How "sexual orientation", as a concept, harms us
It destroyed existing fluid, expansive practices of intimacy--and obscures our real desires anyway
To preface this post with proof that I don’t have a long-standing bias against sexual orientation labels: I’ve identified as bisexual since about 2005 and as ace spectrum since 2009. I’ve lived a queer-centric life, including a period in my mid-twenties when I was only half-joking to call myself a bi-separatist, my social life centered around a bi/pan/ace+ support group and social club and its interlocking network of people and spaces, including an open mic night, poetry writers’ group, queer performance art troupe, favorite comic shop, and more. I unquestioningly accepted the satire and distrust aimed at people who reject sexual orientation labels for most of my adult life, so it pains me a little to realize they were right this whole time. But only a little, the discomfort paling compared to the relief of letting go of something that wasn’t serving me and the excitement of knowing there was a time when people commonly practiced the free-flowing intimacy my aspec heart craves.
It was, of course, a queer romance novel that caused this realization. Maybe I do spend more time reading them than I do working at my job. The novel was based on historical research into “romantic friendships” and more general same-gender physical touching and emotional intimacy (even passionate declarations of love!) that prevailed before the creation of the concept of homosexuality in the late 19th century.
[idk how to add official captions but this is a photo of two 19th century women known as examples of a passionate romantic friendship - Cindarella Gregory and Frances Shimer in 1869]
Speculative fiction exploring changing intimacy norms
The novel that sparked this line of thinking is The Sleeping Soldier by Aster Glenn Gray, who writes historical fairy tale romances about gay and bi men. In The Sleeping Soldier, a man from the 1860s is put into a 100-year sleep before waking up and having to adjust to life as a college student in the 1960s. I thought this would be a light read, only to get my mind blown wide open with the exploration of changing norms around intimacy and emotional expression. It also illustrates some historiographic points on how language changes over time can make it very easy to misinterpret historical texts and relationships.
I highly recommend this to anyone who’s interested in the subject, perhaps even people who’ve already read scholarly works on romantic friendships. The advantage of fiction for understanding that we normally try to achieve via non-fiction is that it can immerse us in what abstract concepts really mean. Gray’s choice to contrast the perspectives of men from two very historical opposite periods when it comes to viewpoints on casual male intimacy creates an impressive work of speculative fiction that seeks to illuminate not just a single period of time, but what it means to our culture to have lost practices of casual intimacy.
So what was going on historically?
Here are some points from Gray’s nonfiction afterword to the novel:
Same-sex friends were allowed to hold hands, sit in each others’ laps, kiss, cuddle, sleep in the same bed, and declare their love to one another. Historians have dubbed those relationships “romantic friendship”, but they were normal at the time.
“[T]he word friend conveyed fervent emotional intensity,” describing Jesus’s love that was understood to be stronger than that of any other person’s, or used to address one’s wife in a letter.
“In the mid-nineteenth century, [Walt] Whitman published lines like ‘my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,’ and the general reading public accepted this without demure until the 1890s.”
They quote a 1918 book as evidence of how female romantic friendships remained acceptable longer than male ones, where a girl “mentions matter-of-factly that a younger girl has a crush on her, and gets a pretty severe case herself on an older girl”.
And from an 1871 novel about two male college friends: “O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me. The only one I have ever loved at all, the only one who has ever loved me.”
“Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality defined the outer boundaries of acceptable friendship (basically, you’re fine as long as there are no genitals involved), and shows how those boundaries contracted as the concept of homosexuality began to spread in America in the 1880s and 1890s.”
Referencing John Ibson’s Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday Photography: “In the 1860s, Civil War soldiers cheerfully got their photos taken holding hands or snuggling with their friends. By the 1960s, snapshots show straight men standing rigidly upright, with a carefully defined margin of space between them. The popularization of the concept had not, as many sexologists hoped, led to increased tolerance.”
What would this have been like for asexuals?
The descriptions of romantic friendship sound a lot like the range of platonic and non-sexual romantic relationships the contemporary asexual community dreams of and advocates for. Of course people were routinely pressured into heteronormative sex with a spouse (if not subject to extreme sexual violence under enslavement, land invasion, or the deep poverty resulting from capitalist industrialization), so this period could hardly have been a utopia for the average asexual. But it must have provided many people with the kind of rich life full of love and connections that many of us, aspec or not, feel locked out of amidst the contemporary loneliness epidemic.
But can we really blame the change on the concept of “sexual orientation”?
I encourage you to read the historical sources if you’re looking for truth rather than narrative-building––I’m accepting without investigation the claim that the concepts of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” were the major cause of this cultural shift, though even Gray’s book illustrates a larger distancing from emotions that occurred in the culture. But of course the word “homosexual” itself doesn’t cause people to think homosexuality is bad. Mainstream Christianity and American patriarchal culture were already virulently heteronormative, demanding that people be reproductively productive and abstain from sexual “sin”.
But if we take for granted that same-sex sex was already seen as sinful, it stands to reason that defining the people who engage in that sin as having an unchangeable, innate propensity to do so would (a) activate all the forces of eugenicism against them and (b) set off the paranoid chain-reaction of people trying to avoid showing any sign of being that type of person (“no homo!) that caused the cultural shift away from platonic intimacy.
Other limitations of “sexual orientation”
We’ve seen that the invention of the concept of sexual orientation, historically, increased homophobia, leading both to attempts to eradicate homosexuality (and I’m too tired to look up the history now but I’m pretty sure this included an increase in anti-gay laws, the invention of conversion therapy, the Holocaust’s pink triangles, and many other attacks on queer bodies) and the sharp curtailing of physical and emotional intimacy between people who weren’t heterosexual romantic and sexual partners. This is as serious as it gets, but I think there’s another major problem with the concept of sexual orientation, one that would exist even if it hadn’t been dropped into a vicious heteropatriarchal culture: It’s just a poor model for people’s actual needs and desires.
For many people, orientation is wildly incoherent
As asexual and/or aromantic spectrum people, we easily see how we exist at the breakdown points of “sexual orientation”. We may be asexual, biromantic, more aesthetically attracted to men, sexually repulsed by cis men in person but interested in fingering cis women (who knows when it comes to the vast array of trans people), and most turned on by erotica about gay men. Some of us are aroace but still “oriented” toward a certain gender, being more willing to have close platonic friendships or perhaps engage in sexual behavior with them or turned on by their naked bodies without any desire to actually engage in sex or finding that subtypes of them catch our eyes more than other genders or any number of other senses in which attraction can vary.
This is also true for allo people, even though they hide it better. I think of my ex, who I dated twice, both times out as nonbinary but once long before I went on testosterone and once long after. He identifies as mostly straight, has some degree of sexual and romantic attractions or connections to men but not enough to justify changing that label, and was sex-favorable toward me even in my full-bearded version but most wanted to cuddle and be emotionally intimate. After reading Gray’s novel, it’s easy to imagine many, many 19th century individuals (who would, if alive today, identify with every label under the sun) having similar experiences of desiring intimacy in a way that can’t be contained by orientation labels.
I think it’s telling that people in our society will ask what different norms around sexuality (e.g. past societies where men were expected to be bisexual, or societies today where having sex with “male-bodied” women/nonbinary people is normal) mean, confused and frustrated because they buck our understanding of the majority of people as naturally heterosexual. But instead, we could see that these variations and nuances are natural to a set of desires that are very complexly and incoherently oriented alongside diverse behaviors that don’t have to cohere to innate desires, either.
Orientation invalidates our identities––especially for trauma survivors
Any ace thinker who’s a decent person will tell you that it’s okay to be ace because of trauma, that you don’t have to comply with the forces of compulsory sexuality that tell you you must (and can) “heal” and recover your supposed in-born sexual orientation instead. But why are we on the defensive even within asexual spaces in the first place? It’s because, as a culture, we often don’t see sexual behavior as a choice and sexual tastes as something born from a complicated, lifelong developmental process (likely including in-born proclivities), but rather see these things as determined by orientation. It can feel morally wrong to even question that model of sexual orientation because of all the times we’ve seen gay rights activists push the narrative that their rights are legitimate because being gay isn’t a choice. (Note that I didn’t bother with an acronym instead of “gay” because not even bisexuals are covered in the no-choice sexual orientation argument.)
If trauma, meds, sensory processing issues, sexual anhedonia, or other disability or life circumstance leads to someone identifying as ace, that puts their identity outside the accepted reasons to identify with a sexual orientation under the commonly-accepted conceptual framework of sexual orientation. Allo people can find their identities similarly invalidated, such as people who became gay after gaining a taste for the same gender in prison, or people whose orientation changed for unknown reasons. We can say all these things are valid all we want, but it won’t eliminate the tension between them and the underlying concept we’re using.
Orientation leaves us questioning forever
It’s actually a common OCD theme for people to compulsively question their sexual orientation, and I think the aspec community is hit particularly hard by this problem, whether it rises to a clinical level (if you think things like this should be diagnosed) or just a continual low-grade mental drain. It’s hard to prove a negative, so people ask, “How do I know I won’t eventually meet someone I’m attracted to?” And even more confusingly under the orientation model, most of us do have some experiences that could definitely or possibly be classed as sexual/romantic attraction. If having any attraction to someone of a certain gender puts you in a class of person, didn’t that crush we have in 9th grade or the flutter down under we felt for someone 6 years ago or the sex we kind of enjoyed with that one person we dated make us permanently the type of person who’s attracted to their gender(s), the type of person who’s not actually asexual/aromantic?
But the thing is, we don’t have enough of those desires or experiences to live as if we’re allo. Just like someone who hooked up with someone of the “wrong” gender once might still be questioning whether to label themself as bi years or decades later, we exist in a contradiction between our actual experiences and the model (sexual orientation) we’re trying to apply to them. Since that contradiction cannot be resolved without either denying/discounting our realities or else softening our understanding of “orientation” (if not outright rejecting the concept), many people end up stressed and questioning endlessly.
Orientation should not determine our behavior
Another problem is an extension of the way orientation led to people polarizing and destroying previous practices of casual intimacy: Belief in orientation leads to people taking orientation as a prescription for how they should behave. While one of the good sides of orientation as a concept is that it can help open our eyes to the fact that it’s time to give up on trying to enjoy forms of sex/romance that aren’t working for us and never had, the flipside then is that doing certain things just for fun or just to play or just because we’re bored becomes unthinkable. Aspec experience and advocacy intersects with this problem, too: Just like an asexual person can choose to have sex for any number of reasons, or an aromantic person can choose to date, allo people should be able to enjoy partnered activities or fantasies “against” their orientation.
Orientation fragments our movements and reinforces toxic masculinity
Returning to the 1800s, men once enjoyed casual intimacy with each other, meeting both physical and emotional needs for connection and affection. When the specter of homosexuality raised its head and everyone had to jump away from each other before anyone saw, that set many of the patterns of today’s toxic masculinity. It harms all men.
Yet the identity politics that flows from the concept of sexual orientation has separated the struggle of queer men from that of straight men. Men have a right to be intimate with other men, whether that’s sexual or not, but it’s almost unimaginable to frame that as a single political demand without centering homosexuality (or queer identity more broadly). Identity categories can create a base of power and organizing, but at least in this case, it’s created a relatively narrow core with no obvious way for men who are inclined toward heteronormativity (which is, in fact, often not by choice) to become part of the movement and advocate for an expansive view of socially-acceptable intimacy. If the focus were still on behavior rather than identity, this would be much easier, and of course aspec people would naturally fit into the diverse social fabric of desire and behavior without having to fight against preconceived conceptions that it’s an innate desire for gay sex that defines the identity around which the politics is based.
Then should we stop using orientation labels at all?
As an asexuality blogger who only started thinking about this topic 4 days ago, I’m obviously not immediately abandoning sexual orientation labels. And I’ve written before about how one of the main advantages of aspec microlabels, and the proliferation of queer identities in general, is that their sheer quantity overwhelms and breaks down simplistic understandings of sexuality/orientation.
There continues to be plenty of cause for using and organizing under these labels––but we absolutely need to take them lightly. We need to understand that they partially explain a subset of experiences for a subset of the population (but that subset can be something very important and naming it can provide people with a necessary guiding light). We need to understand that sexual orientation labels were invented with good intentions, and then immediately used for eugenicist purposes, transforming the lives of people of all orientations in a negative way as people had to dissociate themselves from homosexuality. We need to understand that we live with an everyday brokenness, loneliness, and disconnect from our own feelings and needs because of that.
I personally choose to live with a mass of contradictory labels as a way of discussing my realities (and because it’s fun), but I have newfound respect for the wisdom of people who reject labels or who identify as “queer” and mean it to refer to many dimensions of their intimate lives, desires, and behaviors, including ones we haven’t bothered to come up with names for under the oppressive cultural weight of sexual orientation––a concept so heavy that sometimes that’s all someone means when they use the word “sexuality”.
Communication is not meant to be simple. The goal of the words we choose and the concepts we choose to reference is not to purge everything that could be interpreted the wrong way or lead to conclusions we don’t like. Words can be used to break down social constructs as easily as create and uphold them. With that in mind, I invite all of us to free ourselves from the constraints of thinking in terms of sexual orientation, not by obliterating the concept and associated labels, but by putting them in the toolbox where they belong and searching for all the other tools we’ve let lie rusty and forgotten or never touched at all.
As aspec people, we’ve already gone a long way toward breaking down the cultural ideas that constrain the vast space of intimacy to combo sexual-romantic relationships. I think it’s intuitively obvious that we are in some sense the anti-orientation orientation. But we need to name that so that we understand that what we’ve freed, we’ve freed for everyone, not just people with our same identities and our allo partners. We can reclaim the intimacy that existed before heterosexuality, and so much more besides.