Born this gay

Is sexuality purely the result of our biology? Brandon Ambrosino argues that simplistic explanations have ignored the fluid, shape-shifting nature of our desires. You so obviously cannot be gaywas her implication, because this is good sex. 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.

The sexual categories were rigid. My sexual journey through gay was anything but run-of-the-mill. 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 born up marrying a woman. I even went so far as to fall in love with one.

As 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. Well, you must have been gay the whole timesome might think, and because of some religious shame, you decided to lie to yourself and experiment with a girl.

But that was nothing more than a blip in the road. 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. In a interview with New York Times Magazine, the actress casually mentioned that homosexuality was, for her, a choice.

The blogger John Aravosis was one of many critics who pounced on Nixon. For Aravosis, and many gay activists like him, the public will only accept and affirm gay people if they think they were born gay. And yet the available research does gay support this view. Patrick Grzanka, Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Tennessee, for instance, has shown that some people who believe that homosexuality is innate still this negative views of gays.

In fact, the homophobic and non-homophobic respondents he studied shared similar levels of belief in a Born This Way ideology. As Samantha Allen notes at The Daily Beastthe born 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 this could explain the spike in support for gay marriage, for instance.

Instead, she suggests it hinges on the fact that far more people are now personally acquainted with someone who is gay. In spite of these studies, those who push against Born This Way narratives have been heavily criticised by gay activists. Drowning out every voice that dares to question dominant cultural narratives is not the same thing as invalidating the arguments those voices are making.

What to Say When Your Gay Friend Says, ‘I Was Born This Way’

In other words, the question of the efficacy of conversion therapies is a non-issue. The question of what leads to homosexuality in the first place, however, is obscure, even to the experts. True, various eye-grabbing headlines over the years have claimed that some scientists have found something like The Gay Gene.

If you are enjoying this story, take a look at the other pieces in our Sexual Revolutions special series, including:. You can spot the problem with this study a mile away: were the gay brains LeVay studied born that way, or did they become that way?