Award-winning and openly lesbian actress Cynthia Nixon landed herself in hot water—twice. Her missteps? Nixon, best known for playing brainy and neurotic Miranda on Sex in the City, stated, in her acceptance of GLAAD’s Vito Russo Award in March 2010, “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.”1 LGBT advocates objected to the implication that homosexuality was a choice. In a January 2012 interview with the New York Times, Nixon unapologetically stood her ground: “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.” Nixon’s words went viral.
Since the Stonewall riots in 1969, LGB activists have encouraged gay people to come out and speak the truth about their lives. Why were activists so angry with Nixon for boldly telling her own truth? What political, and personal, nerve had she inadvertently struck?
In the past decade, the argument that homosexuals are born that way has become a major talking point used by LGB advocates to argue for equal rights. Nixon’s declaration, “For me, it’s a choice,” strayed from this carefully crafted political and legal script. Worse, it could be heard as reinforcing the antigay message of some conservative political groups. These groups, in their own public relations strategy, describe homosexuality as a “lifestyle choice” or “behavior-based identity.” If being gay is a “choice,” it supposedly does not merit the civil rights protections extended to racial minorities and women.
But “born that way” is more than a sound bite in a public relations war. Many LGB people describe their sexual identities as inborn, an immutable part of who they are. Some others, like Nixon, claim they choose to be gay. This may be particularly true for lesbians. In the late 1970s, some feminists believed lesbianism was a chosen political and sexual identity. These “political lesbians” did not necessarily have sex with, or even sexually desire, women. Most self-declared lesbians decidedly do desire and have sex with other women (see myth 13, “Lesbians Do Not Have Real Sex”).
Still other LGB people would say their sexuality is both chosen and unchosen. They may not have chosen their same-sex desires, but they do choose to act on them and come out as L, G, or B. Other LGB people would say they do not care how or why they came to be gay—they are gay and it is fine. LGB people, like straight people, have all sorts of ways of answering the question, “Why are you the way you are?”
Sexuality, or the life of desire, asks profound questions about relating to others in the world we share. The intricacies of sexual desire, especially whom we desire, have been understood as an important key to who we are since “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” were invented as distinct identities in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary United States—because heterosexuality is presumed to be the natural, default position—all the pressure is on LGB people to explain their desires and justify their existence. This has meant that LGB people’s explanations for who and why they are acquire disproportionately large moral, legal, and personal significance.
What is the connection between whether or not LGB people are born gay and whether they should be protected from discrimination? If LGB people are born that way, and cannot change who they are, it would be unjust to discriminate against them. Alternately, if homosexuality is a choice, then society is not required to extend equal protections to LGB people as a group. This latter argument implies that homosexuality is not just a choice, but a bad choice. Ironically, the gay-affirming, born-that-way argument may imply this as well. Defending homosexuality on the grounds that LGB people are born that way and just can’t help it could bolster the idea that there is something wrong with being L, G, or B.
This discussion raises several issues that need to be addressed. When it comes to the moral question of how to treat other people in everyday interactions, it does not matter what causes homosexuality. There is nothing wrong with same-sex desire or LGB lives.
Second, LGB people deserve equal protection under the law. As a simple matter of fairness and legal precedent, it does not matter whether homosexuality is “immutable.” This is not a legal requirement for granting equal rights.
Finally, it is simply not true that heterosexuality is the way everyone naturally is. We know from studies that a large number of heterosexually identified people have had same-sex sexual relations at some point in their lives (see myth 2, “About 10 Percent of People Are Gay or Lesbian”). Heterosexuality does not occupy a moral high ground of naturalness. It is also as much in need of explanation as homosexuality.
Attempts to explain what causes homosexuality have a long, and often ugly, history. Various medical theories that pathologized homosexuality have caused and justified outright violence against LGB people, most notably, the use of electroshock treatments as part of therapeutic attempts to cure homosexuality in the 1950s. As terrible as this history is, it does not mean that attempts to consider what causes homosexuality—or how it evolves—are necessarily bad or dangerous for LGB people.
All scientific studies are carried out by humans and are never free of cultural assumptions and even prejudice. This may be especially so for scientific attempts to explain sexuality and its causes. Historically, the science of human desire has been deeply connected to impassioned debates over the morality of homosexuality. Many scientists have pursued this research because they held strong views one way or another.
The nineteenth-century invention of the homosexual and the heterosexual as distinct kinds of persons was followed almost immediately by various scientific attempts to explain why some women and men desire their own sex. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was an influential early thinker who argued that the male homosexual had the body of a man and the soul of a woman, and that the reverse was true for a lesbian. This scientific explanation seems naive and misguided to us today, but it was an important step in giving people a way to think about the origins of their sexual desires (see myth 15, “Transgender People Are Gay”).
A growing body of contemporary scientific research suggests that sexual desire—both gay and straight—may be related to brain structure. The most widely publicized such study is Simon LeVay’s 1991 study of “the hypothalamus, which controls the release of sex hormones from the pituitary gland.” His study claimed the hypothalamus “in gay men differs from the hypothalamus in straight men. The third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH3) was found to be more than twice as large in heterosexual men as in homosexual men.”2 LeVay’s research garnered front-page coverage in the New York Times. The ensuing criticisms of LeVay’s study—many by other scientists—received far less attention.
Along with his survey sample being too small for an accurate study, his basic assumption that male/female brain differences are comparable to gay/straight differences—assumptions oddly similar to Ulrich’s—made little sense. Additionally, he never took into consideration the lived sexuality and experiences of his subjects.
Other brain research has been examining how “exposure to sex hormones in the womb during a critical period in brain development affects future sexual orientation.”3 These studies also suffer from a confused set of assumptions. Historian of science Rebecca Jordan-Young notes that, “Sexuality is notoriously hard to define. So when a headline proclaims, ‘Prenatal Environment May Dictate Sexual Orientation,’ just what is it, exactly, that it is said to have dictated? Is it whom someone desires? Whom one has sex with? What a person calls him or herself?”4 The rigid models and language used by these studies—male/female and heterosexual/homosexual—cannot capture the multidimensional character of sexuality.
Genetic studies of sexual desire appear at first less problematic. Scientists have hypothesized that homosexuality runs in families. Studies done on twins seem to support this, finding that the identical twin of a lesbian has almost a 50 percent likelihood of being lesbian herself. A similar correlation—or concordance rate—was observed in cases of gay men with an identical twin brother. Concordance rates were lower, but still significant, in cases of fraternal twins and nontwin siblings. Identical twins share 100 percent of their genetic material, fraternal and nontwin siblings, approximately 50 percent. These differing rates are consistent with the idea that there is some genetic component to homosexuality.5
Although these studies demonstrate that there may be a genetic basis to homosexuality, none of the studies has explained how this works. Genetic studies give us a picture of associations, but not the direct genetic mechanism by which genetic inheritance could “cause” homosexuality.6
Genes also never operate in isolation from environment. Except in extreme circumstances (such as twins separated at birth), identical twins, fraternal twins, and even nontwin genetic siblings share many of the same childhood environmental factors. They share the same house, attend the same schools, watch the same TV shows, and have the same parental and adult role models.7 If it is difficult to separate biology from environment, we also need to remember that biological capacities develop in relation to their environments. For example, many people dislike a specific food on their first encounter, only to have it become a favorite treat later on. The biological ability to digest this food was always there, but the taste for it had to be cultivated. Sexual preferences may operate along similar lines. Biological capacities and, possibly, biological predispositions become focused in different ways, depending on complex environmental factors.8
Still, environment can only take us so far in trying to answer the questions “Why am I the way I am?” and “Why do I like what I like?” The twin studies demonstrate that identical twins share 100 percent of their genetic material and may share, as children, very similar environments. But twin homosexuals exist in only 50 percent of the cases. Clearly, neither genetics, nor genetics plus environment, can tell the whole story.9
For much of the twentieth century, the most influential scientific theories concerning homosexuality came from psychiatry and psychology. These theories, importantly, introduced the idea that individuals play some role in the formation of their sexuality, even as they are always doing so in relation to others and to a larger culture.
Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, thought that homosexuality was a normal variation of human sexual desire. He also thought that all people experienced, at least unconsciously, desire for the same sex at some point in their lives.10 Nonetheless, he believed that sexual development should end in reproductive heterosexuality, and in some of his writings portrayed homosexuality as a detour from that end point, an arrested development. But he also consistently argued that the path to reproductive heterosexuality was so difficult for anyone that it could not happen without compromise. In order to achieve mature reproductive heterosexuality, individuals have to restrict—give up—the much wider range of ways their desires might be experienced and expressed. Desires are shaped by cultural norms but not fully determined or “caused” by them. This insight is one of the reasons why Freud spent much more of his work explaining how people become “heterosexual.”
The unconscious is one of the great discoveries of psychoanalysis. We can see its workings in any number of ways, such as in how we connect memories and what appears in our dreams. With desire, we can glimpse the unconscious in the disconnect that often occurs between what we say we want in a sexual partner or lover and the kind of person we actually choose (often, over and over again). The unconscious helps explain the fact that the formation and expression of human desire are never fully within our control, nor even within our conscious understanding. Our desire always contains more than we could ever know, let alone admit or tell.
Freud’s ideas about sexuality were often contradictory. Some of them reinforced false ideas about gay people. Others greatly expanded the bounds of what people thought was sexually “normal” to include a wide range of desires, fantasies, acts, and self-understandings. But Freud’s psychiatric followers in the United States ignored his subtle, subversive claims about homosexuality, heterosexuality, and the unconscious life of desire. Spurred on by the political and social conservatism of post–World War II America, they selectively grafted his theory of homosexuality onto a model of mental pathology. In 1952, the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) called homosexuality a “sociopathic personality disorder.”
One of the most influential proponents of the pathology theory was psychiatrist Irving Bieber, who argued, in 1962, that “heterosexuality is the biologic norm and . . . unless interfered with all individuals are heterosexual.”11 Bieber identified the “causes” of homosexuality as negligent parenting, or other dangerous environmental factors such as society’s glamorization of homosexuality. Another prominent psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, argued in his 1954 Seduction of the Innocent that Batman and Robin were coded homosexual lovers and Wonder Woman was a man-hating lesbian. (Wertham also testified at a congressional hearing that comic books corrupted young people and led to juvenile delinquency.) While images of LGB people in the media do shape people’s imaginations of what is possible to express about themselves, they do not do so in this simplistic way (see myth 4, “Sexual Abuse Causes Homosexuality”).
Psychiatrists such as Bieber argued that they could “cure” homosexuals through therapy, an idea still with us today. Sometimes this takes the form of so-called conversion, or reparative therapy, promoted by many conservative religious groups. Another, more strictly religious version of this is to pray for God to cure you, often referred to as “pray the gay away.” But even here, major changes are underway. In 2013, in a surprise move, Exodus International, the world’s oldest and largest evangelical Christian ministry dedicated to helping gay men and lesbians find “alternatives” to unwanted same-sex attractions, disbanded and publicly apologized for perpetuating shame, false hope, and trauma.
Although other ex-gay ministries remain committed to curing same-sex attraction, no reputable scientific studies support any of this. Not the bad-parenting theory. Not the indoctrination model. And certainly not the idea that homosexuality can be cured. This negative view of homosexuality very slowly came to an end for a variety of reasons. New research, such as Evelyn Hooker’s important 1957 study showing that homosexuals were no more likely to suffer from psychopathologies than heterosexuals, changed the mind of medical professionals. Society’s views were also changing during this time. Most important, the gay liberation movement—and other activists speaking the truth about their own lives—demanded change. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association reversed its decades-long stance and dropped its categorization of homosexuality per se as a disorder from the DSM. Irving Bieber and other conservative psychiatrists fought against this change and, for the next decades, also spoke out against the gay rights movement. But it is now the overwhelming consensus of “the behavioral and social sciences and the health and mental health professions” that homosexuality is, to quote the American Psychological Association, “a normal and positive variation of human sexual orientation.”
So, if there is no proof that homosexuals are biologically born that way, or that they are made that way through unhealthy parenting or bad cultural influences, then maybe Cynthia Nixon is right: individual agency is the real question, and people do just choose to be gay or lesbian.
The question of “born that way” versus “choice” is much more complex than either the political debates or scientific studies generally admit. The problem is that to many people, the word “cause”—like “choice” and “born that way”—marks a kind of big bang theory of sexuality that explains everything about who we are and how our sexual desire works.
It is more useful to think about cause as the more expansive question of how a person comes to have a character, or a personality. Sexuality is not a containable part of yourself, or simply reducible to a sex act. Rather, it is an ongoing process formed by the interactions of our psyche, body, and environment. Both we, as individuals, and the world around us are implicated. Sexuality, like personality, is a product of a string of minute choices—wanted, forced, compromised—that we consciously and unconsciously make during our endless negotiations of the world into which we are born. We can never know the precise moment when a person becomes gay. Nor can we know exactly how or why it happens. The same can be said about when, how, or why a person becomes straight.
Every day we make decisions, both direct and indirect, that lead to consequences we may never intend—but which we may come to understand and experience as profoundly desirable. For example, a young woman who attends a women’s college may encounter a vibrant community of lesbian, bi, and queer women. Perhaps this opens up possibilities for her own desire she did not know she had—possibilities she might not have discovered, or admitted, had she chosen a co-ed school. Her choices affected the path of her desire and self-identification; but, so did the countless other turns she took from the moment she was born, turns that also inevitably involved her in the lives of others. (In this instance, these turns include getting into, and affording, a private college.)
To ask what causes homosexuality is to try to understand how we, as humans, learn to grapple with a world of ultimately unanswerable mysteries—including the mystery of our own desire. This mystery entangles us in other vital questions: how our feelings and relationships come to have the meanings they do. How community results from these actions. And how we come to survive and live productively within it all.