Gay by Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity

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But some activists are more reluctant than Besen to rely on this line of reasoning. "One thing I find troubling within the gay community is a lot of people feel if they can make that claim strongly enough that's going to give them equal rights," Sean Cahill, former director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, told me. "But I don't think it really matters," he says, pointing out that believing that sexual orientation is biological doesn't cause one to support gay rights. Indeed, many social scientists think that the beliefs are merely correlated, that people who hold one tend to hold the other.

Some gay rights lawyers point out that whatever biology's role in sexual orientation, it should not be legally paramount. The Supreme Court has ruled that the immutability of a group's identifying characteristics is one of the criteria that entitle it to heightened protection from discrimination (and some cases establishing gay rights were decided in part on those grounds), but, according to Suzanne Goldberg, director of the Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic at Columbia Law School, there's a far more fundamental reason for courts to protect gay people. "Sexual orientation does not bear on a person's ability to contribute to society," she notes. "We don't need the science to make that point." Jon Davidson, legal director of Lambda Legal, agrees, adding that if courts are going to ask about immutability, they shouldn't focus on biology. Instead they should focus on how sexual orientation is so deeply woven into a person's identity that it is inseparable from who they are. In this respect, Davidson says, sexual orientation is like another core aspect of identity that is clearly not biological in origin: religion. "It doesn't matter whether you were born that way, it came later, or you chose," he says. "We don't think it's okay to discriminate against people based on their religion. We think people have a right to believe whatever they want. So why do we think that about religion and not about who we love?"

Cahill—who says he doesn't think he was born gay—points out that even if it is crucial for public support, essentialism has a dark side: the remedicalization of homosexuality, this time as a biological condition that can be treated. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychologist who has conducted some of the key studies of the genetics of sexual orientation, infuriated the gay and lesbian community with a paper arguing that, should prenatal markers of homosexuality be identified, parents ought to have the right to abort potentially gay fetuses. "It's reminiscent of eugenicist theories," Cahill tells me. "If it's seen as an undesirable trait, it could lead in some creepy directions." These could include not only abortion, but also gene therapy or modulating uterine hormone levels to prevent the birth of a gay child.

Psychology professor Lisa Diamond may have the best reason of all for activists to shy away from arguing that homosexuality is inborn and immutable: It's not exactly true. She doesn't dispute the findings that show a biological role in sexual orientation, but she thinks far too much is made of them. "The notion that if something is biological, it is fixed—no biologist on the planet would make that sort of assumption," she told me from her office at the University of Utah. Not only that, she says, but the research—which is conducted almost exclusively on men—hinges on a very narrow definition of sexual orientation: "It's what makes your dick go up. I think most women would disagree with that definition," she says, not only because it obviously excludes them, but because sexual orientation is much more complex than observable aspects of sexuality. "An erection is an erection," she says, "but we have almost no information about what is actually going on in terms of the subjective experience of desire."

Diamond has spent the last 12 years doing her part to fill in this gap by following a group of 79 women who originally described themselves as nonheterosexual, and she's found that sexual orientation is much more fluid than activists like Besen believe. "Contrary to this notion that gay people struggle with their identity in childhood and early adolescence, then come out and ride off into the sunset," she says, "the more time goes on, the more variability comes out. Women change their identities and find their attractions changing." In the first year of her study, 43 percent of her subjects identified themselves as lesbian, 30 percent as bisexual, and 27 percent as unlabeled. By year 10, those percentages had changed significantly: 30 percent said they were lesbian, 29 percent said they were bisexual, 22 percent wouldn't label themselves, and 7 percent said they were now straight (the remaining 12 percent had left the study). Across the entire group, Diamond found that only 58 percent of her subjects' sexual partners were women; in year eight, even the women who identified as lesbians reported that between 10 and 20 percent of their sexual partners were men. Diamond concludes that the categorization of women into gay, straight, and bisexual misses an important fact: that they move back and forth among these categories, and that the fluidity that allows them to do so is as crucial a variable in sexual development as their orientation.

Diamond cautions that it's important not to confuse plasticity—the capacity for sexual orientation to change—with choice—the ability to change it at will. "Trying to change your attractions doesn't work very well, but you can change the structure of your social life, and that might lead to changes in the feelings you experience." This is a time-honored way of handling unwanted sexual feelings, she points out. "Jane Austen made a career out of this: People fall in love with a person of the wrong social class. What do you do? You get yourself out of those situations." For the women in Diamond's study who tell her, "'I hate straight society, I don't want to be straight,'" Austen's solution is an effective treatment for unwanted other-sex attraction. "If you're around women all the time and you are never around men, you are probably going to be more attracted to women," she says. Such women sometimes end up falling in love with women, and their sexual feelings follow. And it can work the other way, Diamond says: Women who identify themselves as gay or bisexual sometimes find themselves, to their own surprise, in love with men with whom they then become sexual partners. Indeed, she says, "love has no sexual orientation."

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