It is this last assumption which provokes the only big challenge that Davidson and his colleagues present. In On Liberty, first published in 1859, John Stuart Mill famously laid out four reasons for why free speech was a necessity in a free society: the first and second being that a contrary opinion may be true, or true in part, and therefore may require to be heard in order to correct your own erroneous views; the third and fourth being that even if the contrary opinion is in error, the airing of it may help to remind people of a truth and prevent its slippage into an ignorant dogma which may in time – if unchallenged – itself become lost.2
Abiding by Mill’s principles would appear to be hard for many people today. Harder, indeed, than simply changing dogmas. In recent years the accepted opinion on gay rights in America, Britain and most other Western democracies has shifted unimaginably, and for the better. But it has moved so swiftly that it has also seen the replacement of one dogma with another. A move from a position of moral opprobrium to a position of expressing opprobrium to anyone whose views fall even narrowly outside the remit of the newly adopted position. The problem with this is not just that we are at risk of being unable to hear positions that are wrong, but that we may be preventing ourselves from listening to arguments that may be partially true.
As it happens, confused as their film-making was, and disagreeable though much of their world view might be, Davidson and his colleagues are onto something around the nature of sexual attraction. These are deep and toxic waters. But there is no point in identifying such waters and not plunging into them.
When it comes to matters around sexuality a set of presumptions have been adopted which are proving quite as dogmatic as the notions they replaced. In June 2015 the then Conservative Education Secretary declared that homophobic views were evidence of potential ‘extremism’ in school pupils in Britain. Indeed as the BBC reported, Nicky Morgan said that ‘attacking core British values or being extremely intolerant of homosexuality were examples of behaviour that could raise the alarm’. They were evidence that a pupil might have been being ‘groomed’ by ‘extremists’, and a pupil who said they thought homosexuality ‘evil’ might need to be reported to the police.3 Of some interest is the fact that in May 2013 Morgan had voted against the law introducing gay marriage into the UK. One year later, in 2014, she said that she now supported gay marriage and would vote for it if it had not already become law. Another year later, in 2015, she was declaring views such as those she herself had held two years earlier as not merely evidence of ‘extremism’ but fundamentally un-British.
In the 1990s Hillary Clinton supported her husband’s ‘defence of marriage act’ which sought to prevent gay marriage from becoming possible in the United States. She watched as he backed the policy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ for gays in the US military, meaning that any gay soldier who told even one other person about their sexuality could immediately be dismissed from the armed forces. As Robert Samuels wrote in the Washington Post, ‘Hillary Clinton had the chance to make gay rights history. She refused.’4 Yet in 2016 when she was campaigning for the Presidency for the second time and the views of wider society had shifted markedly, the LGBT community (as gays had now become) were one of the specific sections of the country whom Clinton claimed to be campaigning especially hard for. It is not unusual for politicians to shift positions. But the speed with which the times changed made for some remarkably sharp changes of position in the political class.
Other people and countries have instituted even swifter and noisier U-turns. Almost immediately after gay marriage became legal in Germany, acceptance of it was made a condition of citizenship in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Yesterday there was one dogma. Now there is another.
It is not just some politicians who must have suffered whiplash in recent years. Newspapers that were until recently decidedly unpleasant about homosexuals now cover same-sex weddings like any other society news. Columnists who were damning about equal ages of consent only a few years ago now berate people not fully onboard with gay marriage. In 2018 the MSNBC host Joy Reid was publicly shamed and made to apologize after historic comments from a decade earlier were found in which she had been critical of gay marriage – at a time when almost everybody else was unsupportive of gay marriage as well. When change happens so swiftly, there is much making up for lost time to be done, and little pity for those found dragging behind.
Making Everything Gay
And so some individuals, governments and corporations appear to believe that their job is to make up for lost time. They are forcing discussion of gay issues in a manner slightly beyond acceptance and more in the realms of ‘This will be good for you.’
By 2018 the BBC seemed to have decided that items of specifically gay news needed to be not just reported but headlined as major news. One of its top stories of the day on the corporation’s website in September that year was that the diver Tom Daley had felt ‘inferior’ about his sexuality but that this had given him the motivation to become a success.5 This story was published five years after Daley had come out. He had not been silent about his private life in the interim period. And yet this human interest story was a lead item on the BBC’s website just beneath news of an earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia which had killed more than 800 people. One day later and the BBC website had as one of its lead stories the news that a minor reality television star called Ollie Locke had announced that he and his fiancé (Gareth Locke) were going to join their surnames to make themselves the Locke-Lockes after their forthcoming marriage.6 In other headline news, the death toll from the Indonesian earthquake had risen significantly overnight.
Perhaps it requires someone who is gay to say this, but there are times when such ‘news’ reporting doesn’t feel like news reporting at all. Rather it seems that some type of message is being sent out either to the public or to people whom the media believe to be in positions of power. This goes beyond ‘This will be good for you’ and nearer to the realm of ‘See how you like this, bigot.’ There are days when you wonder how heterosexuals feel about the growing insistence with which gay stories are crow-barred into any and all areas of news.
Take a fairly average day at The New York Times. On 16 October 2017 a reader of the International Edition of the paper might decide to take a break from the opinion pages and turn to some richer fare. They might turn to the business pages. There they would find the lead story in the ‘Business’ section to be ‘Gay in Japan and No Longer Invisible’. Perhaps the average reader of the business pages of The New York Times had never thought much about the visibility or otherwise of gay people in Japan. So here was their opportunity to learn about something they didn’t know. Specifically, about the story of Shunsuke Nakamura who recently used a morning meeting with fellow employees at his insurance company to come out as gay. This in a country where attitudes towards homosexuality have tended to be (as one professor at a Tokyo university is quoted as saying in the piece) ‘indifference rather than hate’. So The New York Times had chosen to splash a story over two pages, as their lead Business feature, about how a man had come out in a company with no negative consequences in a country that had no special problem with gays. Ordinarily it would have to be an exceptionally quiet day in the markets for such a story to be the most important story of the day in ‘Business’.
Turn one page and the story continues, this time under the headline ‘Companies in Japan More Welcoming to Gays’. By which point the casual reader may well have satisfied their interest in the position of gay men in Japanese companies and begun casting their eye guiltily to the opposite page and the ‘Culture’ section. And what is the lead story and main headline there? ‘A Broader Stage for Love’.
The subject matter of this article could be guessed from the half-page accompanying photo of two male ballerinas, their arms and bodies entwined. ‘Ballet is slower to change than most art forms’, the paper informed its readers, continuing excitedly, ‘but in the span of just two recent weeks, New York City Ballet, on
e of the world’s premier companies, showed two ballets featuring significant same-sex duets’.
The cause for this vast splash is a ballet called The Times Are Racing, the latest production of which – at New York City Ballet – includes the casting of a man in a role originally created for a woman. The New York Times goes on to explain how the hitherto overwhelmingly heterosexual world of ballet was finally ‘responding to the contemporary world and putting it on the ballet stage’. A male choreographer who was involved promised an ‘exploration of gender-neutrality’ in his work in an Instagram post hash-tagged ‘loveislove’, ‘genderneutral’, ‘equality’, ‘diversity’, ‘beauty’, ‘pride’ and ‘proud’. A sole heretical outside choreographer was singled out for criticism for his stated belief that ‘there are gender roles in traditional ballet’ and that while ‘men and women are of equal value’ they have ‘different tasks’. The New York City Ballet’s stars – and The New York Times – did not agree.
To the amazement of nobody it turned out that several of the male leads in the New York City Ballet are themselves gay, and one of them explained to The New York Times how early in rehearsals his dance partner had turned to him and said, ‘It’s so nice to get to step into a role where I feel I could actually potentially fall in love with the person I’m dancing with, as opposed to pretending to be a prince falling in love with a princess.’ To which one might say that anyone who feels any tedium enacting scenes in which princes fall in love with princesses may find ballet isn’t their medium. But in case this outburst of diversity on the ballet stage is not enough, the story adds more of the five-a-day moral nutrition to the story with the news that this production ‘explores not only a same-sex relationship but also issues of race’. Describing the overall effect of two men dancing together, the choreographer declared that it just ‘blew her away’. ‘Suddenly, they could just be themselves’, the story concludes. At which point the reader of The New York Times has the opportunity to read the other main story about ‘Culture’: a story about how female comics joking about pregnancy and motherhood are finally becoming big.7
There is nothing wrong with a newspaper of record deciding to devote its Business and Culture pages as well as much of its opinion and news pages to stories about being gay. But it sometimes feels as though there is something else going on in all this. The use of gay special interest stories for purposes other than those of actual news: perhaps making up for lost time, or perhaps just rubbing things in the faces of those not yet up to speed with the changed mores of the age. Either way something strange and vaguely retributive is in the air.
Of course people change, learn and often shift their positions. Most do so quietly, generally after others have done the heavy lifting. But one problem of changing societal positions so swiftly is that unexplored, even unexploded, issues and arguments are left behind in the wake. When Piers Morgan demanded of his guest, ‘How can you think that nobody’s born gay?’ the answer is that plenty of people think that, and they may be right or right in part. Nobody is yet certain. And whether or not anyone is born gay, or whether everyone who is gay is born gay, it does not follow at all that being gay is a one-way street.
A one-way street?
That idea is just one curious place that our culture has arrived at. In society at large, when people come out as gay they are celebrated for having arrived at their natural end-point. For most people this is a decent recognition by society that there is no problem with them being who they are: they have arrived at the place that is natural and right for them. But one oddity of this position is that anybody who is gay and then subsequently decides they are straight will be the subject not just of a degree of ostracism and suspicion, but widespread doubt that they are being honest about their true selves. A straight who becomes gay has settled. A gay who has become straight has rendered himself an object of permanent suspicion. From being strongly inclined towards straight the culture has settled with a mild inclination towards gay.
After writing the watershed gay drama Queer as Folk in the late 1990s, the screenwriter Russell T. Davies followed this up with another television series called Bob and Rose (2001). It told the story of a gay man who falls in love with a woman. It was provoked, as Davies told the press at the time, by the recognition that gay men who went straight often received more resentment from their circle of friends than a straight man who came out as gay.8
Perhaps that is one reason why the whole direction of traffic is so little addressed. For many gay men and women the idea that sexuality is fluid and that what goes one way may go another (what goes up must come down) is an attack on their person. And this isn’t a fear without basis. Plenty of gay people will hear in the suggestion some echo of those dread words ‘It’s only a phase.’ People who are gay find this suggestion enormously offensive, as well as destabilizing in their relationships with parents, family and others. So since the phrase ‘It’s only a phase’ is offensive for some people, the idea that it might actually be true for some people is unsayable.
For their part, Millennials and ‘Generation Z’ have attempted to provide their own ways around this by stressing sexual fluidity. Opinion surveys suggest that these people now in their late teens are moving away from the idea of there being fixed points in sexuality, with one 2018 study showing that only two-thirds of Generation Z claim to be ‘exclusively heterosexual’.9 While that is still a majority it suggests a distinct shift from the attitudes of the generations before them.
For those generations older than Millennials the issue of ‘fluidity’ remains a complex and often painful one. For many of them, people who join the club and then leave it are far more likely to be reviled than those who never joined at all. They may not show up on surveys, and they certainly don’t have national spokespeople or ‘community leaders’, but a lot of gay people know cases like this. Friends who didn’t quite fit in the gay world, who disliked the scene and couldn’t find another. People who dipped into it and then jumped out. Or people who had other things they sought in life. People, for instance, who wanted children and the security of marriage and who stopped or sidelined being gay to pursue being something else. Or (and nobody knows what proportion of people this might comprise) people who, having had relationships with members of the same sex for most of their lives, suddenly – like the title character in Bob & Rose – met a member of the opposite sex with whom they fell in love.
Will these sorts of behaviour diminish now that there are civil partnerships and gay marriage, not to mention gay adoption and even the possibility of gay parenting? Will people increasingly adopt the looser sexual identities of Generation Z? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Because everybody also knows people who that wasn’t meant for. People who had the odd gay kiss or more, but who went back to being straight afterwards. And yet where the culture in the recent past would have seen the gay kiss as the aberration – the falling away from the norm – today the culture suggests that the gay kiss is the moment of revelatory truth.
Today the person who once did anything gay is the one believed to be living a lie. Because in some way the perception has developed that to once be gay is to have fallen into your true state of nature, whereas to be forever afterwards straight is not. This is different from a claim of bisexuality. It is a presumption that the see-saw of sexuality is not evenly balanced but in fact inclines towards gay. And that whereas a previous era might have tilted the see-saw towards straight, this one has decided to tilt it in the other direction. Perhaps in order to right a wrong (in the hope that the see-saw will at some point arrive at an even position). But how people are to work out when the see-saw has arrived at the right position is impossible to tell. Because like everything else, we are making all this up as we go along.
For the time being, the generations above Millennials – as well as an ongoing majority among them – retain the idea of at least some fixed points of sexual identity. Perhaps not least because knowing where other people stand imposes at least some clarity on relationships and p
otential relationships. But the fact that all this can change from one fixed identity to another, and from there to fluidity, points to more than a leap around from one dogma to another. It suggests a deep uncertainty about one underlying and rarely mentioned fact, which is that we still don’t have much or any idea as to why some people are gay. After decades of research this is a huge – and potentially destabilizing – question to remain unresolved on an identity question which has arrived at the very forefront of our purported values.
Some sensitivity over this whole subject is naturally understandable. After all, it was only in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association decided that there was no scientific evidence for continuing to treat homosexuality as a disorder. That year they removed it from the APA’s glossary of mental disorders (a rare example for that ever-growing tome of something being taken out). The World Health Organization performed the same task in 1992. None of which is very long ago, and a good reason why there is some remaining suspicion of the language or practice of medicalization or psychiatry making its way into any discussion of homosexuality.
Yet from an acceptance that being gay is not a mental disorder it does not follow that it is a wholly inbuilt and immovable state of being. In 2014 the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) in London issued a fascinating ‘statement on sexual orientation’. They were commendably adamant in their condemnation of anything that seeks to stigmatize people who say they are gay. And they explained that in any case the RCP does not believe that therapies to alter anyone’s sexual orientation could work in either direction. The RCP could no more make a homosexual straight than they could make a heterosexual gay. And yet they do make a fairly important acknowledgement, which is that ‘The Royal College of Psychiatrists considers that sexual orientation is determined by a combination of biological and postnatal environment factors.’ They cite a set of sources to back up this statement,10 and they follow it up again with the reassertion that ‘There is no evidence to go beyond this and impute any kind of choice into the origins of sexual orientation.’11
The Madness of Crowds Page 3
