Queerness (or the Orientation Disputation)

Reading about queer theory in my Intro to Literary Studies class has inspired me to write about something which has been on my mind for a while now. I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower recently, and it made me pretty angry about the homophobic mindset of our society. When watching the election results last year, I wasn't as interested in the presidential side of things as much as the Senate. Partly because I already knew Obama was going to win (it was closer than I thought it would be, but there was still no way, in my mind, that Romney could've pulled it off), but also because Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay Senator, and I got to be part of making that history.

Better yet, some states legalized gay marriage! It is a slow process, but I am hoping that, in my lifetime, I will see the majority of the U.S. with such legislation. After all, it is ridiculous to deny anyone the ability to marry another person. Especially in a country that nominally extols freedom as a human right. Freedom should only be impinged on if the exercise of it harms others, or keeps them from exercising their own freedom. And gay marriage doesn't harm anybody. Trying to stop it, however, does.

I haven't always been in favor of this, though. For most of my life, I was a Christian, and my upbringing had led me to believe that homosexuality was wrong. I didn't hate people for it, but I at least thought that they needed to change, and that what they were doing was a sin. I cringe when I remember that I once thought to myself that gay men should be shown porn in order to help them like women again (notice, I assumed heterosexuality was the natural starting point).

But slowly, over the course of my high school years in particular, I began to accept homosexuality as an orientation. First I thought it was wrong. Then, I thought it was okay, as long as homosexuals kept it to themselves. Then, as I became friends with a few bisexual people, and, at the same time, began to lose my faith in God...I went to the extreme and figured that nothing is right or wrong. As such, homosexuality isn't bad. I still believe that nothing is right or wrong, but I have since then developed the sense that, given an objective moral standard, homosexuality still wouldn't be wrong.

(People misunderstand me a lot when I say nothing is right or wrong. Mostly they focus on the "wrong" part. What if someone raped your kids? What if someone steals from you? What if someone murders someone you love? I get questions like that, invariably, every time I explain this. I think the problem comes with the phrasing, and the normal way people think about right and wrong. When I talk about this, I mean that the objective standards of "right" and "wrong" don't exist. When we say something is bad, we are merely saying that we don't like it, or it harms us. It is not "wrong" to steal/rape/murder. It is, however, very detrimental to the current societal system and the individuals involved to do any of these things. If you hurt me or steal my things, I won't call it "wrong" in any objective sense, but I definitely won't like what you've done. I will get angry. But that's the point: when something goes against our ideal, we call it bad. We call it "wrong". But objectively, there is no quality of wrongness inherent in the act.)

My first college course featured a graphic novel called Stuck Rubber Baby, about a man who was gay but didn't accept it. There were a lot of parallels between that story and the one of civil rights for African Americans (especially since they took place in the same period of time). Reading this pretty much sealed the deal: I respected homosexuality, and even went so far as to question myself. Instead of just naturally saying I'm heterosexual, I asked myself if I really am. It became clear pretty quickly that I am not sexually attracted to men. I can, however, grasp the homosexual mindset, in the same way I can grasp the female sexual mindset--I have no experience of it, but I can understand it (mostly through the more truthful media representations, or just thinking about what it would be like).

When I took Intro to Literary Studies, probably my favorite class ever in terms of content, I got a different spin on the whole idea of sexuality. We read some Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, etc., in our Queer Theory section of the class, and at first it didn't really reach me. But then we watched some videos of Butler discussing the topic, and my mind was blown. It was this experience that made me think that everyone should be required to take a class that explains stuff like this.

Simply put, the idea behind Butler's theory is that gender is performative. There aren't any real, biological distinctions between what a man inherently does and what a woman inherently does. We choose what we do. And this extends to sexuality. As Foucault points out, homosexual acts were originally thought of as just acts--not as part of an orientation. The term "homosexual" is actually fairly new, and came into being before the term "heterosexual." The point being that our culture decided to treat these acts as part of an abnormal identity, something that would define people along a sexual boundary. In reality, though, "heterosexuals" have just as much ability to have sex with those of the same gender.

Our society today is guilty of heteronormativity, the practice of treating heterosexual acts as the only normal, right ways of expressing sexuality. This creates a homophobic culture that goes so far as to make the phrase "no homo" necessary in some same-sex interactions. There was a time when males saying they loved each other wasn't a big deal. No one automatically saw them as homosexuals, since the idea of same-sex love as an identity didn't exist back then. As I learned in my Shakespeare class, it was normal for men to only see other men as their equals, and thus their same-sex friendship was something akin to how women act together now (except it was about manly stuff). This is why most people don't understand Shakespeare's male characters, and automatically assume that some of them might be gay. While it's possible, they're mostly going off of a modern day understanding of social norms that didn't exist at the time the plays were written.

Our culture today is a bit of a mixture of perspectives, but overall it's still homophobic. And it really surprises me that the people who are so strongly against homosexuality don't see the parallel between this issue and racism. There are some people who do see it, and have commented on it, and yet there is no change. But that's not really where I want to go with this post. I want to get even more philosophical with it.

I saw a question online once that interested me (okay, I'll admit it, I was on Omegle, since I'd never used it before and I thought it'd be fun. I did the question-and-answer option, which can be pretty entertaining at times). A guy was confessing that, while drunk, he gave a male friend of his a blowjob. He asserted that he wasn't gay, but wanted to know if this could make him gay. I pointed out that this was done while he was drunk, and so it had no real connection to his orientation. I went on to talk about how "gay" is an identity, not an action. The person who I was talking with agreed with me, and we had a discussion about politics and philosophy, ending with her saying that this gave her hope for our generation.

But after a while, I thought about what I'd said in light of what I'd learned in class. And I decided that I was wrong. What Queer Theory is really getting at isn't that homosexuality is an identity, an action, or even, for that matter, a real orientation. "Homosexuality" is just a construct. A term. A label. And, like all other labels, it is mere generalization. It was used to point out that some people were different, and that a certain identity--heterosexuality--is right, normal, and correct. Foucault's works make it quite clear that such labels are used to make distinctions that prescribe for us what "normal" is. And if we don't act "normal", then there must be something wrong with us. And if there's something wrong with us, this can be fixed--hence the existence of correctional institutions. Such places reinforce the subconscious conception of what "normal" is, and scare us into trying to remain within the norm. With these institutions in place, our culture contains multiple examples of what "normal" should be, and so we accept these things, and hide our idiosyncratic deviations. As a result, we police ourselves, and the illusion of normalcy is maintained.

This state of things is what creates such things as homophobia. But of course, since we're able to look at it in this way, we can analyze the truth behind it. Is being attracted to someone of the same sex wrong? No. It's just that part of the "normal" conception of sexuality as prescribed by the doctrine of heteronormativity makes people think it is. Butler takes things further, and that is where I'd like to steer this post. The fact of the matter is that "homosexuality" doesn't exist. Neither does "heterosexuality."

How is this possible? Because these terms are constructions, and have nothing to do with the reality of sexuality. Sexuality is not a binary distinction. Rather, it is a personal expression. I like to think of it as a spectrum, but that doesn't even come close. If there have to be labels, then the the two I would choose are "sexual" and "asexual." Either you are sexually attracted, or you are not. But I would even go so far as to reject this, and posit that no label fits better than..."human."

With whom you have sex, whether or not you have sex, how you have sex, who you are attracted to...all these things are just part of being human. I understand that the idea of "orientation" is just to simplify matters and get a general idea of a person's inclination, but the conception of sexuality as a spectrum of orientations hasn't really helped us as a society to understand how each person is equal. Making these distinctions only led to us counting one of these orientations as better than the others. Just like racism, it leads us to assumptions about intrinsic value that don't make any logical sense. So I support the LGBTQ community, but I hope that someday we tear down these constructs, and simply see the variety of sexuality as something to be celebrated.