"Because the only thing that no straight man would do is be in a sexual relationship with another man."Do I have to say I disagree with the above? If one's working definition of anything that is clear-cut and unproblematic, and one isn't doing math (and I'd have doubts even then), then chances are pretty good one's definition is
wrong.
(Wait, am I being hostile? I linked to a public post.)And then in the comments, Grace said
"Yeah, I would word it as being attracted to the same sex, rather than simply having sex, makes you gay (or bi)," (I linked to a comment on a public post written by someone on my flist! OMG, I must have all kinds of hostility!) which in my IMHO is just as unidimensional and unsatisfying. For me (and I'm just repeating myself here, because I've said it plenty of times before in this journal), sexual orientation is a complicated interplay of behavior (of which both desire and sexual acts would be subsets, I suppose, although desire is really constructed in a way that sex as an act is not), self-identify, and social interpellation.
To ignore the socially constructed character of either homosexuality or heterosexuality (or bisexuality or . . .) is, IMHO, a mistake.
OTOH, "gay" is a much less fluid category than "queer" (as we saw in the most recent batch of "queer female space" discussions), so maybe it makes sense that a note of (biological?) essentialism might creep in. (And let's face it, there's a lot of sexual orientation essentialism in fandom, beginning but not ending with the seemingly uncritical use of the Kinsey scale and the "X isn't gay!" anti-slash arguments.) But embracing homonormativity isn't exactly something we want to do in any case, and should be resisted on those grounds, right?
