Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [22]
Queer theorist Michael Warner has sent up the twins study conducted by J. Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard, respectively professors of psychology and psychiatry. The study argued for a genetic basis for homosexuality after finding that if an individual with an identical twin was gay, his twin was disproportionately likely also to be gay. One of the study’s marquee claims was that this held true even for twins raised apart. Yet Warner observes that one pair of twins raised apart was not only gay but also shared a penchant for masturbating over pictures of construction workers. Does this mean, Warner asks, that there is a gene for masturbating over construction workers?
Even if these studies had been perfectly executed, they would still be a leaky defense for homosexuality. These studies appear to assume biological traits are immutable, while cultural traits are mutable. Yet as literary critic Eve Sedgwick has pointed out, that conventional wisdom may be turning a cartwheel. As our scientific technology advances, genetic traits may become more susceptible to human manipulation than cultural ones. As envisioned in Jonathan Tolins’s play The Twilight of the Golds, it is a short step from finding a gay gene to screening out fetuses that carry it. If scientists find a gay gene before gays have done the cultural work of securing the validity of homosexuality, gays will be more endangered than we are today.
Others have made subtler claims about immutability, observing that cultural attributes can also be immutable. Yet the more sophisticated the immutability defense becomes, the more convinced I become of its irreducible wrongness. The defense is flawed because it is an implied apology. It resists the conversion demand by saying “I cannot change,” rather than by saying “I will not change.” It suggests electroshock treatment for homosexuals is wrong because it does not work. But such treatment would be no less wrong if it did. Such a defense also leaves bisexuals, who can choose to express only cross-sex desire, without a defense for any expression of same-sex desire.
Of course, as a logical matter, immutability and validity defenses could coexist. As a practical matter, however, the two defenses tend to moot each other as rhetorical arguments. If an identity is immutable, people are less likely to ask whether it is valid, as no alternative exists. But the opposite is also true—if an identity is valid, people are much less likely to ask whether it is immutable.
As literature professor Leo Bersani says, “the very question of ‘how we got that way’ would in many quarters not be asked if it were not assumed that we ended up the wrong way.”
The gay critique of assimilation begins here. Conversion is the ultimate demand for assimilation—while passing and covering leave the underlying identity relatively intact, conversion destroys it. When someone asks for conversion, the difference between the two available refusals is immense. Which will we choose? Will we say we cannot change? Or will we, like the early gay activists, say we will not change, meeting the demand for conversion with a demand for equality?
I understand the seductions of immutability. When I speak of the books that hold me up, like Bill Rubenstein’s book or Jonathan Katz’s book, it is in part their unchanging quality that moves me. But what moves me more is their resistance to the cultures from which they arose. These books did not need to exist, and that is what makes their existence miraculous. They stand against a pull as strong as gravity. Against the call to go down, they hold us up.
GAY PASSING
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner depicts a sailor whose penance for shooting an albatross is to repeat the story of how he killed that bird of good omen. He instinctively knows who must hear his tale, and transfixes them with his “glittering eye.” He is compelled to speak, and they are compelled to listen. So he tells and tells,