Like most gay men I know, I never made a conscious choice to be gay. I just was. And to the extent choice was involved, mine was to deny I liked guys, date girls, and pray like hell for a cure that never came. But does that mean a person can never choose to be gay?
And by choose, I don't mean choose to engage in the kind of homosexual behavior that occurs in single-sex environments like prisons. I mean actively choose to desire sex with one gender rather than the other.
That's exactly what Cynthia Nixon says she did. And the interesting thing is science may be on her side, at least when it comes to women. As Tracey Clark-Flory explains:
More than a decade ago, social psychologist Roy Baumeister proposed the idea of female “erotic plasticity.” In a paper on the subject, he explained that men tend to have rigid sexual preferences that “generally remain the same for the rest of the man’s life.” Women, on the other hand, “are more likely to switch back and forth,” he wrote.
Since then, Baumeister's theory of fluid female sexuality has found support in reseach showing that, while viewing sexual stimuli, most men have a strong genital response to either males or females, while lesbians tend to have a relatively weak arousal preference for females and straight women exhibit on average no preference at all. That could mean women are by nature more sexually fluid. On the other hand, it could just mean women aren't all that into porn and therefore don't respond to it sexually one way or the other. What do you think?
