J. Bryan Lowder grapples with Cynthia Nixon's insistence [NYT] that homosexuality was her choice:
I’m not really interested in guessing at what Nixon’s “true” sexual identity is—that’s her business, and labels are always only approximations at best. What does interest me, however, is the alternate political model that her comments suggest. She asks why choosing one’s sexual orientation is any less legitimate than being theoretically "born this way," and in so doing, Nixon questions why we depend on biology as a measure of worth as opposed to creating a society where the sexual relationships between consenting adults need no justification at all.
It’s a compelling thought, a world where grown-ups don’t have to explain away their sexual activities by way of what amounts to an unavoidably apologetic "I can’t help it." Still, many critics will argue that appealing to biology is the only way to protect against the attacks of the religious right—if God made me this way, surely you can’t hate me. But I have to agree with Nixon that depending on biology cedes a great deal of control to bigoted people; after all, much of Christianity is based on the idea of resisting sinful bodily desires. If homosexuality is truly genetic, why not just ignore it, like good old heterosexual lust?
John Aravosis thinks Nixon must be bisexual. My own view is that female sexuality is inherently more fluid than male sexuality, and that lesbians and bisexual women, because they are less fixated on crude physical signals for arousal, have more of a choice than men, gay or straight, in their choice of loved ones. I think this is about the difference between lesbian identity and gay male identity. For all the attempt to corral us into one vowel-free liberal conglomerate, I know few communities less alike than lesbians and gay men.
The Dish 