddhanature, or higher self, or Atman, or Christ Consciousness - different worldviews have different names for it - but my sense is that it is not gendered.

Okay, this is sounding like dualism, and I reject dualism (I once proposed Singularism back in grad school in the 1990s, before I knew anything about the Singularity hype proposed by Ray Kurzweil and others). So please allow me to clarify: I think we are evolving toward a time when our bodies will be male, female, or intersex, but our identities will not be defined exclusively by our biology (which is largely the case these days for a majority of people). Identity (awareness?) will be influenced or even shaped by our biology, but it will not be defined by it. We will become gender fluid, and with that, sexual identity will be seen as a continuum, not a binary.

I hope . . . . 

Jill Dolan - Do We Need a More Nuanced View of Sexuality?

Writing for Alternet, Jill Dolan responds to the latest LGBT controversy that arose when Sex in the City actress Cynthia Nixon said in an New York Times Magazine interview that she chose to be a lesbian. Here is a brief summary of the issue:

LGBT, feminist and queer theorists such as UC-Berkeley’s Judith Butler and University of Michigan’s Gayle Rubin propose that gender and sexuality in fact aren’t innate, but are chimeras constructed as indisputable fact by ideology and long-established cultural norms. Nixon’s announcement follows their logic. She had a long-term relationship with a man; now she’s in a committed relationship with a woman. She says jokingly that “gay is better,” but that she chose among sexual practices and relationships is most important. 

Here is what she actually said in the interview and, for the record, I agree with her 100%.

“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.” Her face was red and her arms were waving. “As you can tell,” she said, “I am very annoyed about this issue. Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.”

The LGBT community is afraid - and rightfully so - that for Nixon to declare that her sexual relationship is a choice is to allow the conservatives to say, "See, it is a choice, and it's an immoral choice that deserves no recognition under law.

The gay community holds to the biology argument as strongly as the conservatives hold to the immorality argument - both are essentially fundamentalist arguments that hold to the belief that sexual identity is a binary, you're either gay or you're straight, and it's not a choice.

But it's not a binary - as noted in the article from Dilon, there is a large part of our gender identity and sexual preference that is socially constructed. When identity is socially constructed, there is a uniqueness to each person's relational experience, environmental influence, and biology. There are no either/or constructs in this wider perspective.

Dilon's article includes the following passage in support of Nixon:

Nixon’s insistence that she’s making a choice about her sexuality is doubly radical. She’s refusing to submit to conservative constructions of sexuality that make heterosexuality the only appropriate expression of desire and she’s advocating for a rights-based argument that isn’t rooted in biology but in practice and experience. The old models of lifelong, unwavering sexual orientation no longer adequately describe the multiplicity and fluidity of sexual practices and choices.

Exactly. Sexual preference and expression is much more fluid than most people know or - in the case of conservatives - are willing to accept about themselves.

Slate Reviews Hanne Blank's "Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality"

I knew that the term homosexual was a relatively recent invention (the word was "coined, in 1868, by a pamphleteer opposed to the laws against "unnatural fornication" being written into the Prussian penal code"), and this book - Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality - looks in detail at that topic. [This is not to say that the behaviors we identify as homosexual are new - they aren't - only that we did not have specific words to classify them as somehow different than other forms of sexual expression.]

However, she also looks at the way our sexual orientation is created through absorption of social norms - we do not consciously create our heterosexuality as much as we inherit it. True, much of it seems to be biological, which it even more striking that people can override their "indoctrination" to identify for themselves how their sexual preferences are enacted.

This sounds like a very good book.

No Hetero: Hanne Blank’s lively history of straights.

By Troy Patterson | Posted Thursday, Feb. 9, 2012

How much of sexual orientation is what we've been taught to call ourselves?

You quondam liberal-artists out there—veterans of lit-crit and queer theory, men and womyn formerly fluent in what Said said and all that Lacan cant—may yet remember that we live our lives according to a system of social constructs. The idea of race did not exist until colonialism required it. The notion of the self was thoroughly obscure until the Enlightenment dawned. The teenager didn't exist until the Industrial Revolution told him to get off its lawn.

Now from Hanne Blank comes a chewy piece of scholarship—Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Beacon)—that puts a spin on the hip-hop catchphrase "no homo," explaining that there was no hetero until social science and pseudo-science invented a need in the middle of the 19^th century. Anyone who's done time at a British public school or a progressive women's college can tell you that matters of sexual orientation are not strictly either/or. But this book twirls that “/” with panache, spinning a generous handful of yarns about the stories we tell ourselves about sex, love, and identity.

Straight covers an impressive bit of social-historical ground despite being, true to its subtitle, a compact production. It runs 264 pages, including index and footnotes. There are no illustrations, lamentably, so let's start with the author bio. Hanne Blank is "an independent scholar," earlier the author of Virgin: The Untouched History, and her "work has been featured everywhere from Out to Penthouse"—a gamut that would seem to exclude both Oui and Playgirl. She is, on the evidence, a rigorous thinker. Tracing the history of the word heterosexual and homosexual—coined, in 1868, by a pamphleteer opposed to the laws against "unnatural fornication" being written into the Prussian penal code—she is calm and clear. Tracing the way those coinages and the ideas animating them radiated into general discourse—by way of Kraft-Ebbing and Kinsey and Freud—she is deft and nimble. Shuttling back and forth through time to chat about related issues—including matrimony and sodomy, the economics of nonsexual bed-sharing and the history of romantic love—she exhibits the handsome confidence of a popular historian. And dragging herself into it, she uses a light touch to make us question the pronoun she.

In the acknowledgements, Blank thanks her partner for "being such such a good sport about being made into a framing device for a history book." The author is a woman who claims "no deep personal attachment to labeling myself in terms of sexual orientation," and her better half is, in terms of sexual organs, a man. But does the manhood make the man? He is diagnosed with Klinefelter Syndrome, "one of the most common sex-chromosome anomalies," meaning that his DNA reads XXY. His looks are androgynous, and his testicles are no help to the perpetuation of the species, but everything's peachy … until you start wondering whether this couple's love would traditionally be allowed to speak its name.

It would be orthodox to say that he is a man and that their relationship is heterosexual, but Blank is most compelling when talking about doxa. One of her few resorts to jargon, it’s a necessary one. "When anthropologists talk about this 'stuff everyone knows,' " she writes, "they use the term doxa. Doxa comes from the Greek for 'common knowledge,' and that's a pretty good description of what it is: the understanding we absorb from our native culture that we use to make sense of the world. … We all create it, together, mostly unintentionally." The doxa of straightness was created by tribal leaders and trial lawyers, by old wives and Viennese witch doctors, and it is being created by me as I write and you as you read. Blank has some questions for us, and they originated, it seems, with an intimate inquiry she confronts at the health clinic when wondering which box to tick, "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," "transgender," or "heterosexual."

The book's impetus may be personal but its passions are strictly philosophical. One mission of Straight is to argue with people identified, with a Cornel West flourish, as "our right-wing brothers and sisters"—some of whom, mostly scarily those running for president, assert that heterosexuality is all about procreation. But Black's argument isn't against them. Rather, it's an engagement with the whole system of thought that allows and encourages right and left wings to take flight.

If I fail to convey the book's central point, that is because the book has no center. It's possible that Blank isn't the tenure-track type because her prose style is too good for too many of the departments that go in for her kind of thing—too free of weedy rhetoric to take root in the groves of academe. But also, Blank, though eminently reasonable, is not committed to sustained linear reasoning. The book hops among a useful riddle about "marked categories" (if we say that prude is the opposite of slut, then what are we saying about the person who is neither?), some thoughts on a court case involving the jazz pianist Billy Tipton (a woman who passed as a man, which was news to his widow), and a consideration of the metaphorical "wide stance" of Larry Craig ("he straddled the border of what was permissible for a man in a position of power"). Elsewhere, there are mini-essays on the cultural shift from courting to dating, the Defense of Marriage Act, the advent of no-fault divorce. … It's all smart, and it's all over the place.

And there are wrinkles in the text that would have benefited from the steam-ironing of peer review. Blank, for instance, spends time fruitfully considering degeneration—a perversion of Darwin that lay behind some lethal pseudo-science—but she neglects to mention the famous Max Nordau book of that title. But am I succumbing to the tyranny of doxa in lodging such complaints? Isn't there something perfect in the fact that Straight zigzags in connecting its dots?