My Queer Life is Not a Birth Defect
Joey Manley
My Queer Life Is Not A Birth Defect
When I read studies purporting to have found a biological cause for
homosexuality, whether that cause is a "bad X chromosome," or an
"oversized hypothalamus," (remember that one?); I am reminded of the
"science" of phrenology, which made similar predictive claims--not
just about homosexuality, but about other forms of "undesirable"
behavior, such as masturbation and burglary--based on the shape and
position of the knots on a person's skull. Ridiculous, right? In the
late 19th century, though, phrenology was every bit as respectable
as, say, psychiatry is today. A few of these "scientists" even claimed
that such knots could be used as a justification to incarcerate folks
for crimes they had not yet committed.
The noun "homosexual" does not appear in English until the same era,
when it was imported from Germany, having been coined there by the
researcher Kraft VonEbbing as a medical diagnosis (i.e. a means of
control). While VonEbbing and his followers were a bit more
sophisticated than the phrenologists--they didn't examine actual bumps
on actual heads--they did make much of "evidence of hormonal
imbalance" in homosexuals, citing the wide hips and limp wrists of
some of their male patients, for example, and the traces of whiskers
on one of the females' lips. Before the late 19th century, sodomy (or
whatever you want to call it) seems to have been considered nothing
more than one set of sexual behaviors among countless possibilities:
sometimes glorified, sometimes condemned, to be sure, and almost
always named, but never a separate category of human being to be
labeled and "cured".
Given this oppressive history I have often wondered why so many gay
activists try to peddle a biological theory of homosexuality to a
generally hostile public. Even if it's true-which I doubt-and even if
we can convince the public, I see no tactical advantage to be gained.
Women and African-Americans, for example, are obviously "born that
way," yet unequal treatment and prejudice against them persist. There
are even darker implications, in our case: to say "we can't help
ourselves; it's in our genes, it's got to do with the shapes of our
brains; we didn't choose this" is to imply that we would not have
chosen homosexuality, that it is inferior to heterosexuality, and that
if we could help ourselves we would. After all, scientists have
"proven" that alcoholism has a genetic component, yet no one would
argue that this qualifies it as a viable lifestyle.
I started telling people I'd chosen to be queer during my Junior year
in high school. I'm still not sure that I believe it. I can't
remember, for example, waking up one morning and saying, "How could I
make my life more complicated? I know! I'll be queer!" I do remember
this, though: standing at the free-throw line of the basketball court.
"If I make this shot, I'm queer," I told myself. "If not, I'm
straight." I missed. I tried again. I kept trying until I made that
shot. Does this qualify as a choice? I don't know. It felt like one.
What do we mean, anyway, by the word "choice?" Most progressives
cannot say when they "chose" to be politically active, for example. It
just happened: a moment here, an epiphany there, a television image
of an oil-swamped beach, say, or a conversation with a coal miner, and
the next thing you know you're voting socialist and boycotting Exxon.
It all adds up, you might say. It just makes sense. That's how I feel
about my queerness.
The real question is not whether or not I chose to be queer. It's
this: how does my queerness function? Why did I choose to be queer?
I'd love to be able to say that I did so as a protest against the
screwed-up smalltown heterosexuality of my day (spin-the-bottle,
teenage pregnancies, prom queens), but I know better. For every
high-minded academic theoretician propounding an essential radicalism
of same-sex love, there's a Gap-wearing Halston-smelly empty-headed
bar boy shaking his ass on some dance floor somewhere hoping to land
the fat corporate executive at the opposite table who drives a nice
car and has a hot tub, a servant or two, and poppers galore in his
penthouse apartment. This is what it means to be queer to lots of
boys. Who am I to say it should be otherwise? My queerness has nothing
to do with theirs; trying to make it so does damage to all of us, to
the dignity of our choices. In fact, one might even argue--as does
Andrew Vermont in a nice little rant on the LGNY Magazine website at
http://gravity.fly.net/~lgny/volume_13/features13/op_ed13.html--that
"gay life" itself, as configured by the media and the movement, is
antithetical to liberation:
"The gay community as a unified, cohesive group
is a fiction that owes its existence to our
collective belief that such a group exists.
Contrary to what gay activists would have you
believe, there is a Gay Agenda. This Gay Agenda
does not seek to turn young children into
homosexuals, as the right-wing Christians fear.
Rather, it seeks to turn homosexuals into gay
children. The primary objective of the Gay Agenda
is to enforce a rigid set of ideas and behaviors
that distinguish gay men from the straight world,
instructing them how to live as 'good' gay men.
There is no specific agency promulgating this effect.
It is product of the mass culture in which we are
all caught up and which we have the power to alter."
Vermont does have a point: if Kraft VonEbbing invented the idea of the
homosexual in the late 19th century as a means of control, it doesn't
matter that we have learned to wear the name with pride and use it for
our own purposes, it's still artificial, and perhaps damaging.
Seriously: how in the world have we been able to hold in our heads for
so long a category of human that encompasses such extremes as Roy Cohn
and Walt Whitman, Phranc and Virginia Woolf, Jeffrey Dahmer and J.
Edgar Hoover, George Michael and St. Anselm? The answer is not in an
easy platitude like "the gay community is diverse." The answer is--as
Vermont argues--that there is no gay community, or, rather, that each
of us creates his or her own community, of friends, neighbors, lovers,
and that we bring our own answers and our own questions to the problem
of queer identity.
But I can't let it go there because that's not enough for me. In Tony
Kushner's play "Slavs! Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of
Virtue and Happiness", which is set in post-communist Russia, one of
the characters admits to another: "I'm still a socialist." He goes on:
"Theory! How are we to proceed without theory?!" I'm afraid that I'm
still a gay liberationist. If my lifestyle was once supposed to be
"redemptive and transformative" to society as a whole (as Urvashi
Vaid, former director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force would
have it), how am I to learn to be satisfied now with simply doing
things with my dick that have no resonance anywhere except in my own
bed? I don't know.
Joey Manley
Web Editor, Free Speech TV
http://www.freespeech.org
Joey Manley
Web Editor, Free Speech TV
http://www.freespeech.org
jma...@tesser.com
j0...@ix.netcom.com (home)