APPLES AND ORANGES: Maggie v. Barry
Barry, you merge two ideas of defining who is gay: 1) sexual desire and 2) sexual capacity. One of the downsides to defining anyone who has any measure of feeling towards the opposite sex as bisexual and not gay, is that then you really don't know who is gay. Many men who are calling themselves gay and taking on gay identiites are, in your view, basically deceiving themselves, as are many men who pretend to be straight when they are repressing some measure of attraction to other men. Many staight men, in the right environment, will have sex with other men. Moreoever, any survey of other cultures calls into question this hard division into gay, straight, or bisexual. In many cultures, all men have ritual gay sex and all men also marry women.
You are also ignoring (just logically speaking) a third possibility: sexual desire may itself be more fluid than your boxes permit. Your friend who was happily married and loved his wife and experienced desire for her and then, after she died, fell in love with a man and acquired an exclusively homosexual identity is a prime example. This is not the same as saying people just wake up and choose to be gay. We don't choose our sexual desires. Nonetheless, desire is not hard fact about us, like the color of our eyes. It is a really complex and interesting phenomena. Does that make sense to you?
posted by maggie at
9:49 AM | Link |
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