There is an elephant in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger courtroom, and I have decided to name it.  Unfortunately, this elephant is a basic and unsatisfying question that gay rights advocates had hoped to lay down long ago.  Nevertheless, it persists, particularly in the language of the defense, and its answer may have a significant impact on the outcome of this trial.  So, without further ado, I say the elephant is this:  How do people become gay?

Yes.  Put aside your views on whether homosexuality is good, bad, or irrelevant.  And whether it should be embraced, tolerated, or discouraged.  Regardless of how you feel, much of Perry’s conflict can be traced to this anxious question beating in the heart of many average Americans:  Is homosexuality a natural variation that will always occur at roughly the same rate in the human race?  Or can the existence of homosexuality be increased, perhaps by exposing children more frankly and openly to its existence?

Your answer might influence your view on same-sex marriage rights.  What’s more, your answer might influence the findings in Perry, where the question looms large and yet relatively unacknowledged behind testimony and argument.  There are at least two prime examples of this.

First, of course, there is the central position of the defense: Allowing gay couples to marry will be detrimental to children – either because they will more frequently be raised by gay parents or because frank social acceptance of homosexuality will encourage more children to become gay.  Naturally, your opinion on whether people choose to be gay – or whether events in the womb choose for them – might influence your amenability to this argument.

Second, the origins of sexuality are at the heart of one of the plaintiffs’ legal positions:  They suggest that homosexuality is an important personal characteristic and one that should be protected by the United States Constitution.  In other words, being gay is such a central feature of one’s identity – like race or religion – that the United States should neither expect a gay man to change his sexual orientation nor exclude him from basic rights because of it.  For many, a response to this position could depend on how the man came to be gay in the first place:  Was it his choice, or was it his fate?

THEORIES & STEREOTYPES

In these ways, Perry is a novel airing of nearly a century of American anxiety about the source of homosexuality and its transmission.  For better or worse, there seem to be implicit cultural questions of:  How can we control homosexuality?  How can we contain it?  What’s more, tracing this history is instructive, because it reveals the origin of many gay stereotypes and helps place the current same-sex marriage debate in the context of an argument that has been simmering for at least the last 60 years.

Last week, Yale historian George Chauncey described the historical American preoccupation with how homosexuality occurs.  In the late 19th century, doctors began to study homosexuality under the assumption that it resulted from a physical illness.  They made little headway, and in the 1920s, Freudians shifted their focus to psychological development.  They theorized that traumas could stunt children in their sexual development and prevent them from progressing to a more sophisticated attraction to the opposite sex.  This led to popular theories that homosexual people were merely immature adults, self-indulgent as children are.

But beginning in the 1930s and accelerating after World War II, theories on homosexuality became more venomous.  Gay men were no longer regarded as harmless “effeminate queens” but rather as dangerous people seeking to convert the weak, Chauncey said.  Highly publicized media campaigns responded to straight and gay attacks on children by presenting gay men, in particular, as dangerous child molesters.  They were “hyper-men, unconstrained by women and threatening the nation’s children,” Chauncey said.

These theories were given greater validity by a tradition of criminalizing gay culture and behavior and, thus, forcing those who pursued homosexual appetites or company into greater confrontation with the law.

Homosexuality was thus transformed from a “randomly contagious disease” to a new illness whose “carriers” tried to infect innocents, Chauncey said.  These attitudes were used to justify banning gay and lesbian employees from the workplace.  Just “one homosexual can pollute a government office,” warned a 1950 subcommittee report for the United States Senate.

The attitudes were also used to isolate children from gay culture.  Television scripts were censored and sanitized of references to homosexuality.   Jobs providing easy access to children were off-limits to homosexuals.  And gay men were understood to be recruiters, seeking to indoctrinate children at a vulnerable stage in their sexual development.  “Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks,” a newspaper advertisement read in the 1970’s.  It ran as part of the “Save Our Children” campaign, a nationwide reaction against gay pride movements that demanded equal rights for homosexuals living openly as such.

AGE-OLD DEBATE CONTINUES

Perhaps many of these stereotypes could be relegated to a painful but irrelevant recounting of the history of American gay culture if everyone believed what gay rights advocates have been saying for years: That people are born gay – not turned gay by watching characters on television or having a gay mentor at school.

The problem is that a lot of people don’t believe that, and they remain nervous about homosexuality despite a slate of plaintiff experts who have said that the damning stereotypes of the 20th century are baseless.

We can still see these effects of these stereotypes in Perry.  For example, Proposition 8 advertising routinely ran with the tagline, “Protect our children,” during the summer and fall of 2008.  This was the case despite the fact that, on Friday, noted child developmental psychologist Michael Lamb testified that there was “absolutely no evidence” that children were more likely to be sexually abused when they were raised by gay or lesbian adults.  “We don’t want to perpetrate against anyone. We don’t want to force anyone to do anything,” Plaintiff Paul Katami protested last week.  “We are not a harm.”

Another Proposition 8 television ad depicted a mother listening to her daughter describe a school book in which a king marries another king.  “When I grow up, maybe I can marry a princess,” the girl posits to her mother’s alarm.  The advertisement “sends a pretty strong message that the simple exposure to gay people and their relationships is somehow going to lead a generation of young people to become gay,” Chauncey said.  And yet, Lamb testified that that gay men and lesbian women currently comprise only two to three percent of the U.S. population and that children raised in gay households are no more likely to become gay or lesbian themselves. 

Perry plaintiffs have also testified exactly to that.  “I’m proud to be gay.  I’m a natural-born gay,” Katami declared on the first day of trial.

Yet for much of the country, the matter is still not that simple.  How gay men and lesbian women come to exist is an age-old inquiry whose answer still baffles scientists and divides the American public.  In July 2009, the American Psychological Association stated that, while most people experience little or no choice in their sexual orientation, scientists do not agree on how that orientation is determined.  Research into genetic, hormonal, developmental, and social influences has yet to galvanize a consensus.  The American public also remains divided.  A 2007 CNN poll of more than 1,000 respondents found that 42 percent believed that homosexuality was the product of upbringing, while 39 percent believed people were born gay.  The poll was noteworthy for another reason, illustrating a potential sea-change in American thought:  For the first time in history, a majority of CNN’s respondents – 56 percent – said that, regardless of how a person became gay, he couldn’t change his sexual orientation after the fact.

Even if American opinion is changing, it is curious that the Perry defense is not addressing this issue more head-on.  Why don’t they overtly say that homosexuality begets homosexuality?  This seems the obvious subtext of many cross-examination questions.  Perhaps the defense has no evidence, or perhaps they plan to put it on when their case begins, likely later this week.  Regardless, the importance of the issue seems clear to the plaintiffs, who repeatedly question their own witnesses about whether gay couples can be good parents and raise heterosexual adults.  The implicit message behind these questions is that, despite expert testimony, public anxiety about the origins of homosexuality remains and must be addressed.

And according to US history and broader current opinion, this does not seem an outlandish stance.  Until the country is confident that homosexuality is both natural and beyond influence, those who want to prevent same-sex marriage will be able to summon and rely upon an American cultural tradition that is both ambivalent about homosexuality and perhaps fearful that the current gay population is only the beginning.  In short, the public is still asking: How do people become gay?  And how do we feel about it?

Tags: children, US History
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