Sexuality is fluid for many people

IN A friendly letter ("Sexuality can't be shifted"), Darren M. Hellwege, challenges the argument I advance in "Putting Prop 8 on Trial," that sexuality is both fluid and mutable for millions of people.

Understandably, since the Christian Right has raised the barbaric notion of "curing" LGBT people of our "disease," some progressives are stunned to encounter leftists such as myself arguing against what I believe is a rather uncompelling biological determinist argument for sexual orientation.

There is not the space here to flesh out my entire refutation of biological determinism, though I do explore this in depth in my book Sexuality and Socialism.

However, by arguing that our sexuality is fluid, I am simply restating a long-held constructionist understanding that economic and social forces shape the possibility for LGBT identities as we understand them today. I am not arguing that LGBT people can be psycho-babbled out of their desires.

I think it would be useful to quote award-winning, left-wing historian John D'Emlio on the social utility of the essentialist argument that our sexuality is fixed and immutable. This is from an interview I did with him in the International Socialist Review in 2009:

The idea that people are born gay--or lesbian or bisexual--is appealing for lots of reasons. Many of us experience the direction of our sexual desires as something that we have no control over. We just are that way, it seems, so therefore we must be born gay. The people who are most overt in their hatred of queer folks, the religious conservatives, insist that being gay is something we choose, and we know we can't agree with them. Hence, again, born gay.

Liberal heterosexual allies love the idea. If gays are born that way, then of course they shouldn't be punished for it. "Born gay" is also a relief to any of us who have some doubts about our sexuality or who feel ourselves sinking under the weight of the oppression. If we're born gay, then it's not our fault, and we're certainly not choosing to be oppressed: we just can't help it, so leave us alone. It also answers those who worry about the effect of too many out-of-the-closet gay men and lesbians: If people are born this way, then young people won't be influenced by us.

I hope you see where I'm going with this: "born gay" is an idea with a large constituency, LGBT and otherwise. It's an idea designed to allay the ingrained fears of a homophobic society and the internalized fears of gays, lesbians and bisexuals. What's most amazing to me about the "born gay" phenomenon is that the scientific evidence for it is thin as a reed, yet it doesn't matter. It's an idea with such social utility that one doesn't need much evidence in order to make it attractive and credible.

Sherry Wolf, author of Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics and Theory of LGBT Liberation, Chicago