Sexuality can’t be changed like a pair of shoes

I was sitting around bored the other day, trying to figure out how to put a turbine engine on the spoon I use to stir my coffee, when I decided for excitement that I would become homosexual for a while. I mean, what the hell, that’s how people end up gay, right? They just decide they want to be gay, or some evil gay person corrupts them at a young age, and presto, change-o, they like chiffon and Cher and people of the same gender.

There will be some problems with my same-gender bender, for sure. My wife may have some concerns, although she has cut me a lot of slack on my loopiness since I snowblowed a big Valentine heart on the front lawn Feb. 14 a few years ago. My best friend will probably get a bit nervous when he sees me sizing him up for a Halston dress, although that may be simply because his legs are sturdier than a pair of fire hydrants.

The idea that people simply choose their homosexuality is one of the abiding myths about homosexuality in American culture. This bit of intellectual pestilence has profound repercussions in our politics, because it infects many with the fear that anything which increases exposure of our society to homosexuals also increases the chance that homosexuality will “spread.” It makes many Americans fearful of gay teachers and gay neighbors, or high school health classes that teach students about homosexuality along with heterosexuality. It makes many of us resist equal rights for homosexuals, because such rights mean homosexuals can live next door, rent rooms, obtain loans, and – heavens, hide the kids! – live among us as equals.

There is little medical evidence, however, that homosexuals choose to be homosexual, or that exposure to homosexuality increases the likelihood that a child will develop a sexual preference for the same gender. In fact, the evidence is to the contrary, that gender preference is primarily a biological expression which typically emerges in late childhood and adolescence.

The majority of us are programmed for our sexuality by something primordial early on, something that had me having the hots for Suzanne Pleshette and not Chad Everett at the age of 12. It’s the same something that still has me thinking Cameron Diaz oiled up in a skimpy bathing suit could burn the motor out of my table saw but Arnold Schwarzenegger oiled up in a Speedo makes me laugh.

Choice may be more of a factor with a few people. There are certainly some people who experiment with sexuality of one type or another.

Some in the Christian right have recently trumpeted the “salvation” of a few gays brought back to righteous heterosexuality as evidence that sexual orientation is a choice. The latter prove little except that among 10 million gays there are a few whose sexuality is ambivalent, or perhaps that if someone works at it hard enough they can convince some poor soul he is a house plant too.

Most of us, however, are probably genetically tracked to end up gay or straight. That is why the American Psychiatric Association decided years ago that homosexuality was not a mental illness, why the adopted children of gay couples are no more likely to grow up gay than someone who grew up on a steady diet of Charlton Heston movies, and why children with gay teachers are no more likely to become gay than children with straight teachers.

It is why children who grow up with gay neighbors are more likely to learn tolerance than homosexual preference. It is why the incidence of homosexuality (about 4 percent of us are homosexual) does not seem to be increasing despite wider acceptance of homosexuals in our society. It is probably why those bastions of conservatism, Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney, had homosexual children.

Beyond the lack of scientific evidence for the idea that sexuality is primarily a conscious choice, our experience should tell us the idea is moose dung. Most of us could not turn our sexuality in the opposite direction even if we wanted to, and if you paid me a million bucks to change mine I still could not stop myself from dreaming more about Julia Roberts than Raoul Julia.

Ask any gay person if they chose their sexuality – most bitterly reject the idea as inconceivable, insulting and hurtful, and they are right. Some would ask in return why they would choose a sexual orientation that marginalizes them in society, and makes them the subject of ridicule, bigotry and violence. You could ask Charlie Howard that question if he had not been thrown off a bridge to his death by three males in Bangor 21 years ago simply because he was gay.

As Maine approaches the equal rights vote this November it will be important that the hot air of ignorant rhetoric get sucked out of the debate.

One way to do that is for all of us to give up the idea that somehow homosexuality is simply a lifestyle choice for which its practitioners are seeking “special rights,” and the related notion that if homosexuals just straightened out they would not need constitutional protection from our biases. If you have a hard time with that idea, try to be homosexual for a few weeks; when you discover that no one can change sexuality like a pair of shoes, and that to live gay in this society is to be treated as a second-class citizen or worse, the experience may help set you straight.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.