Imagine that you firmly believe you were born gay, and you've just come out to them. You recommend your local PFLAG chapter to them, and after a few weeks of resistance they finally agree to go. So this evening, they come home from their first PFLAG meeting with a book in their hands. "We bought this at the bookstore on the way home," they tell you. "The PFLAG Chapter President told us it's the best book ever written about this and that it will answer all our questions."
"Wonderful!" you exclaim, and ask to examine the book. It's by Marcus Ericson, and it's called Is It a Choice? Answers to 300 of the Stupidest Questions to Go to Anyone Other Than Your Own Child for Answers To. Hmm . . . interesting. You turn to page one and read:
Is it a choice?
Just as heterosexual people choose their feelings of sexual attraction, gay and lesbian people choose theirs. All of us choose our feelings of sexual attraction as we grow, whether these feelings are for someone of the same sex, the opposite sex, or both sexes. For gay and lesbian people, another important choice is between denying we've chosen these feelings of same-sex attraction—and pretending to have been "born" with these feelings—and living the full emotional and physical life of a human being who acknowledges all of his or her own choices.
I like what one of my friends says whenever he's asked this question or hears someone voice the opinion that gay people don't have any choice about being gay: "Why would I be unable to choose my own feelings of sexual attraction when I can choose all my other feelings, like the way that forcing myself to smile and think pleasant thoughts when I'm unhappy actually makes me start to feel happier? Why would I want to pretend to be unable to choose my own feelings, when anyone who loses the ability to choose to be happy is diagnosed as clinically depressed and prescribed medicine to cure them, and claiming I cannot choose my own sexual feelings is only likely to come across as a condition similarly in need of a 'cure'? What sort of world would this be if we could not choose our own sexual feelings—a world in which we could not learn from our past relationship mistakes and choose to start being attracted to healthier personality types, or a world in which when our lovers get old and wrinkled we cannot choose to learn to be attracted for the first time to old people with wrinkles? What sort of world would this be if we were born biologically programmed to be attracted to a specific gender—a world in which internet romances would be psychologically impossible because there's no way to verify the gender of the person you're chatting with, or a world in which we'd all have a biological instinct that would tell us automatically the gender of everyone we meet online, and there's never even be any need to ask?"
If you firmly believe you were born gay and are nervous about how well your parents understand that you didn't choose your gayness, you probably aren't going to be very happy to have PFLAG recommending books like that to your parents. Well, you're in luck then, since there is no Marcus Ericson and his book quoted above doesn't really exist. Yet huge numbers of PFLAG chapters constantly recommend an equivalent book by Eric Marcus which says this:
Is it a choice?
Just as heterosexual people don't choose their feelings of sexual attraction, gay and lesbian people don't choose theirs. All of us become aware of our feelings of sexual attraction as we grow, whether these feelings are for someone of the same sex, the opposite sex, or both sexes. For gay and lesbian people, the only real choice is between suppressing these feelings of same-sex attraction—and pretending to be asexual or heterosexual—and living the full emotional and physical life of a gay man or lesbian.
I like what one of my friends says whenever he's asked this question or hears someone voice the opinion that gay people make a conscious choice to be gay: "Why would I choose to be something that horrifies my parents, that could ruin my career, that my religion condemns, and that could cost me my life if I dared to walk down the street holding hands with my boyfriend?"
—Eric Marcus, Is It A Choice? Answers to 300 of the Most Frequently Asked Questions About Gay and Lesbian People by Eric Marcus
If no one ever chose to do things that horrified their parents, could ruin their career, that their religion condemned, or that could get them persecuted and killed, then there would never have been a Galileo, a Socrates, or radical political dissidents of any kind. Eric Marcus presents a one-sided view in this book, asking a question about queer by choice people but not presenting our answer to it, and proclaiming in no uncertain terms that "gay and lesbian people don't choose" their feelings of sexual attraction. And no matter how carefully and eloquently queer by choice children may present our answers to our parents ourselves (and remember, not all of us are eloquent enough to hold our own with a professional writer, so Eric Marcus's slick wording may put a nervous teenager's fumbling explanations at a serious disadvantage by comparison!) the impression will always remain in our parents' minds: Why do so many lesbian and gay experts say that the choice my child says s/he experienced is impossible? My child doesn't seem to fit in with the lesbian and gay community.How can my child ever be happy there when these people don't see things the way my child does? My child is so different . . . maybe my child is not really gay.
Please understand that we are not asking PFLAG chapters to remove Eric Marcus's book from their resource lists entirely. For some lesbian and gay people, a book like Eric Marcus's (and there are certainly plenty of others like it—all of the books by Betty Berzon come to mind as examples) might well tell their parents exactly what they want to say. But if you're recommending books to an individual parent, try not to recommend a book like Eric Marcus's unless you know for sure that this parent's child does not believe s/he has any choice. If you don't know what the child's experiences of choice are, try recommending a book that does not enforce any definite ideas about whether or not people can choose their sexual orientations—such as Beyond Acceptance: Parents of Lesbians and Gays Talk About Their Experiences, and the other books listed on our suggestions page.
If you're making a list of recommended books intended for a general audience rather than a specific parent, check whether any of the books on the list deny all possibility of choice. If some of them do, then please either remove those books from your list, or provide a counterpoint by also including at least one book that specifically encourages people to believe it is possible to choose to be queer, such as Vera Whisman's Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity, or Claudia Card's Lesbian Choices. If your chapter is recommending books that categorically deny the existence of queer by choice people, then the only way for your chapter to indicate that you recognize us as part of your constituency as well is to also carry books that explicitly acknowledge the reality of our existence.
So why would any PFLAG members hesitate to do this? Are they worried that any book that says it's possible for some people to choose to be queer will do some kind of terrible harm to children who consider themselves to have been born gay? Well then . . . think how much more harm a book that says it's completely impossible for anyone to have not chosen their sexual orientation would do. That's the equivalent of what Eric Marcus's book says to the parents of people who consider our own queerness a choice.