“What is required to identify and define homosexuality, is an act. Without homosexual behaviour, there is no homosexuality to worry about, and this fact alone is sufficient grounds to deny protection.” – William Gairdner (http://www.williamgairdner.com/gay-wrongs)
Gairdner doesn’t mince words when it comes to gay rights – he’s generally opposed to them. Notice, however, his implied definition of homosexual. To him, homosexuality is all about what you do. How you feel is irrelevant.
This is hard for me to confess, but it has to be said: When I found myself attracted to girls, it wasn’t something I had asked for. I was quite happy to live my life as a young male child who liked hockey, baseball, dodge ball, cats, TV, board games, comic books (especially DC), and swimming at the cottage. My contact with the female sex was limited mainly to mother, sister, aunts, teachers, etc.
Somewhere around Grade 6, I noticed two things. First, my eyesight wasn’t as good as it used to be. (Two years later, I would finally start wearing glasses.) Secondly, despite my vision problems, girls actually started to look, well, interesting. Just a few months before, I could care less about how a girl’s ass moved when she walked. Soon, though, it took real effort (or the girl turning around) to take my eyes off her ass.
Then, of course, there was the chest. I knew women had breasts. I had seen a few bare ones when I was a preschooler and could tell that women had them under their clothes. But these newer ones on girls who had never had them before captivated me. Soon, I could tell which ones wore a bra. Clearly something was happening.
Whenever I would go to the local drug store to buy comics, I would see magazines that showed naked women on the cover. In other circumstances that are now nebulous, I remember being able to look through a few of them (though not in any store). I also discovered that while our English TV station would never show any nudity, the French channel would show some quite often. This may explain, at least in part, how I became a Francophile.
If these magazines and movies existed, there had to be other people like me who found women’s bodies fascinating. And as far as I could tell, they were all men. There was no one around to really talk to about these things. Luckily, there were nurses in the family and my mother was one of them. She kept medical books at home for reference purposes and I started pouring through them… when she wasn’t around, of course!
As time went on, a clearer picture of what was happening came to me. Like many others my age, I was experiencing puberty and was now fully transforming into a fully sexual being. (Children are sexual beings, too, but not quite in the same way.) More to the point, though, I was turning into a heterosexual being. Why? Simply because I had a combination of these traits: a) I was male; and b) females were my sexual focus.
I hadn’t asked for this. One of my aunts, whom I suppose meant well, started talking about how I would attract a lot of attention from girls because I happened to be quite tall. This was scary! I never had to deal with girls before except as fellow students. Now, they would be on my mind all the time. My aunt even assured me that this was supposed to happen. To make matters worse, my parish priest was adamant that I would burn in hell if I didn’t somehow eradicate my heterosexual feelings.
It took quite a few years, but I eventually came to grips with my heterosexuality. I am what I am and always will be. Women look as fascinating as ever, and I now allow myself to enjoy their company without any feelings of guilt. But with puberty behind me, I can also concentrate on tasks when I must.
I realise now that I was lucky. I have come to see just how much more easily our society accepts heterosexuality, as long as it is controlled, preferably through institutions such as marriage. I can’t imagine what I would have gone through if my sexual focus had been my fellow males.
As far as I’m concerned, I’ve been heterosexual my entire life, or at least since puberty. But if Gairdner is to be believed, I couldn’t possibly have been heterosexual until the day I finally had sex. If we follow his definition to the letter, I only became heterosexual at the age of 19. What was I before then? And what were the gay men before they finally had sex with other men? Neuter? Ambiguous? Fence-sitters?
Implicit in Gairdner’s argument is the wish that homosexuals would deny their very nature. I wasn’t able to deny my heterosexual nature, so I don’t see how I could ask a gay man to deny his.
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