Glorified Evil

What is Sexual Orientation?  I was having a email back&forth with a couple of my friends.
It started with a comment on one of those ex-gay ministries which try to speak of love and
tolerance on the surface, but if you look deeper you will find the same message that
homosexuality is a sin and that the only way to redeem yourself in the eyes of god is by
changing.

I personally do not have any problem with people changing or marrying: more power to
them. My problem is when someone says, that change is round the corner, just run for it;
or that you are homosexual bacause of unformed relations with your parents or some
BS like that.

Anyways, back to the  original question: What iis sexual orientation? do I need to be
sleeping with a man to be gay?  Is it something that one does? or is it something
more internal. The question arises for many people who sleep  with the same sex
strongly deny being gay (giving rise to the term MSM - men who sleep with men)
while some  say they are not gay or are ex-gay just because they no longer
engage in homosexual relations. My friend formulated his thoughts very
nicely, which I am posting here (of course with his permission) :

" I think its not (something) with well-defined boundaries. I think its a "what you prefer",
with varying degrees of bisexuality defining the areas between gay/straight. When I think
of it as a preference, then "gay person with straight lifestyle", "straight person with
gay lifestyle" etc. become meaningless phrases.
Note, however, that :
- its probably not an entirely voluntary preference. That goes for many preferences,
    now that I think about it.
- Temporarily changing preferences under duress/intoxication is certainly normal.
- It can be a very inflexible preference for some people. But that goes for
   many other types of preferences too.
   
  I guess its what you would gravitate to in the absence of external forces "

I think it is beautifully written. If only more people were so clear in thought.

The development of sexual identity has different stages that all of us (from all parts
of the sexual rainbow) have to go through.Interestingly, societal oppression influences
the identity development of both target and dominant members of society (Patricia
Sullivan, "Sexual Identity Develpoment: The Importance of Target or Dominant Group
Membership" in Working with LGBT college students, ed. R. L. Sanlo(1992)) In this case,
societal oppression would refer to homophobia (or might I say queer-phobia to include
transphobia and bi-phobia), the target group refers to  queer folk and the dominant
members are heterosexual. It is when we reach the final stage of development, the
‘internalization’ that we are free of latent phobias and can truly accept those different
from us without feeling threatened. I am happy I have some friends like that.

On another note, in India, a rapist had the audacity to propose to marry his victim in a
bid to reduce his sentence. And the funny(!) part is that the court actually delayed the
sentence to hear the woman’s response to that even though the person was found guilty!

afterthought: such is the training of the male dominated society that we usually think of
men while formulating our questions, gay is used in general for all queer folk (sometimes)
etc etc. There is no term like WSW in parallel to MSM. Also the use of ‘man’ to denote
things pertaining to all humans. (eg. man proposes god disposes)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 4th, 2005 at 6:53 am and is filed under LGBT Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.