Is It a Choice? 3rd ed.

Eric Marcus

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061745287
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: LGBT-Studien

The answers to all the questions you've ever had about sexual orientation but were afraid to ask. Eric Marcus provides insightful, no-nonsense answers to hundreds of the most commonly asked questions about same-sex orientation. Offering frank and accepting insight on everything you've always wanted-and needed-to know about same-gender relationships, coming out, family roles, politics, and much more, including:

How do you know if you're gay or lesbian?

What should you do if your child is gay or lesbian?

Do gay parents raise gay children?

What does the Bible say about homosexuality?

1

The Basics

What is a homosexual?

A homosexual is a person whose feelings of sexual attraction are for someone of the same gender: male for male, female for female. In contrast, a heterosexual is a person whose feelings of attraction are for someone of the opposite gender.

The word homosexual was first used by Karl Maria Kertbeny in an 1869 pamphlet in which he argued for the repeal of Prussia’s antihomosexual laws. (Prussia is now part of northern Germany.) Homosexual combines the Greek word for “same” with the Latin word for “sex.”

Homosexual people come in all shapes and sizes and from all walks of life, just like heterosexual people do, and are part of every community and every family. This means that everyone knows someone who is homosexual. Most people just don’t realize that they know, and perhaps love, someone who is homosexual, because many—if not most—homosexual people keep their sexual orientation a secret.

I wish I had known what a homosexual was when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Kew Gardens, New York, a comparatively bucolic New York City neighborhood about forty-five minutes from Manhattan by subway. At first I didn’t know exactly what a homosexual was, except that homosexuals were something very bad and disgusting. The popular image for someone of my generation was a creepy-looking guy in an overcoat who hid behind bushes and tried to lure children into his clutches with candy.

As I grew into adolescence, I still wasn’t exactly sure what a homosexual was, never having seen one on television or having met one, but I knew that the most horrible thing you could call someone was a “faggot.” In summer camp there was always at least one boy who got tagged with that label. It was usually someone who always struck out at baseball. He was despised by the other boys and shunned by the girls.

One summer, when I was fourteen, I was that boy. It was also around this time when I was just beginning to understand that “faggot” meant more than just being bad at baseball. It had to do with not being like other boys, who at that age were starting to get girl-crazy in a way that made no sense to me. I can’t say I had any memorable attraction to those of my own gender back then, but I do recall thinking that my strapping eighteen-year-old counselor, Ted, was kind of cute—an observation I knew not to share with my bunkmates.

I was sixteen years old when I finally met someone I knew to be homosexual, and I was both shocked and relieved. Bob was no creepy-looking guy in an overcoat. He was a smart, devastatingly handsome (to me), and very confident college student who lived down the block. He didn’t lurk behind shrubs, and he never once offered me candy. He did, however, help dispel all the myths I’d grown up with about homosexuality.

Bob was the first person to explain to me that a homosexual is simply a man or woman whose feelings of sexual attraction are for someone of the same gender. One man could meet and fall in love with another man, my new friend explained, and one woman could fall in love with another woman. So simple, but to me it was a revolutionary idea, and it changed my life, especially since I had a wild crush on Bob and could now do what any normal sixteen-year-old would do: imagine a life that included living happily ever after with the object of my affections.

What is a gay person? Why do gay people call themselves “gay”?

A gay person is a man or woman who is a homosexual. Gay is a synonym for homosexual. The word has been used publicly by gay people since the late 1960s, when gay was adopted by homosexual men and women in the early gay civil rights movement and incorporated into slogans like “Gay is good!” Gay was seen as a positive alternative to the clinical-sounding homosexual.

Gay was used as slang in place of homosexual as far back as the 1920s, almost exclusively within the homosexual community. If, for example, you wanted to indicate to a friend that a club or bar you planned to go to was frequented by homosexuals, you would say that it was a “gay place” or that there was a “gay crowd.”

One of the early examples of gay being used in print to mean “homosexual” occurred in 1947. Lisa Ben, a young Hollywood secretary, used the word as part of the subtitle for a newsletter for lesbians that she published on her office typewriter. Lisa called her newsletter Vice Versa: America’s Gayest Magazine. Other homosexual people knew that Lisa didn’t mean her magazine was simply full of fun, which is what most people at the time would have thought, because gay was a word then typically used to mean “happy” or “fun,” as in “We had such a gay time at the party.”

Not all homosexual people like using the word gay to describe themselves. And since gay has come to be used most often in association with male homosexuals, many homosexual women prefer to be called lesbians. (See “What do gay people like to be called?” at the end of this chapter.)

What is a lesbian?

A lesbian is a woman whose primary feelings of sexual attraction are for other women. In other words, a lesbian is a homosexual woman. Like gay men, lesbians come in all shapes and sizes and from all walks of life.

The word lesbian derives from the name of a Greek island, Lesbos, where Sappho, a teacher known for her poetry celebrating love between women, established a school for young women in the sixth century BC. Over time, the word lesbian, which once simply meant someone who lived on Lesbos, came to mean a woman who, like Sappho and her followers, loved other women.

Do gay men find all men sexually attractive? Do lesbians find all women sexually attractive?

No. Like most heterosexuals, gay people are pretty picky about the kind of person they find sexually attractive. So for all the heterosexual guys out there who are afraid that the gay guy at the gym or in their school shower is looking at them because they want to have sex with them, it’s okay to relax. They’re probably looking at you because gay people, like all humans, are generally curious and like to look at other humans, clothed or unclothed.

What is a bisexual?

Bisexual is the term used to describe a person who has feelings of sexual attraction for both men and women. But I think the term is misleading, because it suggests that such a person has the same strength of feelings for both men and women. Humans are far more complicated than that and more typically have stronger feelings of sexual attraction for one gender than the other.

It was Alfred Kinsey who, in his landmark studies in the 1940s and 1950s on male and female sexuality, first revealed the rich variety of sexual feelings and expression. He developed a seven-point rating scale to represent human sexual attraction and experience.

The Kinsey scale has a range of zero to six. The zero category includes all people who are exclusively heterosexual in their feelings of sexual attraction and report no homosexual experience or attraction. Category six includes those who are exclusively homosexual in experience and attraction. Everyone else falls somewhere in between.

Some people are under the mistaken impression that people who are bisexual are involved in sexual relationships with both men and women at the same time. Though this may be the case for some people, most women and men who identify as bisexual and are in couple relationships have only a single partner at a time.

Are bisexuals just gay people who are afraid to admit they’re gay?

No. Most men and women who identify as bisexual are indeed bisexual. If there’s some confusion about this, it’s because some homosexuals, as they come to terms with accepting themselves, may at first say that they are bisexual, even thought they’re not. That’s what I did.

In my last year of high school I confided to a close male friend—who I thought might be gay—that I was bisexual. By this time I already knew I was gay because of the crush I had on Bob, the college student down the block, and I wasn’t the least bit interested in having a physical relationship with a woman. But somehow, “bisexual” didn’t sound nearly as bad as “gay,” and I really wasn’t ready to acknowledge to myself or the world the truth about my feelings. I was, needless to say, a fairly tortured and somewhat confused adolescent.

I figured if I said that I was bisexual, then in the eyes of the world—and in my own eyes—I was at least half heterosexual. I rationalized that I could keep one foot in the gay world and the other safely in the heterosexual world, in word if not in deed. And I imagined that people would have an easier time accepting me if they thought I “went both ways.” But within a couple of years, when I felt more comfortable about being gay, I gave up claiming I was bisexual.

Unfortunately, because of gay people like me, many people have the misconception that all men and women who say they are bisexual are homosexuals who are afraid to admit the truth about themselves. This is simply a misconception. Yes, some people who claim to be bisexual, as I did, are gay, but there are many people who have feelings of sexual attraction, to varying degrees, for both men and women—and they are called “bisexuals.”

Is bisexuality the same as living “on the down low”?

No. “On the down low,” or “on the DL,” is a slang term that originated among African Americans. It is used to refer to men in heterosexual relationships who also have sex with men. Most often these men do not consider themselves to be gay or bisexual, and, in general, they keep this aspect of their sexual lives secret from their female partners and their families. They’re in hiding, or, in other words, “on the down low.”

What makes this a little confusing is that men who live on the down low are engaging in bisexual behavior and have a homosexual or bisexual sexual orientation. But they generally think of themselves as heterosexual men who have sex with men. If it sounds like I’m describing a person who is a mental contortionist, you’re right. But however confusing it may seem, this is simply another way that some men have chosen to adapt to living in communities that are less than accepting of people who live an openly gay life.

Unfortunately, life on the down low usually involves unsuspecting f...