In 1985, only 24% of American respondents said they had a gay friend, relative or co-worker - in 2013, that number was at 75%. Instead, she suggests it hinges on the fact that far more people are now personally acquainted with someone who is gay. In fact, the homophobic and non-homophobic respondents he studied shared similar levels of belief in a Born This Way ideology.Īs Samantha Allen notes at The Daily Beast, the growing public support for gays and lesbians has grown out of proportion with the rise in the number of people who believe homosexuality is fixed at birth it would be unlikely that this small change in opinion could explain the spike in support for gay marriage, for instance. Patrick Grzanka, Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Tennessee, for instance, has shown that some people who believe that homosexuality is innate still hold negative views of gays. And yet the available research does not support this view. Calling me “idiotic” and “patently absurd”, Aravosis wrote, “The gay haters at the religious right couldn’t have written it any better.”įor Aravosis, and many gay activists like him, the public will only accept and affirm gay people if they think they were born gay. “Every religious right hatemonger is now going to quote this woman every single time they want to deny us our civil rights.” Aravosis leveled the same accusations against me in 2014 when I wrote a piece for The New Republic discussing my own complicated sexual history. The blogger John Aravosis was one of many critics who pounced on Nixon. “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.” In a 2012 interview with New York Times Magazine, the actress casually mentioned that homosexuality was, for her, a choice. Take, for example, Cynthia Nixon of Sex and The City fame. “Such statements,” she writes, “infuse biological accounts with an obligatory and nearly coercive force, suggesting that anyone who describes homosexual desire as a choice or social construction is playing into the hands of the enemy.” People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often cast as homophobic, and their thinking is considered backward – even if they are themselves gay. But what feels most accurate to say is that I’m gay – but I wasn’t born this way.Īs Jane Ward notes in Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, what’s interesting about many of these claims is how transparent their speakers are with their political motivations.
But that doesn’t feel like an accurate description of my sexual history, either. How do I explain that I was honestly in love with a woman? Some people might argue that I am innately bisexual, with the capacity to love both women and men. If so, that ‘blip in the road’ has always been a thorn in my flesh. After all, most kids experiment with heterosexuality in college, don’t they?
But that was nothing more than a blip in the road. Well, you must have been gay the whole time, some might think, and because of some religious shame, you decided to lie to yourself and experiment with a girl. To this day, she and I joke about how she was the only girl I was ever in love with, and how I would’ve been quite happy marrying her.Īs a writer, this kind of complicated story is incredibly interesting to me – mostly because it shows that my own personal history resists the kind of easy classifications that have come to dominate discussions of sexuality. I even went so far as to fall in love with one.
During that time, we both pal’d around with girls on the side.
I came out at a conservative Christian college in the US and was in a gay relationship for around two years with a basketball player who ended up marrying a woman. My sexual journey through college was anything but run-of-the-mill. They weren’t subject to human imagination or experimentation – to the frustration of many sociologists, and kids, like myself, who found themselves inexplicably in bed with a player from the other team. If you happened to engage in activity that ran counter to your sexual identity, then you had two options: you were lying to yourself and everyone else, or you were just experimenting.
#Teen gay sex story full#
It was 2006, a full five years before Lady Gaga would set the Born This Way argument atop its unassailable cultural perch, but even then the popular understanding of orientation was that it was something you were born with, something you couldn’t change. You so obviously cannot be gay, was her implication, because this is good sex. It wasn’t a command - it was a challenge.