[caption id="" align="alignleft” width="342" caption="Cynthia Nixon and Christine Marinoni (Zack Seckler/Getty Images) -- photo at NYDailyNews.com”]
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I was lucky enough to go see Cynthia Nixon perform in “Wit” this past weekend. Nixon’s performance is so really and truly superb that it is not till you’re walking out of the theater that it hits you that this woman, a cancer survivor herself, does this incredibly painful hour and 45 minute death scene night after night after night. I left wondering just how one person could withstand so much emotional, gut-wrenching, tear jerking and yet simultaneously funny performance. But Nixon’s role in “Wit” might be a walk in the park compared to the heat she has taken this past week for having the nerve to suggest that, for her, love is a choice, not biological destiny.
In an interview in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Nixon said
...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. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here... Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate.
Such talk is heresy among some people in the gay advocacy community and the response was both immediate and predictable. Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out, accused Nixon of aiding and abetting bigots and bashers.
When the public hears Nixon say that her homosexuality is a capricious choice, they think that she once found sleeping with women repulsive, but then woke up one day and decided she would do it anyway for social or political reasons. It makes it sound as if she quit men like one quits smoking cigarettes – which plays into the right wing’s false addiction analogy.
No one is questioning Nixon’s right to say whatever she wants. However, with celebrity comes great responsibility and it might be wise if Nixon articulated her feelings in a more thoughtful way that would not lead to LGBT youth stuck in Bible Belt communities ending up in “ex-gay” boot camps.
Then Besen, like others, goes on to define Nixon’s sexuality as “bisexual,” even though that is not a term she has wanted to use for herself.
Most importantly, Nixon never chose to be gay, but is clearly bisexual...
Faced with mounting criticism, Nixon recanted with a statement to the Advocate:
My recent comments in The New York Times were about me and my personal story of being gay. I believe we all have different ways we came to the gay community and we can’t and shouldn’t be pigeon-holed into one cultural narrative which can be uninclusive and disempowering. However, to the extent that anyone wishes to interpret my words in a strictly legal context I would like to clarify:
While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have ‘chosen’ is to be in a gay relationship.
As I said in the Times and will say again here, I do, however, believe that most members of our community — as well as the majority of heterosexuals — cannot and do not choose the gender of the persons with whom they seek to have intimate relationships because, unlike me, they are only attracted to one sex.
But what if sexuality and romantic love are neither choice nor genetic? What if love stems from something much much deeper: culture and history? The truth is, the very idea that we can “choose” whom to love is a very recent historical invention and hardly one that exists in all cultures. “Choice” is a result of liberal philosophical movements that posited a rugged individual making choices about his life as well as consumer capitalism that presents us with choice in everything from cars to sperm donors. “Choice” is not the basis of most relationships at most times.
Nor is sexuality clearly genetic. This is where the gay activists and scientists looking for the “cause” could really use some anthropology and history to temper their findings. There was no such thing as the homosexual or the heterosexual till the 19th century, although surely men fell in love with men and women with women. This is not only fairly established historical fact, it is also fairly established anthropological fact since a variety of cultures do not have sexual species in the same way that we do in North America and Western Europe.
Furthermore, our belief in homosexuality and heterosexuality is based on there only being two genders, male or female. But as history and anthropology have shown, many cultures at many times have had more than two genders and perhaps even more interesting, we ourselves might increasingly be a multiple gender culture with the “discovery” of intersex bodies as regularly occurring in our population and also with a transgender movement that makes deciding if someone is straight or gay increasingly difficult.
My point is, sexuality is hardly a known quantity, but what we do know is that these questions are decided by cultures, economies, and histories. The hardline taken by many gay rights activists that sexuality must be genetic because that is how gays will gain legal protection is not only factually suspicious, but probably not the best way to ensure rights in the first place. Race has been seen as a biological fact for some time and this “fact” has done little to mitigate structural racism and individual animus. Gender, too, is seen as biology and that has hardly killed patriarchy.
You cannot force tolerance by claiming you are “born that way” just like you cannot force love. Tolerance, like desire, is the result of culture and history and so we must create a society that accepts love as a many-splendored, not a genetic, thing.
