Nixon’s comments landed her in hot water. Some gay rights activists fumed that her words had set their education campaign back decades. And as could be expected, the Rick Santorums of the world offered each other a collective high five.
But as Hobbes the lawyer might have respectfully submitted — read the fine print.
Here’s what she said precisely, “ . . . 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.”
There are enormous segments of the population that are resolutely heterosexual.
And a lot of men and women clearly define themselves as gay. For them there is no choice involved.
But along the spectrum between gay and straight, there is a considerable grey area — with the confirmed bisexual smack in the middle.
Those who hover near the centre of this continuum may be the ones who make choices — to opt for a heterosexual or homosexual connection because they are, more or less, attracted to both.
Nixon, 45, who apparently identifies as a bisexual, confirms she loathes the descriptive. “I don’t pull out the bisexual word because nobody likes the bisexuals. Everybody likes to dump on the bisexuals,” she told the Daily Beast’s Kevin Sessums.
For example, many people were bent out of shape when Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche split up. And when Heche hooked up with a dude, she was reviled.
Nixon has performed her own flip-flop. She is currently engaged to Christine Marinoni, who is the mother of their nearly one-year-old son Max.
Before that she was in a 15-year relationship with her college boyfriend Danny Moses. The couple broke up in 2003. They have two children.
Scott Rayter, associate director of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, has theories on why bisexuals are derided.
“Gay people often suggest they are just afraid to come out of the closet. They can’t commit.”
As well, Sigmund Freud suggested that all children are innately bisexual — that all people are born with attractions to men and women — but they grow out of it.
They grow up and become one or the other, says Rayter. “So bisexuals are considered somehow immature.”
Rayter also suggests, “AIDS may have made people afraid of the bisexual,” — the person who was bringing the disease into the straight community.
Rayter believes women are more likely than men to act on their various attractions. Women, he says, are “cultured to be more fluid in their attraction” while men experience a “crisis of masculinity” if they dare experiment.
Only a Republican delegate from Florida couldn’t understand the nuances of Nixon’s statement. As I understand it she was not making a choice to be gay or straight — she was deciding as an undeclared bisexual to be with a man and then with a woman — that was Nixon’s choice.
Even hardcore gay activist actor Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy) sprang to Nixon’s defence. He told Newsday, “If Cynthia Nixon feels the best way to express her own journey — and it has to be your own personal journey — is to say, ‘I am a lesbian by choice,’ then God bless her. It takes nothing away from me.”
Dina Georgis, assistant professor of the University of Toronto’s Women and Gender Studies Institute applauds Nixon and her courage to defy categorization.
Georgis, who identifies herself as “queer,” found it interesting that Nixon emphasized choice, a loaded word in gay activism . “Sexuality is complicated,” she says, agreeing with Rayter that women, “have been given permission to have more fluid attractions.”
Georgis says she could imagine a world that universalizes sexuality — so it would be, “possible for everyone to have queer experiences.”
“If Nixon doesn’t want to call herself a bisexual, that’s all right.”
“I think a lot of people in sexual studies celebrate what she did.”
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