There is no such thing as homosexuality

The other day I overheard a conversation where someone I know was telling his friend, “You know what’s fun? Say you and a friend are in a room somewhere and a third person comes in. Just as they open the door, start talking like you are winding up a story and say, ‘So that’s when I figured out that I’m a FLAMING HOMOSEXUAL!’ The looks you get are great!”

The guy talking is in high school, which is about the right age for this kind of joke.  And while I have no idea whether this particular young man self-identifies as gay or straight, I do know that he is capable of saying the most outrageous things, with reckless disregard for the truth, just in order to play with people’s minds.  But it did remind me of a line of thought that I have had for some time on the subject.

The title of my post is, “There is no such thing as homosexuality,” and I admit right away that, like my high school friend, I have chosen wording that is likely to raise some eyebrows.  Since I am not as comfortable as he is with misleading or perplexing others, I will hasten to add that it is important not to misunderstand what I am trying to say.  I do not deny that some people are sexually attracted (to greater or lesser degree) to others of the same sex.  (Of course they are.)  I do not claim that these people could somehow simply decide to feel attraction to members of the opposite sex instead, as if our likes or dislikes were under simple conscious control.  (Most often they aren’t.)  I am most emphatically not trying to make any kind of political point whatsoever.

My only point is that homosexuality is not a thing.  By the same token, I deny that words like homosexual, heterosexual, gay, straight, lesbian, queer, or any of the others in that conceptual constellation have any well-defined meaning except as badges of personal identity.  We can use these words as banners to identify which groups of other people we feel comfortable hanging out with, but they have no other objective meaning.

By contrast, baldness is a thing in the sense that there is a clear objective test whether someone is bald.  Hair color is a thing in the same sense.  Maleness and femaleness are things in the same sense.  Ditto cancer, or diabetes.  But not homosexuality or heterosexuality.  There is no blood test, no DNA sample, that can tell you whether this or that person is one or the other.  All you can do is ask him; and at that point you are checking for self-identification – badges of personal identity – and nothing external.

What is there, then, if there is no such thing as homosexuality or heterosexuality?  If there are no straights, nor gays, nor lesbians, nor any of the rest?  What’s left?

That’s easy.  All that’s left are people.  People making choices.  People having sex.  People making choices about whom to have sex with.  Sometimes those choices follow predictable patterns, at least for a while.  Sometimes they don’t.  There are some guys who want sex only with other guys and are nauseated by the thought of sex with women; there are others for whom it’s the other way around.  But they aren’t different human types.  They aren’t different categories of man, any more than we have to set up a special category for guys who are nauseated by creamed spinach.  And after all, occasionally it happens that somebody who was really sure he wanted only this kind of sex and would never ever in a million years tolerate that kind … later changes his mind.  Maybe it doesn’t happen often, but it happens.  I can think of a couple of people I’ve known personally of whom I can say that.  It wouldn’t surprise me if you can too.

It’s really a much simpler way to look at the whole subject.  Simpler and lower-key.  And I think it’s true.