liberal box checking

Liberals and progressives have far more humane and compassionate views on gay rights and gay love than conservatives do, but in my experience, they are often not more open-minded than conservatives.

A telling moment in this Wesley Morris essay on HBO's new Liberace movie, Behind the Candelabra: in one paragraph, he notes that Matt Damon's character Scott (Liberace's live-in boyfriend and employee) "insists that he's bisexual." In the next paragraph, he says that Damon and Douglas are "playing homosexuals." Perhaps the movie makes it clear that this self-definition by Scott is in fact self-delusion, I don't know. But I'm not sure how such a thing could be dramatized. If it's not, why run so roughshod over a character's self-definition? Yes: there is a tradition of gay men who are not just closeted but self-deluded. But the insistence that any man who has sexual or romantic relationships with another man must be gay is simplistic and deeply restricting of the right to sexual freedom and self-definition. (You'll note that this is never asserted when it comes to women.) Morris's piece writ large reflects on homosexuality not as a set of preferences and behaviors but as a totalizing identity. That is neither a productive way to look at a world that is full of complexity nor fair.

Consider this passage from a 2009 article by Amy Sohn on male-to-female transsexuals and men who are attracted to them:

Part of the problem is, there’s no language yet to describe men who are drawn to trannies—or, as a friend of mine puts it, “transgressives.” My own guess is that they fall into four subcategories: closeted gay men who need the T&A so they don’t freak out about the D, bisexual men who can get both needs met at the same time, porn-addicted men who need to keep crossing new boundaries to get aroused, and straight guys who nonetheless have a narcissistic attraction to the penis.

I suppose I'm glad that Sohn has reflected that sexual desires are complex and  idiosyncratic. But consider that three out of these four categories are defined as fundamentally disordered or dysfunctional: closeted men who are lying to themselves, men who are addicted to pornography, and men who are motivated by narcissism. This is flagrantly judgmental about adult, consensual sexual behavior. It's amazing how confident Sohn is in creating a taxonomy of desires that she doesn't share and can't possibly fully understand. Like most affluent Brooklynites, I'm sure Sohn thinks of herself as a modern, forward-thinking person. Yet she is so suffused in the privilege of being able to define others' sexual identities that she doesn't see the offense in reducing the boundaries of the possible, of the permissible.

It's not just that liberals define the sexual identities of others constantly. It's that they are so quick and casual in doing so. I personally have long marveled at how the same people who advocate eloquently for the equal dignity of gay love and gay relationships can be so quick to take the right of self-definition away from men who experience them. None of us have access to other people's internal feelings and emotions, and thus we are constrained in how we can assess their own orientation towards their own desires. The fair, compassionate, and liberal thing to do is to let people act as they want to, and trust in the perfect legitimacy of all adult, consensual sexual behavior.