From Post Secret, apropos of my recent post.
“I Married a Lesbian”
Hugo Schwyzer has an article about his history of attraction to lesbian women. My history is a little different, having identified as a lesbian myself for a while. However, I still find myself attracted to women who are queer or lesbian (Rachel Maddow makes my heart flutter and I know I’m not the only guy who feels that way!)
Schwyzer writes,
Lots of people have “types” to which they are consistently attracted. From the time pubescent hormones started surging through my body, I found that I was particularly drawn to female jocks. It’s not as if my attraction was limited to athletes alone; I was a horny teen boy who could be turned on by almost anything that moved. But I tended to get crushes on the same type of girl: the star basketball player, the soccer forward, the swimmer. Some were lesbians. Some weren’t.
In several classes during my junior year of high school, I sat next to “Kendall,” the statuesque multi-sport star. A year ahead of me, Kendall was nearly six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a jawline that could cut glass. All-League in three sports, she wore her letterman’s jacket almost every day, and would often come to class with her short dark hair still wet from the post-workout shower. Her signature scent was chlorine with a hint of sweat.
Aside from the possibility of a statistical prevalence of certain physical and stylistic attributes that Schwyzer observes (jawlines and haircuts), I think there is probably another reason. Of the men I know who are attracted to Maddow, to use an example (and no, we’re not primarily attracted to her in her news anchor “drag”), we’re all strongly feminist and suspicious of fixed gender roles. It’s possible that women who share these characteristics (and reflect them in their attire and general attitude) are often either queer or lesbian.
Speculating about the cause in a chicken and egg style manner isn’t something I want to write about now, but it’s interesting to think about.
(Don’t get me wrong, I like straight women, too. And I have no desire to date a lesbian-identified woman in order to “convert” her, nor will I date a lesbian who makes an “exception” for me.)
The phenomenon of bi-erasure makes me wonder
Has anyone ever researched the sociology/psychology of it in comparison to the “one-drop rule”? It seems like calling someone “really gay” when they’re bisexual is similar in that being gay is viewed a kind of “contamination”, like race, and in both cases it’s the contamination/deviation from the norm which determines the identity of the individual.
Of course, in the broader culture male bisexuality is more often reduced to being gay and female bisexuality to being straight. And in some LGBT/queer circles, people can be accused of being “really straight” if they’re bisexual. The latter would fit the “contamination” theory (it’s just that the expectation is of same-sex relationships as the norm/ideal), but the problem of erasing female bisexuality doesn’t fit as directly. I’m sure it has something to do with denying female sexual agency, the objectification of lesbian relationships for male consumption, and etc.
Anyway, just wondering if this has been looked at somewhere.
Yeah, I should have used Google Scholar before posting:
Brekhus, Wayne H. 1996. “Social Marking and the Mental Coloring of Identity:
Sexual Identity Construction and Maintenance in the United States. ”Sociological Forum 11(3):497-522.
Brekhus, Wayne H. 2003. Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia
andthe Grammar of Social Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Really fascinating article about a rabbi who as a matchmaker between gay men and lesbian women in order to help them have children. Some excerpts and a few thoughts below:
“Rabbi Harel introduced us and there was a good initial click,” wrote Sari and Avi, a couple Harel set up, in a testimonial on Kamoha’s site. “It’s not love. It’s chemistry, a sense of understanding and partnership, trust and appreciation.”
I thought this was a really interesting quote — a lot of asexual people, or people with a different understanding of “love” might disagree with this characterization. Understanding, partnership, trust, appreciation, and chemistry all seem like important elements in making a long-term relationship work. Sexual attraction is for many people, crucial, but not to everyone.
Harel was unable to persuade the couples he has already wed to speak to the media. But Kamoha referred The Associated Press to a man who has applied for Harel’s services, a 35-year-old Orthodox Jew in the closet…He said he was willing to forgo love if it means being able to have children. He wants to try to refrain from seeing men when he is married but would discuss the issue with his wife if that changed, he said… Harel said as long as both parties are aware the other is dating, it would not be adultery in such a union. He said the same would not be true for a straight couple because they are sexually compatible and have no reason to look elsewhere. Jewish law forbids adultery
The double standard here — straight couples cannot have outside relationships because they are “sexually compatible”, but a gay/straight pairing is not compatible and so they can — is based on a really narrow understanding of “compatible.” What if one partner in a heterosexual couple wants/needs anal sex? Kink? Sex more/less frequently than the other? The compatibility in question can’t be biological, since for both couples, we’re talking about a cisgender man and woman, presumably one with a penis and one with a vagina (having children is the goal here). What makes sexual orientation the key distinction between allowable incompatibilities? And why not allow polyamory for both with consent?
The liberal religious gay group Havruta opposes Harel’s approach, saying it seeks to “erase” homosexuals from the Orthodox community.
“They are saying, ‘Changing them isn’t possible, but how else can we hide their existence? If we can’t fix them then let’s set them up with lesbians,’” said the group’s spokesman, Daniel Jonas.
The response from liberals is expected. Since the norm is that cismale/cisfemale pairings are heterosexual, when gay men and lesbian women are married, their identities are erased. But what if that weren’t the norm? What if gays and lesbians who wanted children and, for their own reasons, wanted to conceive them with one another, could partner for that reason and have open marriages? I, personally, think that it is irrational religious views which keep them from simply partnering with the person that they desire, but plenty of our reasons are irrational. These couples are acting on reasons that, to a large extent, are their own (though I do think that there are some strong psychological factors that may keep them from seeing some of the irrationality in question).
Rabbis have criticized Harel’s method because it doesn’t try to discourage gays and lesbians from seeking to change their sexual orientation.
Maybe more unexpectedly, conservatives are unhappy because this does not go far enough. There is now a property of human beings called “sexual orientation” which must be “changed.” This way of classifying humans is not ahistorical (we haven’t always classed people in this way), and not part of the Hebrew scriptures, as I understand them. What would constitute acceptable “change”? If the couples in question are having procreative sex and (setting aside outside relationships, let’s say) being faithful to one another, what more is required?
Lots of really interesting stuff going on here.
