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I just wrote this response on another post and thought I'd share it here. These ideas of sexual orientation and race as social rather than biological constructions are controversial, I know. I hadn't been very much exposed to them until this year, primarily through a class in LGBTQ theory. I find them really compelling. That and it makes me want to deconstruct memes like this one, even if I agree with the sentiment behind them.
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From the meme: "If gays become accepted, then more people will decide to be gay. Yes, because after Blacks gained rights, all the White people went out and decided to become Black."
My thought was, well, in a way, that happened to some extent.
When restrictions against African-Americans were loosened, it actually did lead to some "White" people becoming "Black". What I mean by that is that in the past, especially under slavery or the Jim Crow South, there were a couple categories of "Black" people who could become "White". People who were of mixed ancestry, or who just happened to be light-skinned, were often able to pack up and move to a new place where no one knew them and 'pass' as White. (This is an argument for a certain level of inherent invalidity in the concept of race as biology and suggests an alternate view of race as a social construction.) In a society where it is more acceptable to be Black than it once was, there are more people who are choosing to enact an identity as a Black person when the choices of Whiteness or Blackness may both be open to them.
In the same way, if you look at sexual orientation as a social construct rather than a matter of biology, (This is is a controversial view, I realize. But Foucault's history of sexuality examines the way that the category of homosexual as a kind of person rather than a kind of action has only existed in fairly recent times.) greater social acceptance of being "gay" has also led to more "straight" people becoming "gay". That is, more people who are capable of enacting a social identity as "straight" may be choosing to enact an identity as "gay" because they are less worried about social repercussions. This may take the form of more people being out of the closet, or even of more people being willing to come to grips with and act on feelings of same-sex attraction when in the past they might have buried and ignored those feelings.
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I also don't mean to divorce sexual orientation from biology entirely here. I'm sorry if it sounds that way. It seems likely to me that there is a lot of biology behind what sex(es) a person finds attractive. But my point here is that there is a hell of a lot of gray area between and around the arbitrary points of "gay" and "straight", and that many people who do are not really one or the other, but have found themselves as identifying as such out of convenience. Some of those people in the space outside the binary gay/straight paradigm may be more inclined to be "gay" than "straight" as society becomes more accepting of a straight identity.
---
From the meme: "If gays become accepted, then more people will decide to be gay. Yes, because after Blacks gained rights, all the White people went out and decided to become Black."
My thought was, well, in a way, that happened to some extent.
When restrictions against African-Americans were loosened, it actually did lead to some "White" people becoming "Black". What I mean by that is that in the past, especially under slavery or the Jim Crow South, there were a couple categories of "Black" people who could become "White". People who were of mixed ancestry, or who just happened to be light-skinned, were often able to pack up and move to a new place where no one knew them and 'pass' as White. (This is an argument for a certain level of inherent invalidity in the concept of race as biology and suggests an alternate view of race as a social construction.) In a society where it is more acceptable to be Black than it once was, there are more people who are choosing to enact an identity as a Black person when the choices of Whiteness or Blackness may both be open to them.
In the same way, if you look at sexual orientation as a social construct rather than a matter of biology, (This is is a controversial view, I realize. But Foucault's history of sexuality examines the way that the category of homosexual as a kind of person rather than a kind of action has only existed in fairly recent times.) greater social acceptance of being "gay" has also led to more "straight" people becoming "gay". That is, more people who are capable of enacting a social identity as "straight" may be choosing to enact an identity as "gay" because they are less worried about social repercussions. This may take the form of more people being out of the closet, or even of more people being willing to come to grips with and act on feelings of same-sex attraction when in the past they might have buried and ignored those feelings.
--------
I also don't mean to divorce sexual orientation from biology entirely here. I'm sorry if it sounds that way. It seems likely to me that there is a lot of biology behind what sex(es) a person finds attractive. But my point here is that there is a hell of a lot of gray area between and around the arbitrary points of "gay" and "straight", and that many people who do are not really one or the other, but have found themselves as identifying as such out of convenience. Some of those people in the space outside the binary gay/straight paradigm may be more inclined to be "gay" than "straight" as society becomes more accepting of a straight identity.
