Behind The Choice Claim

After all these years and despite scientific evidence to the contrary, anti-gay extremists still base their positions on sexuality-related issues on their belief that homosexuality is a choice. They believe it very fervently, and no amount of evidence to the contrary will dissuade them. In recent weeks, I’ve stumbled across various pieces of literature that have helped me get inside the head of the anti-gay activist. To understand, even if I cannot agree.

Poor Mayor Jim West of Spokane has struggled with sexuality issues his entire life, it would seem. Even if the allegations of predatory sexual abuse of boys aren’t true – we may never know either way – it would seem he’s spent a career profiting off of what closet cases do best. Denial. In the eighties, he was one of the most vociferous anti-gay voices in Washington State and had a brief abortive marriage to a woman. Now, the guy has been caught having virtual sex with young men over the internet. With his hypocrisy now laid bare, he is suffering demonstrably.

Jim West’s story has been potent for me, in no small part because of the luridness of the detail with which it has been told. I never had to deal with the denial Jim did because I came out as a relatively young man. But Jim – well, he was in law enforcement, then political office. A conservative man, he couldn’t even come out to himself, and reacted against what he felt was wrong with him, voicing his self-loathing as a public position against others like him. And as the classic scenario goes, we find him coming out at the age of 54, struggling and embattled, as conflicted with himself as ever.

Neil Horsley was on the Alan Colmes show on the Fox Radio Network twice during the past couple of weeks. If you’re not familiar with Neil’s work, he’s an aggressive anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-everything Christian extremist who has a lot of opinions about just about everything. And he’s an expert on sexuality, it turns out, due to his experiences with men and mules alike. Yes, I said mules. On the Alan Colmes show, he said he’d have even had sex with a watermelon or a washing machine under the right circumstances.

Neil has found god, of course, and so he condemns all that which he once enjoyed because the Lord doesn’t approve. I can’t say I approve of sex with things other than humans, either. However, in reading about Neil and the prevalence of bestiality, I learned that about %13 percent of men have had sex with an animal at some point. That was a big surprise to me, and it validated Neil’s assertion that sex with farm animals is actually common.

Reading Jim’s story and hearing Neil talk, I found myself thinking about sexuality and choice, and how it fit for these two men. Both have had sex with men, and both have dealt with it in different ways. Neil appears to have chosen to abstain from sex with men, animals, vegetables, and machinery for religious reasons. Barring contrary evidence, we can only assume he has been successful. Jim, however, has tried to be with women and failed. He’s acknowledged that he seeks men for sex and engages in romantic discussions with them online.

To me, this fits perfectly with Kinsey’s continuum of human sexuality. Jim is predominantly attracted to men. Like me, Jim may be a five out of six on Kinsey’s scale, indicating that he is almost exclusively attracted to men for sexual relationships, and is only incidentally heterosexual. What is currently known about his relationship history supports this assertion.

Neil, on the other hand, may be a two or a one on the Kinsey scale. He’s had sex with men, and so he obviously finds them sexually attractive at least part of the time. This excludes him from being classified as a zero on the scale, the point for a person who is exclusively heterosexual.

Obviously, then, both men are attracted to both sexes, albeit to different degrees. And they did not choose this for themselves. Most likely, both would have chosen to fall onto the Kinsey scale at the zero point. But both have had to make a choice as to whether to honor their natural tendencies or to suppress them. For Neil, this might simply have been like turning down chocolate for someone who only likes to have it once in a while. Neil’s choice to give up men may have been an easy one.

For Jim, however, his sexual attraction toward men was too strong to deny. He tried for many years because social mores and his own beliefs told him he should, but he was unable to succeed. Jim clearly struggled with his options for a lifetime, and ultimately decided that he could not suppress his innate sexuality.

Both men did choose, based on the sexuality they developed. Neil chose to lead a straight life and Jim chose a gay, albeit closeted and contradictory, one.

Neil and Jim are interesting because they represent voices opposed to societal acceptance of homosexuality despite their own histories. According to Kinsey’s research, they are among the roughly 60% of young men who have a homosexual experience or relationship during their youth. But if only four to six percent of them turn out to be gay, what happens to the rest?

Presumably, most find that gay sex is not as satisfying to them as relationships with women. But that’s no different from discovering that you prefer chocolate over vanilla. The choice is easy if you have a clear preference. But they carry that memory. And in the context of strong social mores against homosexuality, they attribute their experiences and resulting choices to their own strength of character, or to the wisdom and influence of their God.

The rest – those like Jim – make a choice to be less happy. They take vanilla, even though they’d prefer – through no choice of their own - chocolate. Perhaps even if they hate vanilla, they’ll deny themselves the happiness that only chocolate could bring.

The “Yes or No,” “True or False,” “Black or White” crowd would say that I am in essence agreeing with my Christian adversaries, but they’re wrong because the underlying preference for male or female is never a choice. And so the key to my understanding of their perspective is that, statistically, men who claim that being gay is a choice think they know first hand because they themselves have made that same choice. They just never say it. And they don’t disclose their classification on the Kinsey scale, either.

My father occasionally repeats his advice to me when I’m facing a dilemma. “Make the choice that will increase your happiness,” he says. Given that Jim and I are fives on the scale, the choice that will make us happiest is to be with men. We did not choose to be fives, but we did have to choose between acknowledging our nature and suppressing it. To different degrees, we made the choice that increased our happiness.

Anyone who asks someone to reconsider their choice, more than half the time, is asking him or her to make a choice they themselves have already made. One that was either easy for them, or makes them unhappy. And it’s funny how so many of them seem so very unhappy. Makes me think that misery really does love company.