[X] My Assistant

[Stark Coyote]

People always say they are usually turned gay or they are born gay.

Are they both right or both wrong?

I am a gay male, and I will say I was born this way. I have always liked males in that way, and I would always be like that towards males.

People also say, they chose to be gay, Why would you want to be Gay? We gays are always put down and stereotyped! I am proud to be gay but as I said before, Why would you choose to be gay.

So the Topic is, Are you BORN Gay/Straight or are you Turned/Chose to be Gay/Straight?

DISCUSS

This post has been edited by Squirtle Squad: Feb 27 2011, 03:16 PM

[Kendall Raine]

Well, there’s a difference between attraction and acting on your attractions. Attraction itself isn’t a choice, only acting on it is. Sexual orientation usually refers to one’s inner attractions, so no, sexual orientation is not a choice. You don't choose what you're attracted to, you just choose who you have sex with/who you enter relationships with. A man who is only attracted to other men can very well be in a relationship with a woman if he's trying to lie to himself and others about his true sexuality. It happens all the time. I've known a few lesbian women who've been in sexual relationships with men, and they didn't enjoy it much, but they wrongly believed that ALL women don't enjoy sex with men and so they themselves didn't even realize they were gay until later on in their lives...

Sexuality is much more complex than people tend to realize. It's rarely ever something anyone consciously chooses, but it can be fluid and it can change, but if it does change it usually does so against your will, not because of it. People can be born either gay, bi, pan, straight, whatever, and later in life they might find that their attractions shift and change. It happens to some and doesn't happen to others. Human beings are very sexual creatures that use sex as a social bonding tool, it's not just a reproductive instinct like it is with dogs and cats and stuff, so our sexuality is a LOT more complex than most other animals.

Best thing to do is just go with the flow, don't try to change your sexuality, but if it changes on its own, that's okay. Nothing abnormal or shameful about that.

Now that that's out of the way... I don’t think it matters if it is a choice or isn’t. Religion is a choice, and yet there’s all sorts of rights and protections for religious people. Contraception is a choice people make to use, and it can be considered “unnatural,” its purpose is having non-procreative sex just like homosexual sex, and yet very few people are against that.

Let’s pretend that sexuality is absolutely, 100% a choice. Okay, so what? Shouldn’t two consenting adults have the right to be together if they want to regardless?

One thing I find problematic about the whole thing, is, what if race was a choice? Would it then be wrong to be black if you could choose to be black? It feels a bit like saying that being gay or black or whatever is some horrible fate and we should only tolerate them because they didn't choose it, those poor dears...but no, we should be accepting because there's nothing wrong with these things, not just because they didn't choose it.