Same-sex male attraction used to be something you do, not something you are. We are not two separate tribes
On the margins of bigger news in recent days have been three
little stories that caught my attention. The Mayor of London has reportedly
stepped in to stop a Christian evangelical group advertising on London buses
their claim that people can be “cured” of being homosexual.
It seems that, depending on your point of view, God, a stroke or a broken neck can turn you gay, help you to be gay or make you straight. On one thing, though, these opinions all agree — people can change.
And (gulp) I think that’s true. I will be misinterpreted; I may give comfort to wrongheaded evangelicals; gay friends may think I’m letting the side down ... but I do believe that male sexual orientation is less fixed than we suppose. It may alter. We gays fought that idiotic “section 28” on dishonest grounds. Homosexuality can, as the statute implied, be “promoted”. So can heterosexuality. It always has been, with much success.
At once must come the qualifications. I don’t think that everyone is alterable. I don’t think change is possible without shelving part of one’s nature. I think that it’s generally unwise to fight a strong orientation unless it would lead to hurt. And I absolutely don’t think that homosexuality can be “cured” in the sense of expelling some kind of disease from the system.
But what I do believe — know beyond any shadow of doubt — is that the previous century took Western thinking on sexuality in a very false direction, and that this has seriously skewed the way in which we think about sexual attraction. It’s difficult even to discuss it in the language our parents bequeathed us. We are not two tribes — the straight and the gay.
It’s inherently most improbable that evolution would have produced two entirely distinct models of the human male, and it hasn’t. That view is quite recent. Prejudice against male homosexual behaviour is as old as Man, but the categorisation of a whole section of males as “homosexuals” (or indeed “heterosexuals”) was 20th-century and it’s simply a mistake.
Before the late Victorians and for almost all recorded history, humanity described male same-sex attraction as a kind of habit, a diversion to which any man might be prone and into which any might be led — something men do as opposed to something men are. Some were known to be more prone to this habit than others, but the elevation of a habit to the status of an identity, “gay” or “straight”, would have struck our ancestors as weird.
It is weird. It flies in the face of the evidence staring us in the face. Try an experiment. Imagine that a majority of men are more straight than gay, a minority more gay than straight. Imagine this in terms of a scatter-graph from left (straight) to right (gay), with some very close to one end, some very close to the other and plenty spread between them. Imagine that those at either pole can feel little if any attraction to the other; but that those between the poles can, depending on where they are, feel weakly or strongly the attraction of both poles. Add to this picture a strong and unremitting social pressure to be considered (and consider yourself) as being at the left-hand (straight) end.
What would be the result? Everyone who, without making themselves too frustrated and miserable, could live a straight life would move towards the left in their behaviour and self-description; a minority who felt they just couldn’t would cluster (partly for self-defence) into a sort of ghetto at the right-hand end. And all the pressure would be to “make your mind up”, ie, shift towards the nearest pole.
Consider how much observed behaviour my hypothesis explains. It explains why in self-description the apparent straight-gay dichotomy has arisen. It explains why until about yesterday there didn’t seem to be many gays, and suddenly they’re everywhere. It explains how throughout history most men with homosexual inclinations have married, many happily, many with a fair degree of physical attraction to their wives; and all of them down the ages with every reason to shut up about it. And it explains the strange and unwitting conspiracy between the world of macho heterosexuality and the world of gay pride to make a no man’s land — to deny the very existence — of all that territory in between. For different reasons, neither side wants to believe they could ever have been located there, that they ever had a choice. Bisexuality has been the love that dared not speak its name.
That my hypothesis has explanatory power doesn’t of itself make it true; evidence is required, yet the hypothesis explains why systematic evidence would be hard to gather. Asking men about their own desires — or studying publicly observable behaviour — is likely to deliver skewed results.
Do I then have anecdotal evidence? I hate talking about my own sexual behaviour and my experience is hardly extensive, but I’ll say only this. Without ever seeking the type out, I’ve slept with as many men who considered themselves basically straight, lived basically straight lives and in some cases (I think) really were basically straight, as with men who were self-identifying gays.
This is not my experience alone. Most gay men manage the considerable intellectual contortion of believing that there’s nothing they could do to alter their own sexuality while at the same time believing (not without evidence) that there’s quite a lot they might do to alter a straight man’s sexuality (“five pints of lager” is the usual prescription). As for altering a gay man’s sexuality, women would know most about this, and women don’t talk. Even I, who feel myself to be exclusively gay, know from dreams and from occasional involuntary physical reactions that shelved somewhere in my unconscious must be a strand of heterosexuality. Millions of gay men will have the same experiences.
But most will be disinclined to mention it. Both sides — straights and gays — have strong reason to deny (not least to themselves) that they ever had a choice: the straights because gay inclinations were disapproved of; the gays because infinitely their most persuasive way of commanding tolerance has always been the (I believe) subtly self-oppressive: “It’s the way I am — nothing I can do about it — part of my identity — it isn’t my fault.”
“I can’t help it”. The very words carry a kind of whimper. I hate this plea. It isn’t accepted as an argument for paedophilia and shouldn’t be. I’d want to be gay whether I could help it or not. The day that the battle for homosexual equality is won and over will be the day a man, straight or gay, can boast that he chose.
