Is homosexuality a choice? Whether one decides to affect camp behaviour is clearly a choice. Choosing to have sex
with any given person is clearly a choice. This may be the root of the myth that homosexuality (your sexual
preference) itself is a choice. You decide whether to act on your attractions, but you don’t decide your
attractions. Homosexuals can no more choose to be straight than straights can choose to be gay. Religious con men
claim otherwise. Imagine it were possible to easily change your gender or sexual preference. Why would you want
to mess with something so fundamental to your identity?
Sex vs Sexual Preference
You may have known numerous people in your life that have had gay sex one or more times. These people apparently
acted out of free choice. These sort of people are probably motivated by curiosity, adventure, horniness…
They were not driven by attraction to their partners. It is possible for some straight guys to have gay
sex heterosexual sex is not available, and for some gays, the opposite is true. But that has nothing to do with
changing sexual preference. Having gay sex merely requires closing the eyes, focusing on sensation, and
fantasising and enjoying the blow job. It says almost nothing about sexual preference. Sexual preference is about
whom you find good looking, whom you stare at, who makes your heart flutter when they come near, whom you wish
you could kiss, whom you wish you might share your life with…
Choosing Celibacy vs Choosing Sexual Preference
Obviously you can choose whether to have sex or not. It is extremely difficult to be celibate when you are in
your teens or twenties, but it is possible to white knuckle it, but you can’t through an act of will,
change what turns you on.
Let’s for argument’s sake presume you are a straight male for whom red-haired tall willowy women
turn your crank. (If you are not, make the appropriate adjustments to my following argument). There is no pill
you can take, or no mental discipline that will enable you to change so that you no longer find such women
appealing, and instead find squat, hairy, dark haired ones the epitome of attractiveness. You can’t, even
in imagination, decide to find males more attractive than your willowy red-head. If even you can’t
change your sexual preference this small amount, why do you imagine that gays can do the reverse, an even bigger
change? Your heterosexuality was clearly never a choice for you. You did not wake up one day and I say, I think I
will be straight. You just noticed stirrings in your chest and attractions to the opposite sex that made you
blush and stammer. The same thing happens to gay people.
The Challenge
I often challenge heterosexual people with the view that sexual preference is a choice to perform an altruistic
act. Change to gay, then change back, and write a book about how you did it. You don’t even have to have
sex, just change your preference. If it is a choice, you should have no trouble. They typically respond,
“But I could never do that. Being gay is disgusting.” I respond, “On my side, the idea of
lusting after pussy is even more revolting! You are just as constrained as I am, and for the same reason.”
The logical error they make is presuming that gays feel the same way about heterosexual sex as they do. They
flatly refuse to believe that to gays hetero sex might smell worse than vomit, feel utterly revolting
(like masturbating with raw bloody liver), be immoral (because of risk of pregnancy in an overpopulation world),
be gross (like having sex with dogs), or boring (like having a warm bath).
Most people can’t understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.
~ Ivan Turgenev (born: 1818-11-09 died: 1883-09-03 at age: 64)
Straight people trying to understand gays mistakenly imagine, that gays experience the situation the same way
they would, e.g. “Why would I tell people I was gay and have revolting gay sex and refuse to have sex with
the people who really turn me on? Well maybe I want to piss my parents off, by getting three rings through my
nose, so that mucus continually drips and a giant ugly tattoo. Maybe it is because I am utterly pissed off with
the universe.”
Such motives would apply to them if they attempted to deny their sexual preference, something they
often demand gays do, and pretend to be gay. To a gay person, heterosexual attraction might seem crude
like mountain sheep rutting. It is clearly very closely associated with mammalian reproduction (childbirth,
nursing the way cows do). In contrast, gay attraction feels natural, clear, pure, unsullied by reproductive lust,
right, logical, egalitarian. Being gay is being yourself. Being gay is telling the truth about whom you really
are and whom you really love. Oddly, straights keep pushing us gays to lie and live a life of misery to live up
their illogical, superstitious, bovine expectations.
Straights, because they are the majority, refuse to believe that anyone else experiences life in a different
way than they do. It is as naïve as imagining every creature experiences the world the same way an adult white
male human does. Straight males seem comfortable with the idea that women have different sexual preferences than
they do, but they are stuck on the notion that all other males must at heart be identical to them. They refuse to
believe we gays are serious. Perhaps if we gays had some distinguishing physical feature, like square pupils,
they would accept that we are different from them.
I am not in this world to live up to other people’s expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live
up to mine.
~ Fritz Perls (born: 1893-07-08 died: 1970-03-14 at age: 76)
I have to suppress my revulsion for all the blatant heterosexuality going on all around me. Straights do not
think it weird that women have no sexual attraction for women. Why are they so skeptical about gays? Even though
I intellectually understand, I still find it emotionally completely baffling when a great hunk of a guy is
attracted to some airhead female tarted up in layers of makeup. He has nothing in common. What on earth would
they talk about? I feel extreme contempt for such females. It feels as if he has to be faking his
attraction, like watching movie actors perform.
Desire to Change
Many gays, especially when they are young, would give their eye teeth to change their preference. They are sick
of the abuse they have to put up with. They have been tormented by Christians to the brink of suicide. Most gays
at some point at least toy with the idea of suicide to escape their preference. If there were some way to change
preference, don’t you think 90% of young gays would take it. No matter how
painful, it would surely to preferable to suicide.
Phony Cures
Christian predators who pretend they have a cure but when you dig into it, they are outrageous
liars and charlatans, much like the sadistic priests who treated nuns with wasp stings in The Devils Of
Loudun. I read four books on these religious conversions that the evangelist Dr. Terry Winter gave me.
What they call a "cure" amounts to white knuckling, marrying and then backsliding, putting the wife
through hell. The attraction to the same sex does not diminish. All that diminishes is the frequency of sex with
people of the same gender. The attraction looms even larger from the repression. You end up with two ruined lives
from his hubris. There are groups that bleed naïve gays of their saving in promise of a cure
It bears repeating, you can’t cure homosexuality, because it is not a disease. Further, nobody has
discovered a way to change sexual preference.
Hard Wired
Dr. John Money did studies on sexual preference and discovered humans get hard wired in before you are even two
years old. This hard-wiring is extremely stable.
Tormenting people to induce them to change their sexual preference is a misguided as demanding they grow an
extra arm.
God
Religious arguments rarely make any sense logically. Sometimes Christians will say, “God made me straight,
thus he must have made you straight too. Why are you turning away from your essential nature?” If there is
a God, he did not make me straight. He made me gay. I have been gay ever since I was a toddler. I have
always had crushes on males. Even as a preschooler, I had no interest in sex play with girls, just boys. That
is my essential nature. If this postulated God could create females who are attracted to males,
who’s to say he is incapable of making a few males who are too?
The Parable of the Arrogant Christian
There was once a very rich Christian who bought an entire island and set himself up as king. Tourists came to
look at gardens and natural wonders of the island. He convinced Baskin and Robbins to set up an ice cream
franchise outlet on the condition they served only one flavour, Maraschino Cherry Custard, his favourite
flavour. He arranged various punishments such as stocks, burning alive, and stoning to death for people caught on
the island sampling any other flavour. He explained that according to the bible (Luke 11:12
), Maraschino Cherry Custard was the one true flavour of ice cream, and eating any other was an insult to
God. The king was horrified to find that many people so detested Maraschino Cherry Custard, that they avoided
eating ice cream altogether. In the king’s view, clearly preference in ice cream flavours was a choice, and
so he had the heretics tortured to convince them to not only eat Maraschino Cherry Custard ice
cream but to like it.
The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.
~ Alfred Kinsey (born: 1894-06-23 died: 1956-08-25 at age: 62)
Arguments
Bigots like to claim being gay is a choice, that it is like having a ring installed in your nose. This helps them
justify persecuting gays. You will notice the people who make this claim also assert they have are not gay
themselves and that they refuse to socialise with gays. So how would they know? Ask any gay person, who obviously
knows first hand, and they will tell you there is no possible way they could just choose a different sexual
preference. Here are some arguments you can use to counter the bigots:
- If I chose to be gay, then you, chose not to be gay. This is not the same thing as choosing to have sex
with members of the same sex. This is choosing whether or not to be sexually attracted to them. So you should
be able to demonstrate it is a choice, by choosing to be gay for 5 minutes. You
don’t have to act on it, just choose to be attracted to people of the same sex. God will forgive you. If
you are honest, you will have to admit you cannot do it. If you can’t change your orientation by
an act of will, what makes you think I can?
- Most young gays consider suicide because they can’t make themselves straight. They can’t stand
all that hatred and violence directed at them. Obviously, if they could choose to be straight they would take
it. Only later do they realise there is nothing wrong with them and accept that which cannot change. This is
not like getting a nose ring to piss off your parents or impress others with how cool you are. You desperately
try to hide your orientation from everyone. Given how cruel people are to young gays, choosing to be gay would
be like choosing to have acne.
- If being gay is a choice, then surely heterosexuality is also a choice. Choosing would be a major event in
one’s life. Do you recall ever making that choice? Of course not. It is just when you were going through
puberty you suddenly noticed a new powerful drive inside yourself that swept you off your feet and makes you
shake with unbearable lust. That sexual attraction drives you, not the reverse. There was no choice involved.
It just happened to you as a side effect of an hormone overdose. You could have a cold shower, but you could
not turn off the overwhelming preoccupation with your sexual attraction. If you could not turn off your
heterosexual attraction, why do imagine I can turn off my equally intense homosexual one?
- You arrogant prick! You don’t know the first thing about homosexuality or what it is like to be gay.
Why do you fancy yourself more of an expert on the matter than I am, who have lived through it? You are just
parroting some bigoted tripe you picked off a website like Paul
Cameron, a defrocked psychologist.
- Read the books written by the Christians who claim to cure gays. All can do is persuade people to cut down
on how much sex they have with the same sex by white knuckling it. They don’t even claim to eliminate the
attraction. They convince gays to marry. Then that ruins the life of an innocent women, who are always second
fiddle in their husband’s attraction. Whether you have sex is a conscious choice. But even then
the drive usually overwhelms any resolution. Whom you are attracted to is not. Being gay is about whom
you are attracted to, not whom you have sex with. Many straight men in prison have sex with other men. But all
during that time they are fantasising about women.
Think of all the people you find irresistibly attractive. Did this just happen unconsciously, or did you
get out a spread sheet and calculate the advantages of all the people you have encountered and compute the
ones with the most advantages should you get together and consciously decide which ones to be attracted
to?
The question is silly. So why do you think we gays consciously choose whom we are attracted to? Why would
we be any different from you?
Most males have a type. For argument‘s sake, let’s presume yours is tall-slim-red-heads. If your
preference were a conscious choice, you should be able to change yourself so that short-plump-black-haired
people would be the ones you found attractive, and you would completely lose your attraction to tall slim
red-heads. I have never heard of any straight person with that ability, so why do you imagine we gays have an
even more powerful version of it, able to change our preferred type and gender?Other people’s preferences are baffling. The boy who lives next door plays music that sounds like
someone banging on pipes with a hammer. Much as I can’t conceive of myself enjoying this music,
intellectually I accept that he must enjoy it, otherwise, why would he be playing it?
Christians when confronting gays say to themselves, I would not enjoy that, so you shouldn’t either.
You should do what I do, even if you find it revolting. You should just adjust, so that you no longer find it
revolting any more. It is part of their “the universe revolves around me” attitude. They imagine
whatever they think or feel is the way God wants people to think and feel. Their claimed exclusive handle on
the mind of God gives them the right to impose it on others.
Normally, when A forces sex acts on B, that B finds repulsive, we call it rape or sexual harassment, and
use the law to stop A from doing that. However, Christians have special dispensation to do this to gays
because they are in the majority. They are even permitted to call on others to kill gays as part of their
tyranny.
- Being gay is like living in a society that has a strong taboo against having sex with one’s own
species. Not only does that society demand you leave your own species (either gender) alone, but that you must
couple with pigs, cats, dogs, goats, snakes, sheep… Mind your own business you lunatics!!!
punctuation 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (all)
©1997-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products
Please email your feedback for publication, letters to the editor, errors, omissions, typos, formatting errors, ambiguities, unclear wording, broken/redirected link reports, suggestions to improve this page or comments to
Roedy Green :
If you want your message kept confidential, not considered for posting, please explicitly specify that.