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[A woman on a panel said she chose to be a lesbian] and the audience was just going crazy! "What does this mean?" and "Well, do you still have an attraction to men?" And she said, "No, I don't." And they said, "But that can't be, if you had it before." And she said, "Yeah, I used to like cheese but I don't eat cheese anymore and I actually don't like it; it was an acquired taste. Men were an acquired taste. I no longer have the taste for them." People were like, "What? Oh no!" Weeping and gnashing of teeth.
—a queer man, quoted in Vera Whisman's Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity, 1996
Although it might seem convenient to, I will not say that I can't help being a homosexual—that it's biological and predetermined chemically, or even, it's God's will for me . . . the fact is that life is like a river and we are like fish, or water-snakes, or the plastic rings from six-packs and we flow and so some of us flow, as a friend of mine once said, into a different pool so when someone says to me "I'm sorry about AIDS Queer-bashing Police Harassment Discrimination, but you chose to be queer," I respond, that I've chosen to be an uppity faggot, actually, and that this was my choice and yours, and I mention queer-faggot contributions to the arts, education, social and sexual liberation, liberation movements and Civil Rights movements, not forgetting uniquely faggot educational activity like, "genderfuck," which by the way if you haven't noticed it is really catching on, so, yes, I can help it and helped myself to it.
—Michael Haldeman (a.k.a. Violetta), "I'm Quitting—and I'm Angry," Holy Titclamps, 1995
Of course, I'm that most awful of perverts. I chose, I gleefully admit that I was heterosexual until I met the right man and chose to indulge in my homoerotic potential. Take that!
—Elf Sternberg, posting on the talk.politics.misc newsgroup, April 18, 1993
I was straight until 21 yrs old.
—Anonymous Deaf Woman, "Heartbroken from a Straight Woman (Deaf)" coming-out story published on deafqueer.org, September 3, 1996
There's a poem by Robert Frost that's called "The Road Not Taken," and it ends something like, "I took the road less traveled by/And that has made all the difference," or something like that, and really, my whole life has been that way. I have always considered that, just because everybody else was doing something, that didn't mean I would do it. And when I think about it, being gay is that way, too.
—a gay man, quoted in Vera Whisman's Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity, 1996
I guess I never felt that it wasn't a choice. It was an option, I guess.
—a queer woman, quoted in Vera Whisman's Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity, 1996
Homosexuality is a way of life that I've grown accustomed to.
—Johnny Mathis, Us magazine, June 1982
I have friends who are straight, you know. I realize it's problematical for them because they have not been able to get out of where I was at, at that particular trap. I think of heterosexuality as a kind of trap. And they can't get out of that trap. I've been known to say, "I think you would be better off without men." And some women say to me, "I just can't bring myself to do that." And I tell them all, "I don't expect you to make any compromises on my account. It's your life." But culture and society says you sleep with men if you're a woman.
—a queer woman, quoted in Vera Whisman's Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity, 1996
Joey's mother used to tell him about collard greens. When he was a child he would say, "Yuck." His mother said, "I know, I know. But someday your tastes will change." She said that one day she had walked into the kitchen and asked her mother what that was that smelled so good. It turned out to be collard greens, which she had always thought were gross before. From that point on she loved them. The story horrified Joey's romantic sensibility. If something that fundamental could change—if he could be the kind of person who liked collard greens—what else about him might be different someday? What other person might he become? He felt the same way now about his sexuality. Sometimes he saw a woman who appealed to him, or while masturbating he accidentally thought about one. He put these thoughts away, not because he had anything against heterosexuality, but because they made him incomprehensible to himself. He also to this day did not like collards, or any greens for that matter.
—Joey Manley (owner of freespeech.org), "Love Will Tear," Blithe House Quarterly, Vol. 2 No. 1, Winter 1998
I must confess that Garber's very multiplication of examples browbeat me into wondering whether I myself might not have been bisexual had I lived in another era. When I was a young man, in the sixties, before the beginning of gay liberation, I was always in therapy trying to go straight. I was in love with three different women over a ten-year period, and even imagined marrying two often. But after the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 . . . I revised my thinking entirely: I decided I was completely gay and was only making the women in my life miserable. Following a tendency that Garber rightly criticizes, I denied the authenticity of my earlier heterosexual feelings in the light of my later homosexual identity. After reading Vice Versa, I find myself willing to reinterpret the narrative of my own personal history.
—Edmund White, "Gender Uncertainties: Marjorie Garber Looks at Bisexuality" (review of Marjorie Garber's book Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life), from The New Yorker, July 17, 1995, p. 81
[O]ne of my goals in the women's studies classroom was to convert someone to lesbianism in the course of the year—and I was always successful at this, just by talking about how sexuality is a construction and heterosexuality an institution and by simply posing the question, by asking my students: How do you identify yourself sexually? And if they would respond: I'm heterosexual, then I would ask: How do you know? How can you be so sure? thus provoking them to question their sexuality in certain fundamental ways. Result? Conversions right and left.
—Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, in dialogue with Calvin Thomas, from Straight With a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality, edited by Calvin Thomas, p. 262, 2000
I was not gay before I met her. I never thought about it. Nobody could have been more confused than me. . . . I think [that] in love, there's not sex, there's not segregation, there's not anything, there's just LOVE, and that’s what I feel. . . . I don't feel like I'm coming out. I've never been in a closet. I've never had anything to hide. I've lived my life in truth always. This was just a natural progression toward getting more love in my life. . . . I don't have any fear about this. This was the easiest thing in my life I've ever done. It's fantastic. I'm the happiest I've ever been in my whole life.
—Anne Heche, interviewed on Oprah, April 30, 1997
"When did you first know you were different?" the counselor at the L.A. Free Clinic asked.
"Well," I said, "I knew I was poor and on welfare, and that was different from lots of kids at school, and I had a single mom, which was really uncommon there, and we weren't Christian, which is terribly noticeable in the South. Then later I knew I was a foster child, and in high school, I knew I was a feminist and that caused me all kinds of trouble, so I guess I always knew I was different." His facial expression tells me this isn’t what he wanted to hear, but why should I engage this idea that my gender performance has been my most important difference in my life? It hasn't, and I can't separate it from the class, race, and parentage variables through which it was mediated. Does this mean I'm not real enough for [sex change] surgery?
I've worked hard to not engage the gay childhood narrative—I never talk about tomboyish behavior as an antecedent to my lesbian identity, I don't tell stories about cross-dressing or crushes on girls, and I intentionally fuck with the assumption of it by telling people how I used to be straight and have sex with boys like any sweet trashy rural girl and some of it was fun. I see these narratives as strategic, and I've always rejected the strategy that adopts some theory of innate sexuality and forecloses the possibility that anyone, gender troubled childhood or not, could transgress sexual and gender norms at any time. I don't want to participate in an idea that only some people have to engage a struggle of learning gender norms in childhood either. So now, faced with these questions, how do I decide whether to look back on my life through the tranny childhood lens, tell the stories about being a boy for Halloween, not playing with dolls? What is the cost of participation in this selective recitation? What is the cost of not participating?
—Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, p. 32, 1998
The train will stop at this way station which might be Boston and stay a few years and then get on the road again and stop at another way station. In this way station you were a heterosexual; in this way station you were a lesbian. You look back down the tracks and you look at your past and all the events in your life and your friends, and you're now looking at them through lesbian eyes. So you're reinterpreting the past.
When I became a lesbian I looked back at my life and realized that all along I had had these signals that I was one of them too. So, when I became a political lesbian that I thought I had chosen, had I really chosen it or had I been one all along but repressed it? When I was writing Borderlands I had the lesbian perspective, but my thinking had not evolved to the place where I believed that when you realize that you like women, that you want to have primary relationships with women, that you want to have carnal relationships with women, you can still make the choice to stay with men. Many of us have done that. You can become a lesbian and be a lesbian for twenty years and then decide that you want to be sexual with a man. I don't know if that changes your lesbian identity, but . . . you make a choice. If you know you're a lesbian and you're married and have kids you say, "Okay I'm going to be with my husband and I'll be a straight woman as much as I can and be with my kids." Or you can say, "I'm going to leave my husband; I'm going to come out as a lesbian and take this path," depending on how much courage you have. But I think that there's only certain places where you can make that choice, and those are the places of ambiguity, of change, where you're in nepantla—you can go either way. Once you're on this track, you're pretty much a lesbian and you think like a lesbian and you live with lesbians and your community is lesbians, and the heterosexual world is foreign and that's the path you and I—well I don't know about you—but that's the path I'm on.
—Gloria Anzaldúa, interviewed by AnnLouise Keating October 25-26, 1991, published in Frontiers, September 22, 1993
The male party line concerning Lesbians is that women become Lesbians out of reaction to men. This is a pathetic illustration of the male ego's inflated proportions. I became a Lesbian because of women, because women are beautiful, strong, and compassionate.
—Rita Mae Brown
Although I have been married and have two sons, I was a late bloomer and decided in my late 20s or early 30s that being a lesbian was OK and that, for me, it is a choice.
—Reader Response to "Why Are We Gay?" survey conducted by The Advocate, July 2001
When I became homosexual I felt free of a great amount of bullshit. I know that people are shackled by a lot of things that they don't believe in, that aren't in their interest to pursue. They pursue them because of the enormous social pressures that play on people, and one of those things is heterosexuality. People don't want to get involved in other people's lives in the straight world, Men don't—they can't. They're afraid of sex. . . . Homosexuality is very positive in people's lives because they can become free of a lot of conventional social imagery that rules them, chains them down, that directs their lives. They can get outside that. It's the first step. Becoming gay is an opening-up process to people: they feel they can be more honest and more real.
—Mark Liebergall, The Ninth Street Center Journal, Vol. 2, 1974
And if desire is something that you learn . . . just like heterosexuality was taught us, you know, you're supposed to like this little boy if you're a little girl. . . . If desire is something that you're not born with, something that you acquire—that sexual hunger to connect, to touch somebody, to be touched by somebody—if that can be learned, it can also be unlearned and relearned. So that if there are political lesbians out there (a lot of political lesbians came out in the seventies because that was a viable alternative), there were other lesbians like Cherrie [Moraga] who at a very early age were attracted, lusting, after women. With both types, there was a resistance to the teaching that we should desire men. But with people like Cherrie, that took on a very emotional kind of manifestation very early on. They got turned on by girls. And with the political lesbian you were a lesbian in your head first and then you started looking at women differently because of these theories about sexuality: Is sexuality learned? Is heterosexuality learned? Is lesbianism learned? And through the theory you got to the body and the emotion and the closeness with women.
After [my book] Borderlands came out I got to thinking that yes, some of us do choose. It's a very conscious thing: "I'm going to give up men; I'm going to go to women; I'm going to come out of the closet and declare my lesbianism." With other people, it's very unconscious. They don't even know they've made the choice. They think it's just natural to be a lesbian or to be a heterosexual woman, but there have been all these processes and decisions made all along the way that you're not even aware of, that you don't remember. Okay so here we are now in 1991, and I don't think a person is born queer; I don't think every person is born queer. I think there may be some genetic propensity towards most things: music, having a good ear for music. I don't know if there are any queer genes, but if there are they'll be discovered. So some of it might be biological; some of it might be learned; and some of it might be chosen. My position will probably change in a year or two, but that's where I'm at with it.
—Gloria Anzaldúa, interviewed by AnnLouise Keating October 25-26, 1991, published in Frontiers, September 22, 1993
But I think that one has to: one, make the distinction between desire and love. Desire may be a catalyst for love, and it may not be. And so I think that it's actually much more easy for us to choose who to love and how to love than who to desire, because I think there's a certain quality of mystery in all our lives that is still centered around desire. I think it's useful that we've had so much focus on the social construction of desire because I think it does enable us to realize the role the mind plays in desire and that it is possible, to the degree that you can alter states of consciousness, to alter the nature of your desire. Now the question is how many of us are really so in tune with ourselves that we are capable of altering our states of consciousness, and I think that most of us don't live at that level of holistic awareness of our senses and of our intellectual understanding in order to be able to do that. But it's certainly possible.
—bell hooks, "An Interview with bell hooks: The Ripple Talks with One of America's Leading Feminists" by Marlene Smith & Julie Petrarca, Washington Ripple, Vol. 9 No. 2, March 1995
I am 46 years old. I am female. I was married for 26 years and have three children and two grandchildren. In my case it was definitely a choice. When I was 35 or so, I met this woman, and we became friends. In the manner of teenagers, and at her suggestion, we decided to "experiment" sexually. I laugh now, to think back on it. I was petrified at the thought, but one day I looked at her and said, "OK, kiss me." We looked at each other and laughed, and she did. My response was, "Well, what the hell, the sky didn't fall! Do it again." . . . I made the choice to be a lesbian. I have found that sexually it is the right choice for me. I have been very lucky in that my children are totally accepting of my choice of lifestyle and my ex-husband is one of my best friends.
—Reader Response to "Why Are We Gay?" survey conducted by The Advocate, July 2001
For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior. She goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. Being lesbian and raised Catholic, indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent). It's an interesting path, one that continually slips in and out of the white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts. In and out of my head. It makes for loquería, the crazies. It is a path of knowledge—one of knowing (and learning) the history of oppression of our raza. It is a way of balancing, of mitigating duality.
—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987
