American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  Choicers like Herman Cain and John Cummins can prove that being gay is a choice by choosing it themselves.

  Suck my dick, Herman. You too, John.

  I’m serious about this. You guys aren’t my type—each of you, in your own special way, is about as far from my type as vagina-free human beings get—but I’m offering to take one (or two) for the team. You guys believe there’s a gay/straight switch in our heads that each of us has the power to flip. Okay then. Flip that fucking switch, guys. Show us it can be done. Show us how it’s done. You guys name the time and the place and I will be there with my dick and a camera crew so that we can capture on video the precise moment when a man makes the conscious, personal choice to be gay.

  This is a big opportunity for you guys. Not just because I have a nice dick—although there is that—but because my offer will allow you to win this argument once and for all. You can prove that being gay is a choice by making the choice yourselves. And then, when you’re on The View, Herman, or you’re on CFAX, or better yet CBC’s evening news, John, and the host snickers when you say that being gay is a choice, you can tell them to roll the tape of you making the choice yourself.

  It’s time to put your mouths where your mouths are, guys, and prove that being gay is a choice once and for all. Show us how it’s done.

  Suck my dick.

  1 The scientific evidence that people don’t choose to be gay is kept in the same locked filing cabinet with the evidence that climate change is real, the Earth is billions of years old, and life on this planet evolved over hundreds of millions of years. Everyone seems to have a key to this filing cabinet with the exception of conservative politicians, evangelical ministers, talk radio hosts, anti-gay bigots, and the rest of the GOP’s base.

  “Show me evidence,” says Herman Cain. “What does science show?”

  There’s an entire field of research focused on the science of sexual orientation. There’s even a great, big book on the subject published by Oxford University Press that has “science” in the title (Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation), written by British-American neuroscientist Simon LeVay. Since Herman isn’t “leading,” perhaps he can make time for some “reading.” But if Herman only has a moment, these few lines from the Royal College of Psychiatrists sum it up nicely:

  Despite almost a century of psychoanalytic and psychological speculation, there is no substantive evidence to support the suggestion that the nature of parenting or early childhood experiences have any role in the formation of a person’s fundamental heterosexual or homosexual orientation (Bell and Weinberg, 1978). It would appear that sexual orientation is biological in nature, determined by genetic factors (Mustanski et al, 2005) and/or the early uterine environment (Blanchard et al, 2006). Sexual orientation is therefore not a choice. [Emphasis added.]

  While there’s no evidence that sexual orientation is a choice, there’s also no evidence of a single “gay gene,” or genetic mutation, that instills a hunger for cock and an appreciation for camp in some men and a taste for pussy and a talent for softball in some women. While homosexual orientation is clearly genetic, no single gene “causes” homosexuality, and nonbiological cultural forces shape the ways in which homosexuality is expressed.

  “Even framing it as a search for the ‘cause’ of homosexuality suggests that being gay is a pathology or unhealthy deviation, in the way someone might speak of the ‘cause’ of cancer,” says Jesse Bering, PhD, science writer and former director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast. “Contrary to this simplistic disease model, behind any sexual orientation is an elaborate orchestra of dynamic factors—genes, hormones, brain development, events in and outside the womb, cultural forces, and so on. To say that there’s a single cause to homosexuality is like saying that Symphony No. 5 was caused by Beethoven dipping his pen in ink.”

  Despite the worrisome implication of a search for a “cause,” gays and lesbians used to hope that science would one day discover a “gay gene.” If scientists could just locate a little pink gene with a tiny spinning mirrored ball inside—and if you could hear Gloria Gaynor singing “I Will Survive” when you held it up to your ear—that would forever shut up the people who argue that homosexuality is a sinful and sick “choice.”

  Some gays and lesbians worried about what would happen the day after scientists discovered that little pink gene. If a single gene were responsible for all non-straight people (gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans people), and if it could be identified, then that same little gay gene could be targeted for elimination. What would stop scientists from genetically engineering us out of existence? The Twilight of the Golds, a 1993 play by Jonathan Tolins, explored this fear: A gay man’s sister considers terminating a pregnancy when a genetic test reveals that the boy she’s carrying will be gay.

  As it turns out, homosexuality is multicausal, involving complex interactions between an unknown number of genes as well as the timing and levels of prenatal hormones that are impossible to control for. Homosexuality is, then, far too complicated to be genetically engineered out of existence. Fundamentalist Christians, creationists, and “intelligent design” advocates have a difficult pill to swallow: God, if he did indeed “design” us, seems to have bigot-proofed homosexuality. Without a single “cause”—without that one identifiable gene responsible for homosexuality—eradicating homosexuality is impossible. Genes, hormones, birth order—there are just too many biological variables to control for. Preventing the births of gay, lesbian, and bisexual babies is impossible.

  In 2004 Italian scientists researched several hundred families and found that the mothers, maternal aunts, and maternal grandmothers of gay men are more fecund—or, um, “fruitful”—than women who don’t have gay male children, grandchildren, or nephews. “These genes work in a sexually antagonistic way,” according to Andrea Camperio Ciani, an evolutionary psychologist from the University of Padova who led the study, “that means that when they’re represented in a female, they increase fecundity, and when they’re represented in a male, they decrease fecundity. It’s a trait that benefits one sex at the cost of the other.” These findings could help explain the paradox of hereditary homosexuality. In other words, why—if homosexuality is determined by genetic factors and gay people are less likely to reproduce than straight people—has it not been eliminated from the gene pool by now? The answer might be because “the same genes create both homosexuality in men and increased fertility in women [and] losses in offspring that come about from the males would be made up for by the females of the family.”

  Then in 2012 a groundbreaking study undertaken by the University of California, Santa Barbara, that built on the findings of earlier studies, including this 2004 one, may have finally solved the mystery of why people are gay and just why it offers an evolutionary advantage to both mothers and fathers. The study links homosexuality not just to genetics but to something called epi-markers, essentially data layers that regulate how genes are expressed. These markers are often erased when parents pass on their genetic information to their offspring. But these epi-markers are not erased in homosexuals, specifically when they’re passed from mother to son and father to daughter. According to Jason Koebler of U.S. News & World Report, who reported on the study, “These epi-marks provide an evolutionary advantage for the parents of homosexuals: They protect fathers of homosexuals from underexposure to testosterone and mothers of homosexuals from overexposure to testosterone while they are in gestation.” Follow that? Me neither. But it’s the science!

  During a hearing about an anti-gay marriage amendment in Minnesota, State Representative Steve Simon asked this question: “How many more gay people does God have to create before we ask ourselves whether or not God actually wants them around?”

  To which I would add: Not only does God want us around, he went out of his way to make eliminating us impossible. And not just that: God commanded the first straight couple to “be fruitful and multiply,”
which anti-gay bigots cite as an argument against tolerating homosexuality. But the more fruitful the straights, the more fruits there are around.

  Which proves that God, if he exists and he came up with the human genome in his basement workshop, doesn’t just want us around. He has a sense of humor about how he keeps us around.

  One last thing about the whole “being gay is a choice” argument that mystifies me: Why aren’t straight people insulted? Yes, it pisses off gay people; the only real “choice” we make is to come out and live with some integrity. But why doesn’t the same argument piss off straight people too? It only follows that if homosexuality is a choice, then so is heterosexuality.

  Herman Cain and John Cummins and Rick Warren and Joel Osteen all seem to believe that straight people can take or leave heterosexuality. Straight? The intimacy you share with your opposite-sex spouse, the love, the connection, the desire, the pleasure you take in each other’s bodies—all of that—is something you can choose to walk away from, like an underwater house or a lousy meal. Why don’t straight people get angry when they hear another straight person making this sexuality-is-a-choice argument?

  Which is not to say that there isn’t an element of choice when it comes to sexual identity. Straight is assumed, it’s the default orientation, and gay, lesbian, and bisexual people have to make an active choice about when and whether to come out. Some gays and lesbians never choose to come out (hey there, Benedict XVI), or they choose to come out to a select few. Some bisexuals round themselves up to gay or down to straight—or “down to gay” and “up to straight,” if you prefer—because the “gay” or “straight” label comes closer to their actual sexual expression (i.e., a bisexual woman with a female partner might choose to identify as lesbian, and others avoid identifying as bi on account of the anti-bisexual prejudices held by some gay, lesbian, and straight people). Which brings us to the messy ones.

  Some gay people choose to identify not just as straight, but aggressively straight. They’re not just straight; they’re anti-gay straight. When I hear people say that sexual orientation is a choice, I can’t help but wonder if they’re speaking from personal experience. I don’t mean they chose to be gay, but that they chose to be straight. They believe gayness is a choice because they are gay or bisexual men—all choicers seem to be men—who chose not to act on their same-sex desires.

  All reputable scientists believe there is a biological basis for homosexuality—and heterosexuality. Straight people are born, not made, just like gay people. Being gay is not a choice I’ve made; it is not a fit I’m having. It is not a reaction to sexual abuse or a particular parenting style. I am gay; my two brothers—older but very close in age—are straight. If environmental factors made people gay, why aren’t my brothers gay? Why isn’t my sister a lesbian? Why isn’t Terry’s brother gay?

  And if being gay is a choice, once again, I challenge Herman Cain, John Cummins, Rick Warren, and Joel Osteen to choose it.

  All of you guys can suck my dick.

  6. My Son Comes Out

  A lot has changed since The Kid, my memoir about adopting our son, D.J., was published a dozen years ago. For starters, D.J. isn’t an infant anymore. And no one sits at home by the phone waiting for a call from a hot guy he met at a dance club or a prospective employer or an adoption agency. Now our phones go wherever we do, in our pockets or (more likely) in our hands, practically a part of our bodies. But it wasn’t that long ago that someone waiting for an important, potentially life-changing phone call would be afraid to leave the house.

  What else has changed?

  Our country, of course, and by extension the world—whether the world liked it or not—on 9/11.

  Two wars came, but just one—as of this writing—has gone.

  Americans put an African-American in the White House. Twice.

  Republicans put an idiot Alaskan on the national stage.

  We saw advances on gay rights all over the world. Marriage rights were extended to same-sex couples in nine US states and the District of Columbia, as well as Spain, Argentina, the Netherlands, Canada, South Africa, and five other nations and counting. And now at least fifteen countries—including most recently France, under Socialist prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault—have extended adoption rights to same-sex couples. When I wrote The Kid, Americans opposed full civil equality for gays and lesbians by wide margins. Today poll after poll shows that an ever-growing majority of Americans now support marriage rights for same-sex couples.

  What else?

  My boyfriend became my husband—in Canada, first, where Terry and I got married on our tenth anniversary, and then in our home state of Washington, where voters passed marriage equality in 2012.

  Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were born.

  Kim Kardashian, Sinead O’Connor, and Britney Spears got married.

  Everyone I know got iPods, iPhones, and iPads.

  Kim Kardashian, Sinead O’Connor, and Britney Spears filed for divorce after seventy-two, sixteen, and two days of marriage, respectively.

  My mother passed away.

  Myspace passed away.

  Steve Jobs passed away.

  D.J.’s mom, Melissa, is no longer living on the streets.

  I wrote a couple of books, became the go-to guy for straight people in need of sex advice, and Terry and I founded the It Gets Better Project.

  Nabisco introduced candy-corn-flavored Oreos.

  Another big change: The number of gay couples adopting children in the United States exploded. In 2000, the same year The Kid was published, there were sixty-five hundred adoptions by gay American couples, according to a study by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2009, nearly twenty-two thousand gay couples in the United States adopted children. This increase in the number of gay adoptive parents has been described as “stratospheric.”

  The Kid played a role in the gay-parenting boom. I get letters daily from gay men who were inspired to adopt after reading about how Terry and I became dads. Many of these men tell me that they had always wanted to be parents but that they had concluded fatherhood wasn’t possible for them after they came out. Reading about our “journey to parenthood,” as social workers everywhere describe adoption, demystified the adoption process and helped them realize that they, too, could be parents. Because, hey, if they gave a kid to those guys—that sex-advice columnist and his disc jockey boyfriend?—who won’t they give a kid to?

  Anti-gay “Christian” activists oppose gay marriage, gay workplace protections, gay military service, and, as they’ve made clear through their support of the fraudulent “ex-gay” movement, gay existence. So it comes as no surprise that they also oppose gay adoptions.

  Opponents of gay marriage/employees/soldiers/adoptions/existence push one “big lie” to justify each item on their anti-gay agenda—gay marriage will harm society, openly gay soldiers will destroy military readiness, gay people can choose to be straight, and so forth. (In fact, gay people have been marrying in Canada for more than a decade, and Canada is doing just fine; a study by the Palm Center, formerly at the University of California and now independent, found that the repeal of the ban on openly gay soldiers has had “no overall negative impact on military readiness, including cohesion, recruitment, retention, assaults, harassment, or morale”; in 2012 the head of the largest “ex-gay” group in the country, Alan Chambers of Exodus International, admitted that his organization cannot “cure” homosexuality.)

  The “big lie” advanced by opponents of gay adoption is this: When a selfish gay couple adopts, a loving heterosexual couple is deprived of a child. Children who could have been adopted by straight couples are being given to gay couples, they argue, and they claim that it’s not just childless heterosexual couples who are being harmed. Children are being harmed.

  In August of 2012, Bryan Fischer, a prominent anti-gay voice on the Christian right and the host of a widely listened-to talk radio program, called for the creation of a new “Und
erground Railroad” that would “deliver innocent children from same-sex households.” Fischer is the director of issue analysis for government and public policy at the American Family Association, and he exerts a powerful influence on Republican politics. And Fischer believes that children with gay parents should be kidnapped because getting your kids to school in the morning, making sure their homework is done, their teeth are brushed, that they have enough decent food to eat—basic parental responsibilities—become “a form of sexual abuse” when same-sex couples perform them.

  Children, according to Fischer and others on the right, need a mother and a father, and denying children two opposite-sex parents isn’t just tantamount to child abuse, it is child abuse. For many years opponents of gay adoption have dishonestly cited studies that demonstrated the advantages of having two parents, not two parents of the opposite sex, to justify their opposition to adoptions by same-sex couples.

  In 2012, a new study that seemed to support the anti-gay-parenting position was released. The study, authored by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus, was funded by two anti-gay think tanks. Regnerus claimed that he was comparing outcomes for children raised by gay parents with children raised by straight couples. He wasn’t. He was comparing children with married straight parents—children from stable, intact homes—to children from broken homes. The study has been widely debunked. (“Among the problems is the paper’s definition of ‘lesbian mothers’ and ‘gay fathers,’” reads a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “A woman could be identified as a ‘lesbian mother’ in the study if she had had a relationship with another woman at any point after having a child, regardless of the brevity of that relationship and whether or not the two women raised the child as a couple…. That fact alone in the paper should have ‘disqualified it immediately’ from being considered for publication.”) Only two young adults out of the 248 interviewed in the Regnerus study were raised from birth by same-sex couples.