Gay, Straight, or Bi?
Dr. Kinsey and the Sexual Categories
In the mainstream of popular culture, the topic of homosexuality is no longer taboo. It was not so long ago that the lives of gay men and women were barely represented at all on television and in popular films. While there is still much left to achieve in terms of civil rights for the gay/lesbian/ bisexual/transgender community, it is undeniable that the last few decades have brought a lot of progress. Myths and prejudices regarding homosexuality continue to abound, but there is more reliable information, and more sound support, than ever before.
But still, young people questioning their sexuality have good reasons to feel uncertain. Dr. Fred Westendarp asks, “How do people determine if they are gay? Is it something that they simply feel? Or is it a group of tendencies or practices that may be interpreted as having a homosexual orientation? Could wanting to label oneself as gay be due to fear of relating to the opposite sex? Or is it that one is more comfortable with members of the same sex and therefore wants to identify more with them?”
In attempting to address Dr. Westendarp’s questions, we should first look to the studies of Dr. Alfred Kinsey. The work of Dr. Kinsey, a revolutionary figure in the study of human sexuality, has lately returned to the public spotlight with the release of Bill Condon’s 2004 film Kinsey. Dr. Kinsey began his academic career at the University of Indiana, as a professor of zoology. His interest was mildly aroused by the study of insects, but what made the biggest impression on him was the sheer number of specimens he sometimes worked with. In order to make valid conclusions, Kinsey had to study large numbers of insects. The more subjects one studies, he learned, the more valid one’s findings.
At some point, it occurred to Kinsey that there had never been a comprehensive study of human sexuality, involving enough cases to yield accurate generalizations. To his horror, Kinsey found that most formal writings of human sexuality, such as the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, were based on the studies of a few extreme cases from a single psychiatric practice. However illuminating an individual case study could be, Kinsey realized that an accurate and wide-ranging view of human sexuality could be composed only if he worked with as many humans as he had insects.
After ten years of obsessive and meticulous effort, Dr. Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. A trailblazing work, it presented data of unprecedented detail and accuracy, representative of interviews Kinsey had conducted with 12,000 subjects. According to The New England Journal of Medicine, “it was with this first book that knowledge about sexuality garnered from a scientific survey burst into the consciousness of the American public. This book and its companion, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female…introduced a new way of thinking and talking about sexuality to American (and world) culture.”
Kinsey was frustrated, though, when he attempted to find solid conclusions about heterosexuality versus homosexuality. With each interview he conducted, Kinsey became more convinced that sexuality was a gray area. Eventually, in this finished work, he wrote that his subjects “do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeonholes.” This would become a defining thesis of Kinsey’s work: that human sexuality could be better understood without the rigid constraints of labels and categories. Rather than branding his subjects “gay” or “straight,” he decided that each subject had a certain degree of homosexual experience/tendency, as well as a certain degree of the heterosexual equivalent. Among Kinsey’s major findings was that 37% of the male population has had “at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age.”
Working to demolish the barriers of strict categorization, Kinsey developed a seven-point scale, assigning his subjects numbers of zero to six. A zero rating indicated that a given subject’s sexual fantasy and activity were completely heterosexual in orientation, while a rating of six signified completely homosexual fantasy and activity. Most of Kinsey’s subjects fell somewhere between the two extremes. He also explained that even these ratings were not rigid, and noted that many people change position on the six-point scale as their lives continue and experiences change them.
In his 1977 work Loving Someone Gay, Dr. Don Clark built upon some of Dr. Kinsey’s findings, toward the end of further undermining the coldness of category. Dr. Clark wrote, “Gay is a descriptive label we have assigned to ourselves as a way of reminding ourselves and others that awareness of our sexuality facilitates a capability rather than creating a restriction. It means that we are capable of fully loving a person of the same gender by involving ourselves emotionally, sexually, spiritually, and intellectually.”
A young person questioning his or her sexuality is unlikely to arrive instantly at such an enlightened understanding. Rather, he or she is weighing personal sexual curiosities against an expanding pop culture catalogue of behaviors and interests perceived as being inherently “gay.” Those with homosexual or heterosexual tendencies may or may not identify with this cultural image. One is likely to derive sexual identity from these criteria – do I cry easily? do I dress flamboyantly? do I enjoy opera? – rather than from the true criteria: Who do I enjoy looking at, fantasizing about, or touching? What characteristics excite me sexually, and what am I looking for romantically?
Adding to the confusion is a school of thought, often but not always motivated by religious fundamentalism, which continues to promote the view that homosexual behavior is somehow wrong. Even in the United States government, there are conspicuous proponents of anti-gay discrimination. They have contributed to a culture sharply polarized between acceptance and hostility. As filmmaker Michael Moore remarked in the “Sodomobile” segment on his acclaimed television program The Awful Truth, “I really believe that gay rights, and how we treat gay men and lesbians, is really the last frontier of civil rights in this country that we have to address.”
No single event brought this issue into clearer or more tragic focus than the senseless murder in 1998 of Matthew Shepherd, a high school student savagely beaten to death by his peers simply because he was gay. For American teenagers questioning their sexuality, the Shepherd murder was a terrifying reason to live in denial rather than fear. Not helping matters any, Reverend Fred Phelps of the Wesboro Baptist Church (Topeka, Kansas) engineered hate-filled demonstrations at Shepherd’s funeral, convincing his minions to arrive with signs bearing messages like “No Tears for Queers,” “Matt in Hell,” and “God Hates Fags.”
According to the National Youth Advocacy Coalition, which recently released a paper entitled Facts About Gay Youth, 80% of gay, lesbian, and bisexual youths reported that they had been the victims of verbal abuse due to their sexuality. Conversely, 44% reported that they had been threatened with physical violence, and 66% reported that they had actually been threatened or injured with a weapon at some point in the past school year. The study also found that 62% of gay, lesbian, and bisexual youths had been in a physical fight in the past year.
Given this frightening environment, it is even less surprising that young people have trouble questioning their sexual identity. The encouraging news, though, is that one rarely confronts harsher or more threatening hatred than what is encountered in high school. Sophisticated adults, more and more, have come to understand that love is love. While religious extremists continue to denounce homosexual behavior, there is also a growing acceptance of gays in the religious community, and many institutions of worship gladly welcome all people to participate. The last decade has seen a sharp rise in the number of clerics, educators, entertainers, politicians, and other professionals who are openly gay and comfortable with it.
At long last, the notion that sexuality is an inherent trait has gained popular acceptance. Contrary to the assertions of some contemporary critics, this revelation is not at odds with Dr. Kinsey’s seven-point scale. Kinsey’s scale suggests that there are a smaller number of purely homosexual or heterosexual individuals, and that most of us are actually bisexual, leaning toward one gender or the other in degrees. Kinsey sought to change the rigidity of sexual labels, but not the validity.
In other words, if you remove cultural factors, the question of an individual’s sexual orientation is actually quite simple. If your sexual and romantic urges and experiences center on members of the opposite gender, then you are heterosexual. If they center on members of your own gender, then you are homosexual. If they center on members of both genders, then you are bisexual.
With the added considerations of society, though, the issues can become confused. In many parts of the country and the world, it is difficult to be gay now in the way it’s always been difficult to belong to an oppressed minority group. Young people, especially, may encounter overwhelming pressure from parents, peers, and members of the religious, political, and/or media establishments. This pressure, and the resultant fear, can lead to denial of one’s sexual identity. This, in turn, can cause one to seek other explanations: Perhaps one is not gay, but simply uncomfortable around members of the opposite sex. Perhaps one is not gay, but simply identifies more with one gender than with another. These may, in come cases, be accurate explanations.
But if they aren’t, they will never be truly effective. Dr. Kinsey, like Freud before him, reported that sexual satisfaction and romantic love are among the vital ingredients in most humans’ happiness. If you are homosexual, you may find that you are able to function in denial and keep your sexual orientation a secret. But the findings of experts suggest that you cannot deny who you are and still lead a happy, fulfilling life. The difficult challenge of accepting one’s sexual identity is still more rewarding and more mentally healthy than the even harder ordeal of denying it.
Community is perhaps the most important element in a lifestyle of acceptance. Fortunately, we are living in an age of increased connectedness among human beings. Technological revolutions such as the mobile phone and the Internet have made it easier than ever to reach out to like-minded peers who are working through common experiences. Whatever one’s identity – sexual or otherwise – it is through the dual adventures of introspection and community that one can learn to live a good and happy life. These experiences teach us that no one is alone.
Author: Noah Diamond
Resources on the web:
http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/about/kinseybio.html
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/pp2/portal/files/portal/webzine/artsculture/art-041124-kinsey.xml