Peterson Toscano delivers some incisive insight into the Ted Haggard thing.
Something else the larger world needs to understand about the conservative Christian world when it comes to statements like the minister pronouncing him to be, "completely heterosexual."
THEY THINK EVERYONE IS COMPLETELY HETEROSEXUAL.
Seriously. They deny the existence of homosexual persons altogether. "Gay" is a label that heterosexual people attach to themselves when they prefer to have gay sex.
I know it hard to wrap your mind around that, but that's how they think. Everyone is straight, but some people just get confused -- because daddy didn't love them enough, or mommy was too assertive (can you hear the patriarchal bell ringing?), because they got raped by other heterosexuals who love gay sex -- and start wanting to have gay sex. BUT THEY'RE STILL HETEROSEXUAL.
This is how they justify their silly programs and "ministries" and therapies and conversion camps. By simply denying that fact that we exist at all.
Thus: Ted Haggard is "completely heterosexual."
2 comments:
I finally believe it, brother.
When I came out I just naturally assumed that some people were born straight, some were born gay and most people were born somewhere in-between. I knew I was born gay because I had never, not once in my entire life, ever wondered what a woman looked like with her clothes off (nor, more tellingly, had ever dreamed of it, either). On the other hand, I had wondered what it would've been like to have been alone, naked, with my school bus driver (male) when I was six.
It used to astonish me when people thought I had "picked" being gay some bright, sunny morning when I was 18 or so. Had they "picked" being straight the same day?
Well, it turned out that most of them probably did "pick" being straight (and some others, gay). Or at least most of them. Since the vast majority of people (according to Kinsey) have sexual preferences which fall in the middle of the two extremes, most people feel as though they've "chosen" to go one way or the other... and to live with their one-time choice, damning themselves for being sinful if they so much as think of deviating from their "chosen norm" on occasion.
So yeah, I "get it" when a lot of people say I "picked" being gay.
I just smile to myself because I know that there was a time when they gave serious thought to joining my club, instead.
Here is an interesting resource: Sexual and Affectional Orientation and Identity Scales (Using the Klein Scale to Teach about Sexual Orientation) - by Bobbi Keppel, LICSW and Alan Hamilton is an excellent teaching tool. They first describe the Heterosexual-Homosexual Scale by Fritz Klein, MD with a 0 - 6 point continuum from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual; then Klein's extended work with his Sexual Orientation Grid - which uses 7 less emotionally "loaded" reference point descriptions. Keppel & Hamilton then present their own "Aspects of Sexual Orientation" which looks with much more depth into these aspects: sexual attraction, sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, emotional preference, and social preference. Keppel and Hamilton write "how a person thinks of herself or himself is often not a matter of choice (preference), the politically correct term has become "sexual orientation." They also looks at past, present & ideal and more. I highly recommend it.
See http://www.biresource.org/pamphlets/scales.html
Post a Comment