After all, most kids experiment with heterosexuality in college, don’t they? But that was nothing more than a blip in the road. If so, that ‘blip in the road’ has always been a thorn in my flesh. 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.
But that doesn’t feel like an accurate description of my sexual history, either. 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. “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. Take, for example, Cynthia Nixon of Sex and The City fame.
