Over the weekend, Frank Bruni at The New York Times weighed in on the internal LGBT community scuffle that Cynthia Nixon set off last week. Why are people gay? Nature, nurture, culture, choice, or some fluid combination thereof? I laid out my point of view here last week: Given that researchers have found women's sexuality to be more fluid than men's and that sexuality is defined and organized differently in different times and places, I wondered whether, in our time, men's appears more fixed because they face the fierce cultural pressure of the masculinity patrol.
Bruni writes:
Born this way.
That has long been one of the rallying cries of a movement, and sometimes the gist of its argument. Across decades of widespread ostracism, followed by years of patchwork acceptance and, most recently, moments of heady triumph, gay people invoked that phrase to explain why homophobia was unwarranted and discrimination senseless....
But is it the right mantra to cling to? The best tack to take?... there are problems with some gay advocates' insistence that homosexuality be discussed and regarded as something ingrained at the first breath.
By hinging a whole movement on a conclusion that hasn't been - and perhaps won't be - scientifically pinpointed and proved beyond all doubt, they hitch it to a moving target.
It's a decent exploration of the politics of that line. I was amused, however, by the fact that the one research study he notes was done only on ... men. Do gay men ever notice that lesbians have had very different experiences in their lives than the boys have?
