Are "Celibate Gays" Really Gay?

Dryden also ‘meant’ by wit the essential gift of the poet. He defined this gift as … ‘propriety of thoughts and words.’ … This definition would commit us to the consequence, ‘Euclid was the greatest wit that ever set pen to paper.’ It may also be asserted almost safely that no human being, when using the word wit to talk with and not talking about the word wit, has ever meant by it anything of the sort. Nor does Dryden himself anywhere make the slightest use of this definition …

We might tax our brains for a long time to explain how a man of Dryden’s stature could have said anything so false to all actual usage, so useless, and so unsupported, if we did not realize its tactical function. He is thinking neither about what the word actually meant nor about what it could, in the interests of clarity and precision and general utility, be made to mean. It is a valuable vogue-word. Therefore a strong point in the critical battle. He wants to deny the enemy the use of it.

—C. S. Lewis, Studies In Words

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Yes.

Freelance journalist Brandon Ambrosino tweeted up a storm about ex-gay organizations a day or two ago, and concluded with a shot at self-identified celibate gays, stating in no uncertain terms that anyone who abstains from gay sex due to traditionalist moral or religious beliefs doesn't even qualify as gay. As he put it, ‘Gayness is more than gay sex, but it can’t be less’ (I think I recall that correctly). I'm not at all sure why he came after me and my friends [1]. Perhaps he had us on the brain because Revoice just took place, I don't know. Regardless, he did it—and seemed more than a little thin-skinned about it: anyone who wishes can go to his Twitter feed and look it up, but I can’t, because he blocked me and several other people who, in his words, came for him and got bitchy.

Anyway. I actually don't want to just rag on Mr Ambrosino for a whole post: partly because I have no intention of obeying a guy who’s not my dom, partly because I've liked a lot of other things he's written, but chiefly because I do think I understand where he’s coming from. Ex-gay organizations have taken to rebranding and moving the goal-posts a hell of a lot in the last fifteen years or so, as it became irrevocably clear that orientation change does not work, but many of them remained unwilling to really face up to the facts. Some ex-gay people have even appropriated the Side B label, notwithstanding the fact that Side B’s salient characteristics are rejecting SOCE and embracing LGBTQ identity and culture. [2]

Further still, some people’s experience of Side B has been toxic for a variety of reasons. A lot of my own attempts at chastity as a Side B person were shot through with problems that could easily have wrecked my mind, if I hadn’t had the help of guides much wiser than myself. Defensiveness and suspicion toward celibate gay identity are perfectly understandable in these circumstances.

But that doesn’t make this gatekeeping definition of gayness a sound one. I believe it’s not only a poor use of language, but actually damaging to the community it’s ostensibly meant to serve, for a great many reasons. I will list just seven.

1. It’s not how anybody actually uses the word. Okay, ‘anybody’ is an overstatement. There is an ideologically driven minority among gay people who do insist that the word be used to indicate beliefs as well as orientation; and thirty or forty years ago, that meaning was much commoner currency. Nonetheless, it isn’t how the majority of people use the word now. It normally indicates orientation, experience, and self-identity, none of which depend on having sex to exist. That is how we know we’re gay before trying gay sex, after all.

There is one other group, however, who habitually use this definition. This leads me into a second and bigger issue …

2. It endorses a definition of gayness originally designed by homphobes to justify and maintain homophobic practices. Now, the origin of a term or definition is not the only thing that determines its value, but it is one of them. And, well, in this case, it's a doozy.

I mentioned ex-gay practices above, which I endured personally. The definition expressed by Ambrosino is the exact same one drafted and used by ex-gay organizations like the Restored Hope Network to this day, because it’s one of the things that helps them move the goalposts. You’re ‘not gay anymore’ because you stop having gay sex, which they can then sell with all the appeal of orientation change—a bait-and-switch change of identity. It downright encourages ambiguous, deceitful language and thought patterns, both with oneself and others. It’s arguably the most basic tool in the ex-gay box. Insisting on gay sex as a qualifier for gay identity gives ex-gay groups more room to maneuver and ammunition to do it with, not less.

3. It erases ace and demi identities. Asexual, aromantic, demisexual, and demiromantic identities all have queer expressions (indeed, insofar as they depart from the het norm, they’re queer by definition). An asexual but homoromantic woman is every bit as entitled to call herself a lesbian as a sexually active polyamorous lesbian is. [3] Under a you-must-be-open-to-gay-sex definition, grey identities are implicitly excluded.

4. It forces people who are still navigating their own feelings into a false dichotomy. This is especially true of teens, I think, who have the most navigating to do and the most at stake in doing it; but it’d certainly apply to, e.g., the heterosexually married Christian man in his thirties who’s finally facing up to the fact that his feelings about his best guy friend are erotic, not just affectionate. A person who’s told that they have to have gay sex (or at least be open to it) in order to ‘really’ be gay is being given an ultimatum about their feelings and identity, and maybe being asked to choose between deeply held religious convictions and powerful instinctive and emotional desires—being asked to call one of those things false and insignificant, when they aren’t ready to do that. What good does that do to anyone? Why is a choice like that necessary? They should not be compelled by others to choose what part of themselves to lie about.

This is normally what Side B is saying to fellow traditional Christians. In this case, we find ourselves saying it to fellow LGBTQ people. The dichotomy is artificial either way.

5. It erases Side B Christians who support gay civil rights, including those of us who’ve been traumatized by SOCE. Okay. In the name of not pulling a bait-and-switch myself, I’ll say frankly here that there are Side B people who don’t support complete political equality between, e.g., gay and straight marriages. [4] But a lot of us do support full political equality, and have paid for that belief among our families, friends, and churches. Furthermore, a lot of us are ex-ex-gays, survivors of conversion therapy. We rejected that stuff because it’s unnecessary, wrongheaded, and toxic. We learned that the hard way—which, if I may be a bit tart, is more than can be said of Mr Ambrosino. We paid for our identities. Having those identities invalidated again, by members of the very community we’ve been vilified for asserting, is a blow upon a bruise.

6. It adds an ideological modifier onto an identity more defined by experience than by behavior. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that every LGBTQ person’s experience is the same. But the shared thread among them is the experience of being othered, excluded, demeaned, treated as less than, on the basis of our attractions or gender expression. We all experience that, in our fears while we're closeted and in our lives when we leave it. That unites lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, trans people, and everyone else in the community, not sexual activity.

Really it couldn’t be sex that united the gay community, not just because (for a variety of reasons) some of us never have any, but because our sexual acts and experiences are so radically different. An act of gay sex usually contains none of the same ingredients as an act of lesbian sex; in that way, each resembles heterosexual sex more than the other. This is, of course, a ridiculous line of reasoning, but that’s kinda why I don’t take this view.

7. It drives an unnecessary wedge between LGBTQ people during a time when anti-gay sentiment appears to be rising rather than falling. Infighting is dull and wasteful at the best of times. When you have a homophobic administration elected by a right-wing portion of the populace, it’s dangerous. And sure, the media distorts things and my own consumption of media is kinda random; but I’ve been seeing a lot more stories about homophobic violence lately, including a couple of nasty scares even at Pride events. This is not a smart time to be fractious.

When Side B people speak up for ourselves and the LGBTQ community as a whole, that is precisely what we’re doing: speaking up for ourselves, and for the LGBTQ community as a whole. If you think we don't get targeted for harassment and hatred because our families or our churches know we're 'the good gays,' you're wrong. We are endangered when the gay community is endangered, and vice versa. Homophobes don’t generally care that (most) Side B people are attempting celibate lives; they care that we’re gay. That’s the thing they hate. That is why, for example, an institution like the Catholic Church can be at one and the same time welcoming on paper, full of homosexually active clergy, and riddled with homophobia in its attitudes, rhetoric, and policies. They’re targeting the identity, the rallying point for the community: often as not, they’re prepared to ignore the sex.

Want to deprive your enemies of a word? Fine. But know who they really are first. You might learn something.

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[1] At any rate, many of my friends can truthfully claim celibacy. I admire celibacy, and I consider celibacy and monogamous heterosexual marriage the only two intrinsically licit sexual states; but, phrased gently, it would be generous at the expense of accuracy to describe me as chaste, and I'm certainly not going to marry a woman. [5]

[2] With qualifications? Sure. But then again, St Augustine embraced Neo-Platonism with qualifications, St Thomas Aquinas embraced Aristotle with qualifications, St Edith Stein embraced Phenomenology with qualifications. That doesn’t make any of them not part of those traditions: it just means they’re a different part of the tradition.

[3] Yes, she might well add the qualifier ace lesbian at her discretion. But that’s exactly what it is: a qualifier, added at her discretion, not a contradiction.

[4] I’m not crazy about this fact. But I don’t want to be accused of pinkwashing a movement that is pretty diverse in certain ways, including some ways that a lot gay people would find objectionable. All the same, I don’t consider it a very damning criticism of the Side B community, since there are outliers in the gay community, like Milo Yiannopoulos or Jack Donovan, that most LGBTQ people find objectionable, too.

[5] Phrased less gently, I’m kind of a whorebag.