Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
I could probably
have lived my life quite comfortably without knowing or caring who Cynthia Nixon
was, but when I read that she — an actress who made her reputation on the Sex
and the City TV show — was being raked over
the coals for having said somewhere or other that being Queer was a “choice”
for her, I immediately got interested and wanted to see exactly what she’d had
to say.
It began when
Alex Witchel interviewed her for a New York Times Magazine article published January 19, 2012. After Witchel
gave a history of Nixon’s professional career — her start as a child actor, her
ability to make the leap to adult roles with stymies a lot of showbiz kids, her
appearances in major Broadway productions with the likes of William Hurt,
Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Irons and Christine Baranski, and her leap into cable
TV with what Witchel called “the global success of Sex and the City” — the writer started to describe Nixon’s personal
life.
He mentioned
that Nixon had been married to a man, Daniel Mozes — who went to Hunter College
High School with her and now teaches there — and they had had two children.
Then, Witchel wrote, “As Nixon has grown older, she has allowed herself to
start coloring outside the lines.” What that meant in plain English was that in
2004, a year after she broke up with Mozes, she started a relationship with
Christine Marinoni, who “with the help of a male friend whom Nixon will not
identify” gave birth to a son, Max Ellington Nixon-Marinoni, whom Nixon and
Marinoni are raising as a couple.
Witchel quoted
Nixon as saying “I totally reject” the skepticism many Queer activists showed
towards her middle-age change in sexual orientation. “I gave a speech recently,
an empowerment speech to a Gay audience, and it included the line, ‘I’ve been
straight and I’ve been Gay, and Gay is better,’” Nixon told Witchel. “They
tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality
can be a choice. And 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 and we are one group and let us stop
trying to make a litmus test for who is considered Gay and who is not.”
Nixon didn’t
stop there. Witchel described her as waving her arms and turning red in the
face as she expressed her antagonism towards the “born this way” orthodoxy of
the Queer community. “Why can’t it be a
choice?” she said. “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. I also feel like people think I was walking
around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was Gay, which I find really offensive.
I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve
been out with.”
Needless to say,
the Queer Thought Police came down on Nixon like the proverbial ton of bricks.
Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out — an organization designed to expose the
abuses so-called “reparative therapy” programs aimed at turning Queer people
straight — said, “Cynthia did not put adequate thought into the ramifications
of her words, and it is going to be used when some kid comes out and their
parents force them into some ‘ex-Gay’ camp while she’s off drinking cocktails
at fancy parties. When people say it’s a choice, they are green-lighting an
enormous amount of abuse because if it’s a choice, people will try to influence
and guide young people to what they perceive as the ‘right’ choice.”
Under the lash
of the criticism, Nixon backtracked — a bit — when she gave an interview to the
Daily Beast Web site and identified herself as Bisexual. (Duh.) “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,” she said. “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.”
Why on earth can’t we acknowledge at least some element of “choice” in
how we express our sexual desires? No Gay man is equally attracted to all men, nor is any Lesbian equally attracted to all women, any more than any straight person is
attracted to everyone of the opposite sex. If we can pick and choose our
partners based on height, weight, age, hair color, tastes in politics or music,
or whatever weird and beautiful criteria that guide us, why can’t we pick their
gender, too? Why do we have to
make some hard-and-fast decision, once we’ve had our first experience with a
same-sex partner, that we have to identify as Gay or Lesbian for life?
In fact, for
reasons that — like much of the science of sexual orientation — aren’t very
well researched, known or understood, women seem more able to have sex, or form
relationships, with other women and not feel that makes them Queer forever than
men are with other men. UC Davis psychologist Gregory Herek did a survey that
found that 16 percent of self-identified Lesbians said they’d had “a fair amount
of choice” in their sexual orientation, versus only 5 percent of
self-identified Gay men. Among self-identified Bisexuals, the figure was 45
percent for women and 40 percent for men.
Another study,
actually an analysis of nine studies by researchers at the Williams Institute
at UCLA Law School, said that 8 million Americans (3.5 percent of the
population — not Alfred Kinsey’s much-vaunted “10 percent,” which only applied
to men and included Bisexuals) identify as Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual. In eight of
the nine surveys Williams studied, Bisexual women outnumbered Lesbians, while
Gay men outnumbered Bi men.
What this says
to me is that women are far less likely than men to regard sexual orientation
as an either-or choice — either straight or Gay — and more likely to be able to
experiment with Lesbian experiences or relationships without having to make a
hard-and-fast decision that they can’t go back to dating the opposite gender.
I’m not sure why that is, but my guess would be that for a man to have sex with
men means identifying with the supposedly “inferior” female role and is
therefore, in the context of a homophobic society with rigid notions of
“proper” gender identification and behavior, a more wrenching psychological
change and a more direct challenge to one’s own sense of identity.
Coming out as
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer or what have you isn’t made any easier by the
demands of the Queer orthodoxy and the “born that way” mythology that once
you’ve ventured into Queerdom, you can’t go back. It has to do with the
metaphor, at the root of much Queer organizing and activism since the founding
of the Mattachine Society in 1950, that sexual orientation is an “immutable
characteristic” comparable to race, and therefore discrimination against Queer
people is as wrong — and wrong for the same reasons — as discrimination against
African-Americans or other people of color.
It’s a metaphor
that’s getting harder and harder to sustain as the Queer community comes to
grips with the existence of Bisexual and Transgender people and tries to figure
out how to integrate them within an essentialist, biologically determined
concept of sexual orientation. The reality of Bisexuals — people who can,
depending on the circumstances, fulfill themselves romantically or sexually
with both males and females — already makes it virtually impossible to sustain
a limited (and limiting) understanding of people as “born” straight or Queer.
And the reality
of Transgender people drives the final nail into the coffin of the idea of
sexual orientation as immutable. After all, it’s hard to think of a more
“immutable characteristic” someone could have than the physical or genetic
configuration of their body as male or female — and yet the Transgender
community has shown us that physical or genetic gender is not destiny, that one
can be physically one sex and psychologically and spiritually the other.
Indeed, an increasing number of Transgender people don’t buy into the notion
that there are just two genders; instead they claim one or more of a dizzying
array of gender identities which is going to take a while for those of us who
don’t share their gender ambiguity fully to understand.
I’ve long felt
that we as a community have reached the limit of race as an appropriate
metaphor for our movement’s struggle against discrimination and prejudice.
Indeed, ironically enough, the growing number of mixed-race people in the U.S.
(including our current President) has weakened the “born this way” racial
metaphor even among the people for whom it was invented; more and more
mixed-race people are sounding like Bisexual and Transgender people in their
refusal to settle on one racial identity and insistence that the people around
them accept the totality of their heritage, not just characterize them on the
basis that they look “more” like one of their ancestral races than another.
I think religion
is a better metaphor for our community than race now. One can accept the
religion into which one is born, one can change to a different one — either a
different denomination or a totally different belief system. One can not
believe for years and then suddenly decide there is a God, or one can believe
for years and then suddenly decide there isn’t. One can accept a particular
faith pretty much “as is,” or one can pick and choose among the elements of
different ones. Or one can make up a belief system of one’s own. All these choices are, or at least should be, protected
under the broad two-part guarantee of religious freedom in the First Amendment
— government can neither play favorites for one religion or another, or stop
you from believing and practicing whatever faith (or non-faith) you want.
Likewise,
instead of telling people they have to fit themselves, their experiences and
their desires into boxes neatly labeled “straight,” “Gay,” “Lesbian” or
“Bisexual,” we as a community should be fighting for the right to express
yourself sexually any way you like, as long as you don’t force yourself on
someone else or otherwise cause harm to others. “Our community is not a monolith,
thank goodness, any more than America itself is,” said Cynthia Nixon — who,
let’s face it, would have got the Queer Thought Police even angrier if her
first partner had been a woman and her second one a man, instead of the other
way around.
“I met Christine
and I fell in love and lust with her,” Nixon said. “I am completely the same
person and I was not walking around in some kind of fog. I just responded to
the people in front of me the way I truly felt.” That’s the sort of freedom we
as a Queer movement should be working for all people to have. It’s the openness to experience, to love, to power, to
— dare I say it? — choice that
will liberate us, not some crabbed orthodoxy about being “born this way” which
makes a great Lady Gaga lyric but a lousy prescription for other people’s
lives.
