Gay Man Defends his Decision to Start Dating Women

"Any Choice of Sexuality Remains Valid"

Homosexual activist Kevyn Jacobs had previously asserted in Oasis Magazine in 1994 that sexual orientations could not be chosen. By 1995, he'd changed his mind, evidently because he had started dating women

It would probably shock some of my more liberal friends to hear me say I agree with the Radical Religious Right on one issue: Some people do choose to be gay.

So does that mean they are less deserving of respect than those who were born gay?

Many liberals have the attitude, "Well, since homosexuals didn't choose to be that way, we should accept homosexuality as a normal part of life."

Excuse me?

Just because homosexuals didn't choose to be that way? Are you saying homosexual behavior is ONLY acceptable if a person DIDN'T choose to beattracted to members of the same sex?

But what if someone DID choose? Would homosexuality then be unacceptable to the Politically Correct crowd? Is there no room for "acquired taste?"

Forgive me, but I find the attitude of "they didn't choose to be that way" a bit condescending -- as if homosexual sex were some sort of aberration, a distasteful thing to be tolerated, instead of a normal part of the human experience.

This may come as a shock to some card-carrying liberals, but I do know some self-identified lesbians on this campus who will tell you that they chose to be lesbian as a political act. And do you know what? I believe them.

So are they less acceptable than the gay man who says he was "born that way?" Is the love of these women who choose to love other women less valid because there was a conscious decision to make women the center of their lives, instead of men? Whose cause is more P.C.?

And what of bisexuals, like myself, who started out one way (in my case, gay) who have made a conscious choice to broaden their sexual horizons to members of the opposite sex? What of the young "omnisexual" woman whose primary attraction is to men, but has decided not to limit her options, just in case a woman she likes comes along?

Is it possible there is more than one kind of homosexuality in the range of human experience?

It seems to me that these are all questions that go to the very heart of human sexuality, and the narrow categories we as a culture have tried to put the broad range of human sexual experience into. But sexuality is
one of those things that just doesn't like to be boxed up into neat little opposing categories of "straight" and "gay," with "bisexuality" somewhere in between.

What if Alfred Kinsey was right? What if all human beings are, to one degree or another, bisexual? What if every one of us has the potential to enjoy being sexually active either with a member of the opposite sex, or a member of the same sex?

I suspect this reality may lie behind the intense fear many religious individuals have surrounding the subject of homosexuality -- why these individuals are so convinced homosexuality is a choice and a temptation
that most people need to be discouraged from giving in to. I suspect that these individuals sense deep down that almost anyone could be tempted into this "sin" ... and enjoy it. Just as most homosexuals could probably be tempted to have sex with a member of the opposite sex ... and enjoy it.

We see evidence of this in traditional all-male or all-female environments -- ships, prisons, convents -- when members of the opposite sex aren't around, people turn to members of the same sex for physical affection. These are folks we wouldn't say are "gay", even though they engage in homosexual sex -- and even relish in it!

The taboo against homosexual sex is also not universal. Many human cultures do not have this taboo, and in those cultures, people we would identify as "heterosexual" occasionally have sex with members of the same sex, and individuals we would identify as "homosexual" occasionally engage in sex with members of the opposite sex.

To these cultures, the concepts of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are alien -- you just have sex with who you have sex with. And if you prefer one sex over another, well, so be it.

In fact, "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" didn't really exist in our own culture until about a hundred years ago. The word "homosexual" was coined in the 1890s, and the word "heterosexual" followed soon
after. These were words coined to identify which direction an individual's sexual preference predominantly went -- but in reality they are artificial social constructs that attempt to put human sexuality into neat little categories, and human sexuality is anything but neat.

That's why the bisexual movement is having such a profound effect on the way people look at sex and sexual orientation. More and more people are
stepping forward and saying that their sexuality can't fit into one little box or another. That sexuality is too fluid.

So, what if I choose to develop an "acquired taste" in women ... does that make my sexuality a little less valid?

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