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What Nixon said in an interview with The New York Times , which was accurately quoted in the Jez article -- confusing headline aside -- was that being gay is HER choice, and no one gets to define HER sexuality:
I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line "I've been straight and I've been gay, and gay is better.'" And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it's not, but for me it's a choice, and you don't get to define my gayness for me. (bolded by me)I'm glad to see a nuanced discussion of sexuality -- no matter how clumsily stated its impetus might be -- but ultimately disappointed at the number of commenters (here and here too) who insist Nixon must be bisexual, closeted in her former relationships with men, or that she's a "fake" lesbian. I get that the "born this way" argument is the best leverage the LGBT community has against bigotry, but it also erases the identities of people who fall somewhere outside the gay-straight-bi spectrum and leaves little room for conversations about fluidity -- particularly in women -- which is different from simply being bisexual. Lisa Diamond explains it in her book Sexual Fluidity (via Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon ):
Women’s sexuality is fundamentally more fluid than men’s, permitting greater variability in its development and expression over the life course.” Based on her research, she describes three main ways that sexual fluidity is expressed: “nonexclusivity in attractions” (i.e., the capacity to find all genders sexually attractive), “changes in attractions” (i.e., suddenly becoming romantically involved with a woman after a lifetime dating men) and the capacity to become attracted to ‘the person and not the gender’” (i.e., a partner’s sex is irrelevant).But I really like Dorothy Snarker's analogy :
I tend to look at the LGBT community as a big umbrella of sexual otherness. And I don’t care if you like to stand directly in the center of the umbrella or on the outskirts so your shoulder gets wet – as long as you’re happy and proud to be under the umbrella with the rest of us I’m happy to have you there.Overall, it's probably a good thing this happened, though the heat that Nixon is getting from the LGBT community is a little uncalled for. Maybe we're just not ready for nuanced discussions about sexual identity.
I was so annoyed reading the 'Why doesn't she just say she's bi' comments. Um, commenters, you don't get to define someone else's sexuality. STOP.
ReplyDeleteYeah, accepting whatever one labels themselves without question should be 101 stuff.
ReplyDeleteIt's a really interesting topic. I've made the argument to homophobes that, for the gay men I've known, their "preference" was no more chosen than mine when I realized that I had a special feeling about a girl named Paula in my fourth grade class. After emphasizing the lack of "choice" in the matter, I always end up wanting to say that it doesn't matter to me whether homosexuality is chosen or not. I do believe that women are more fluid in their sexuality, but it's also clear to me that men become much more fluid about it when their options are restricted. There's more "choice" involved in a lot of potentially discriminatory categories than people realize. We're all dealt a complex interwoven hand of nature and nurture. We know how we feel, but then we self-identify as we choose. When anybody sets out a formula for when someone is white, black, gay, straight, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, even male or female, they're trampling on individual rights as far as I'm concerned. What can carry more personal freight than someone saying, "This is who I am?"
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