Understanding Gay: What’s Fiction?

By Andrew M. Haines | October 15, 2013

One thing I can tell you confidently is fiction: last week’s unusual attempt to make sense of the mechanics and matter behind “coming out.” The article won me about as many friends as I expected (very few), and left some others confused.

Another fiction is that “being gay” is easier to understand—especially for many of us who don’t claim it—than the idea of “being X-ray.”

The fact is, fictions exist. The trouble is that our ever-increasing zeal for authenticity, especially in the arena of sexuality, forces our hand on these fictions—to absolutize them in the direction either of universal truth or undeniable falsehood.

Michael W. Hannon has once again done a tremendous job shedding a bit of light on the otherwise murky depths of fact, fiction, and gay identity. In last week’s piece for First Things, Hannon expounds two reasons for believing that “sexual identity” is a not a very “constructive construct.”

First of all, the heterosexuality-homosexuality distinction is a construct that is dishonest about its identity as a construct, masquerading as it does as a natural categorization [more on that here], applicable to all people in all times and places according to the typical objects of their sexual desires (albeit with perhaps a few more menu items on offer for the more politically correct categorizers). Claiming to be not simply an accidental nineteenth-century invention but a timeless truth about human sexual nature, this framework puts on airs, deceiving those who adopt its distinctions into believing that they are worth far more than they really are.

A second reason for doubting the value of “sexual identity,” he says, is that

its introduction into our sexual discourse has not noticeably increased the virtues—intellectual or moral—of those who utilize it. On the contrary, it has bred both intellectual obscurity and moral disarray. Our young people, for instance, now regularly find themselves agonizing over their sexual identity, navel-gazing in an attempt to discern their place in this allegedly natural framework of orientations. Such obsessions invite far more heat than light, and focus our already sexually excited adolescents on discerning extraneous dimensions of their own sexual makeup.

As I’ve come to expect, Hannon propounds his views with the seriousness and charity that any public discussion of sexuality should maintain. He’s not afraid, however, to point out that certain concepts aren’t befitting of a reflective and worthwhile cultural or moral tradition. Moreover, some related terms must even be actively purged from the lexicon.

Sometimes, this must be done with help from those outside the phenomena to be explained, bringing a vantage point to the subject that those caught up in the occurrence do not have, and offering an explanation that they may not be able to craft for themselves. All this is simply to say that, while it is true that we must meet people where they are, it does not follow that we must begin by agreeing with their account of the location.

This last comment is invaluable. It gives confidence to those who wish to be both kind and keen, and reminds us that drawing distinctions, even in emotionally chaotic moments, can sometimes be valuable—sometimes even dutiful.

Last week’s “Coming Out as X-Ray” was perceived by most to be an argument; yet by others it was taken to be a joke, or even crass mocking. It was none of these—at least not entirely. On the other hand, it was an attempt to understand the anatomy of “being gay” from a dispassionate, third-party perspective. Hannon had exercised the syllogistic approach, so I took the anecdotal one. Of course, I had my opinions going in—it’s no secret that I tend to side with Hannon on the “don’t say gay” debate—but fiction, like a careful argument, helps to remove undue bias by leveling the playing field and opening it up to all sides.

While my rendition of embracing the “X-ray identity” was pure fiction, however, the ideas behind it were not. A few things became obvious in discussions that followed. First, and most importantly, it became clear that the intelligibility of “coming out” is bound almost entirely to homosexual identity: people approached and emailed me, saying “I don’t get it.” Of course, to “get” fiction isn’t a normal concern (at least not outside of a graduate literature course). A princesses sifting through suitors based on their sensitivity to produce doesn’t raise any eyebrows; but a story—using equally common language—about a guy coming to terms with his Superman-like abilities makes us ask, “What’s the point?” The lines were quickly drawn: either the story was a defense of something vital, or a simplistic attack on something I just don’t understand.

unfinished-bridge A second, related clarification was that the term “being gay” refers to a whole tangle of things. This isn’t really news: Hannon makes the point with respect to a “messy web of attractions and drives and temptations.” What proved interesting, here, was that the tangle was acknowledged from either side, yet in neither case were its components considered less than prima facie obvious. In other words, I never saw a response or received a comment to the effect that the fictional account clarified something that was lacking, or built a case (or failed to build a case) for something commonly misunderstood. But across the board, reactions tended to claim some sort of decisive victory or failure; or at least total confusion. That should sound a little strange.

Naturally, I don’t believe this all represents much progress in breaking apart the deeply entrenched and bitterly defended language of “being gay.” Maybe the most my article permitted were a few “meta-linguistic” awakenings: certainly not what I hoped for, but worth keeping around nonetheless. For what they tell us, at least in this case, is that the rift between “pro-gay” and “pro-nature” is vast and insurmountable, at least so far as conventional experience is concerned; and that any bridge building across that divide must plan for a broader span than perhaps was previously expected.

As far as fiction goes, the type of realism that permits “being X-ray” to stand in for “being gay” isn’t going to cut it. What’s required here, maybe, is something more akin to the fairy tale realism that Chesterton advocates in Orthodoxy, which merits and illuminates not by the fact that it’s exact, but precisely because it’s so incredibly fantastic.

Dan Hugger

The thing about self identification is that it’s useful to the person self identifying. I self identify as a Detroit Tiger’s fan and I believe that says something about me. I use my self identification as a tool to make sense of my experience of watching baseball.

You may think my being a Detroit Tigers fan says nothing about me and that it doesn’t help me make sense of the experience of watching baseball.

I’d think you’d be wrong, and if you told me what you thought I’d think you were either dense, or trying to bait me.

I imagine that’s how a gay person would read your piece.
http://renegadetrad.blogspot.com Mark

I am totally still confused.

It was obvious that your “X-Ray” story was some sort of thinly veiled analogy for homosexuality or the coming out experience. Everyone knew that.

The question became why you wrote it. Did you write it to promote the view that coming out as gay makes no sense or is revealed as trivial or self-absorbed when we consider a hypothetical analogous experience? Some people, like Dan Mattson, apparently thought so, thought it was sort of a mocking or at least gently ribbing piece saying “Look how absurd these attitudes would be if we replaced same-sex attraction with any other experience.”

Or did you write it to try to lead people into empathy for the way that gay people experience our “secret” and how we relate to it, perhaps something like how the X-Men movies use “mutant” to similar effect, or how the stigma attached to “magic” is used in the series Merlin (both of which everyone I know who is gay immediately connects to our experience of homosexuality)? This is actually what I thought at first! As a gay Catholic person, I read your story in a sympathetic light, as understanding and empathizing with the experience and making self-identification and disclosure look very reasonable and sensible, as if to say to the haters “If it wasn’t such a controversial issue, you’d understand why it’s so important to them. You just have a double standard when it comes to gay.” Just like people are led to sympathize with the mutants’ predicament in X-Men or whatever (and probably, if they are honest, are led to sympathize with others belonging to “invisible” minorities too).

Yet you deny that the piece was either. What was it then? Just an attempt to create a neutral analogy we could all agree on to further discuss the issue at hand? Why not discuss it directly? Or maybe an exercise in putting on your own “empathy cap” (as Justin Lee calls it), trying to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone facing a similar experience? Why not just imagine yourself as gay directly then, rather than mediating it through contrivances about X-ray vision??

I was honestly surprised when this piece came out and it turned out you were on the “don’t say gay” side of things, because your piece actually resonated with most of the gay people I knew, like it captured the sort of “atmosphere” and emotions that go along with being “special,” with belonging to an invisible minority like that. To find out that, in fact, you can somehow portray all that so accurately…and then NOT understand why self-identification and disclosure are so important to gay people, or even think it’s an argument for the OPPOSITE conclusion…is just baffling.