I'm always writing LiveJournal comments about choosing to be queer and then wanting to say exactly the same thing in ten other people's journals a few months later, but I can never find my old comments anymore to copy and paste them, so I rewrite the same things endlessly. This time I'm going to copy and paste them here as an entry in their own right, so maybe I'll manage to find them again later. I wrote this in foucaultonacid's journal, and I apologize for possibly boring you if you've heard it all from me before.

I would say that we can create an attraction or an orientation that is not just temporary - but that in order to do so, we also need to have created an entire system of other beliefs/desires within which the new attraction makes sense. A meaningful, long-term change of orientation can't just be tacked onto the top of a personality without other changes that give the person a reason to desire to be with members of a different gender or other category of people than the person previously desired to be with.

I think that feeling more attracted to a particular gender arises from believing that members of that gender are more likely (at least in our society) to do/feel/be something or other, and that the something or other they are more likely to do/feel/be is important to one's happiness. A person can be either right or wrong about what members of each gender are more likely to do/feel/be, and a person can also be either right or wrong about whether the something or other is really important to their happiness. For a person to choose to change their orientation in a meaningful way, the person would start by questioning these beliefs and looking for reasons to change their mind about these beliefs. If they succeed in finding a good reason to change their beliefs, then they successfully choose to change their orientation.

If they don't succeed in finding a good reason to change their beliefs, then they don't succeed in changing their orientation. However, in a way, this means that they actually choose to keep their existing orientation - because they evaluated the reasons for having each preference, and they made a decision that the reasons for having their existing preference were better reasons.

Of course, the common notion of "free will" demands that there must also a third possibility, which is that theoretically they could choose to change their orientation to one that the preponderance of evidence available to them suggests they should not choose. But I think if we're talking about sane people, this option is going to be so automatically ruled out that it doesn't much count as a choice at all. I think sanity is inherently defined as basing one's choices on evidence whenever evidence is available. If all available evidence suggests to you that being hit by a car would really hurt, and that if you run right in front of the one currently coming at you it will it you, yet you choose to run right in front of it anyway, we call that insane. In exactly the same way, if you see that being in sexual situations with certain people is likely to make you happier than being in sexual situations with certain other people, yet you choose to avoid sexual situations with the first group of people and seek them out with the second group of people anyway, that also would have to mean you're insane.

Also, I wrote this next bit in response to a comment on a different entry in foucaultonacid's journal, in which the commenter said he wishes he were heterosexual because "reproducing is the main thing that makes the earth go around, our main purpose. so not naturally liking what I'm supposed to, what I'm MADE to do, is kind of disappointing."

This is exactly why I think the whole idea that sexual orientations are biological (as opposed to being developed in various other ways that you aren't necessarily able to change) increases homophobia. If you accept the idea gayness is biological, then it can be very, very difficult to avoid judging its value in terms of its evolutionary viability, and by that measure, concluding that it probably deserves to be called a "birth defect."

But why should you accept the idea that gayness is biological, just because you haven't been able to change yours? If you see gayness as something that evolved through your interaction with the world, it becomes much easier to say, for example, maybe your gayness is a sign of your greater than average ability to think for yourself, to gravitate toward relationships with people who share more of your experience of life and who can therefore understand you more fully and deeply. It becomes much easier to judge the value of gayness in terms of its social purposes, in terms of furthering the purposes of our lives that we can choose for ourselves, such as making the people we love feel loved and making the world a better place for people of future generations who share that goal, instead of just worrying about making more copies of little bits of DNA.