Homonormativity and Cynthia Nixon’s Sexuality
Cynthia Nixon (of Sex in the City fame) has been rolling in headlines since announcing her candidacy for governor of New York on Monday. While a number of these stories highlight Nixon’s bisexuality, some may remember when her sexuality made waves for different reasons.
In 2012, Nixon gave a speech to a queer audience in that implied that her sexuality was a choice. She then defended that statement in an interview with the New York Times.
“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better,’” Nixon said. “And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.”
Many members of the LGBTQ+ community balked at Nixon’s statement, saying that sexuality is inherent and not something one can choose.
While Nixon has since come to “finally” publicly identify as bisexual, her comments as recently as one year ago point to a more complicated story.
“I didn’t really identify as bisexual,” Nixon said in 2017. “But people were so insistent that I pick a ― you know, it caused a huge controversy and everyone wanted to graft on to me this narrative ― [that] I felt that I had just simply been mistaken about myself for all these years and finally the veil was lifted and I was a lesbian. And that was not true.”
In other words, Nixon felt that her sexuality had been boxed in — not by the heterosexual world, but instead by the queer world.
In the United States’ political landscape, the mainstream LGBTQ+ community has come to emphasize the notion that sexuality is inherent. People don’t choose to be gay: they’re “born this way.” Shannon Weber, a sociologist of sexuality, has speculated that this framing of queerness may be, in large part, a response to the Christian Right’s insistence that queerness is a “choice” to engage in a “deviant” and “sinful” lifestyle.
While this may seem to be a natural dichotomy, one might imagine a world in which it was inconsequential whether or not one’s desire to have non-heterosexual sex was a choice.
Columbia University sociologist Shamus Khan has pointed out that “other liberation movements have rejected the idea that biology is destiny.”
“In 2015 the ‘Born This Way’ slogan served a progressive cause, but a more historically informed perspective on the idea is troubling,” Khan writes. “Biological determinism has had a long career of serving oppressive and deadly cases; to the millions who have been subject to its horrors, its sudden emancipatory role would come as a shock.”
The logic of gay rights has relied on the idea that queer individuals deserve the same rights as heterosexual individuals because queerness is a biologically-determined aspect of oneself over which one has no control. While this has, undeniably, resulted in a number of substantial victories for the LGBTQ+ community, it seems worth stepping back to examine some of the potential consequences.
Perhaps the LGBTQ+ community would be more inclusive is it were more able to embrace the idea that it is “okay to be gay” regardless of whether or not you say you were “born this way.”
Shamus Khan also argues that relying on biological determinism risks marginalizing certain members of the LGBTQ+ community.
“The false belief in biological determinism does considerable damage,” Khan writes. “It marginalises some of the most precarious members of the gay community, such as the transgendered [sic]; it limits our capacity to discuss what makes a good and just community; and it leads many of us to misunderstand ourselves and society.”
Insisting that the only “authentic” queer experience is one which falls under the “born this way” narrative places constraints on queer life. After all, a major aspect of Queer Theory is the notion that stable sexualities and identities should be debunked.
Perhaps it’s possible for some people to experience their queerness as inherent to who they are and for other people to experience queerness as a choice.
The controversy over Cynthia Nixon’s sexuality is merely one high-profile example of how some strands of the LGBTQ+ community are prone to insist that queerness be experienced as inherent. If the point of sexual liberation is to expand individuals’ sexual freedom, then the community has some soul-searching ahead.
Canton Winer is a freelance writer and a sociology Ph.D. student at UC Irvine. You can follow him on Twitter at@CantonWiner.
