Born This Way | The Chronicle of Higher Education

Spending time in Provincetown – Cape Cod’s mecca of all things homosexual – is both a thrilling inversion of everyday life where queerness is the banal majority and a depressing reminder that normative ideologies can seep into even the most festive of gay milieu.  As New York made history by approving same-sex marriage, Ptown vacationers congratulated each other as they slathered sunscreen on their finely chiseled bodies and circuit-partied until the sun came up.  But pro-marriage T-shirts (“Put a ring on it”) were soon eclipsed by the T-shirt slogan de jour “Born this Way.”

Now, I’m the last person to dis the wondrous Lady Gaga, but her well-meaning ode to immutability is less helpful to gay rights than Guiliani in drag. If marriage and military access are conjured as the Oz of queer liberation, then biological and genetic arguments are the yellow brick road, providing the route and the rationale for civil rights.  The medicalization of sexual identity – and the search for a cause if not a cure – has a long and infamous history. This history includes well-meaning attempts by social activists to create a safe life for same-sex desire through the designation of homosexuality as biologically predetermined but also, more ominously, includes the sordid history of incarceration, medication, electroshock “therapy” and numerous other attempts to rid the body (and mind) of its desires.

Notions of homosexuality as “inbred,” innate and immutable were endorsed by a wide variety of thinkers and activists, including progressive reformers such as Havelock Ellis and not so progressive conservatives, eager to assert same-sex love as nature’s mistake.  Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the 1880s and Magnus Hirschfeld in the 1903s – both pioneer sexologists and generally advocates of “toleration”– came to believe in some notion of “innate” homosexuality, whether through theories of a kind of brain inversion or through vague references to hormonal imbalances.  These theories mostly had little traction, and no evidence whatsoever, and were further undermined during the heyday of the early gay movement which included a deep commitment to the depathologization and demedicalization of homosexuality, manifested in a long-term attempt to remove “homosexuality” as a disease category in the DSM…. Read the full article on The Chronicle of Higher Education.