Beyond Gay or Straight: Understanding Sexual Orientation

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

I thought that we would be friends forever. Although she and I had never wavered outside the bounds of platonic love, we were always together. Our arms were often affectionately draped around each other and we routinely engaged in a conspiracy of whispered words, loud guffaws, and intimate glances. We giggled over our crushes, told tales about the women we'd slept with, and shared the girl-meets-girl dreams that consumed our passions.

Then I met, and started to fall for, a man. Without ever discussing it, my friend and I started to drift, she toward the lesbian feminist community she had previously danced around, and I toward the man I would eventually marry. That was almost 13 years ago. I have since heard that she's moved out of state and lives with her lover of nearly a decade. Via the rumor mill, I have heard that she is successful and happy. I also know, thanks to some mutual friends, that she believes I violated some basic precepts of loyalty and honor when I chose a man over a woman, heterosexuality over lesbianism.

Despite the passage of time, I have not completely accepted the schism that occurred and am continually startled by her periodic appearance in my daydreams. Since we no longer speak, I occasionally find myself wondering about her day-to-day life although, oddly, I do nothing to track her down. On one hand, I miss her style, charm, and humor. But on the other, I am angry at what I feel is her betrayal of our friendship, furious that her close-minded definition of acceptable sexual conduct slammed the door on our relationship. For what, after all, is the struggle about if not the freedom to love whomever we want, in public as well as private? Jan Clausen's Beyond Gay or Straight: Understanding Sexual Orientation, the 28th book in Chelsea House's series on lesbian and gay issues, is a wide-eyed look at current debates surrounding sexual identity. The fixed and permeable boundaries surrounding sexual orientation are explored, and a cross-cultural assessment of sexual mores and expectations provides a jumping off point for analysis. Thorough and concise, if at times densely written, the volume asks essential questions:

• Is sexual orientation an inborn trait, or does it somehow develop in the unfolding personality?
• Is it an unchanging characteristic, or one that is liable to shift over time?
• Is it present in all cultures, even those that appear to organize sexuality quite differently from the way we do, or is it simply the way in which certain societies (especially Western, urbanized ones) currently think about sexual identity?

Clausen openly describes her own movement within and between "queer"and "straight"

communities, and ultimately concludes that just as experts cannot "end the political crises caused by bigotry and unjust power relations, they cannot say how desire connects to identity. They cannot tell us what we desire, what our desires mean, which of them are real or authentic, if and how to act on them, whether they will change in the future, or how best to move from desires and behaviors to descriptions of our selves."

Yet despite this lack of knowledge, a whole slew of people are shouting, and their words and deeds have dramatic implications for those struggling to create a climate that tolerates gender nonconformity. There are the essentialists, people Clausen defines as believing "that there exist some core defining characteristics of homosexuals that are the same in all times and places," and social constructionists who believe that sexuality is " a fluid, changing phenomenon, defined by social contexts that establish not only the meaning but the very texture of what we call experience, including bodily experience."

The scientific community has also been vocal and prominent researchers continue to look for gay hormones, brains differences, and genes to explain behaviors and drives. "One is left with evidence that biological factors have something (but not everything) to do with at least some instances of male homosexuality," Clausen writes. "However, this knowledge has no value in helping to predict or explain the orientation of particular individuals. While it suggests that human beings may not start their lives as entirely blank slates, it says next to nothing about the process whereby whatever is written on the slate to begin with turns into the complex phenomenon we call sexuality. It does not, in other words, provide a causal explanation." LFurthermore, Clausen astutely points out that current scientific research "treats homosexuality-not heterosexuality or bisexuality--as the phenomenon demanding explanation ... The research focus continues to suggest that opposite-sex behavior is the yardstick by which all other behavior is to be judged."

The absurdity of this measurement becomes incredibly clear in the book's most engaging chapter, "Bodies and Meanings Across Cultures." In it, Clausen offers examples of cultural variation regarding sexual propriety. For example, in ancient Greece "sexual fulfillment for women was considered appropriate only for courtesans, who could, if they wished, have recourse to either males or females." Similarly, Greek citizens--by definition non-slave males--were encouraged to have relations with young men who had not yet reached citizenship age. "Such relationships were expected to co-exist with the older partner's marriage; the younger man, in his turn, would probably be married to a woman and take his own young male lover," Clausen writes.

In more contemporary life, certain Melanesian cultures expect sexual activity between older and younger males since masculinity is believed to be acquired via the ingestion of semen. And in Suriname, "women known as mati or matisma enter into sexual relations with other women but may simultaneously or subsequently maintain relationships with men with whom they often have children. The same-sex pairings are frequently intergenerational, with the older woman exacting unconditional devotion" from the younger in exchange for her attention, gifts and mentoring.

The lack of interest with which many cultures view sexual-object choice should lead us to be suspicious of the Euroamerican obsession with that particular dimension of desire and behavior," Clausen concludes. "People's orientations can and do change, which is not to say that everyone's can change, that people make changes at will, or that there is any positive value to be attached either to changing or not changing ... In the poetic formulation of Chicana lesbian writer Gloria Andaldua, 'identity is a river.'

Indeed, as my own identity had flowed from incarnation to incarnation, a variety of people have come and gone, yet the "mystery of desire" has kept things interesting. My former friend continues to invade my thoughts, and I continue to debate whether or not to get in touch with her. For now, though, I am content to keep that particular door shut. But who knows? Tomorrow is another day and I may feel differently.