Be Who You Are

Apparently, five in every thousand people refuse to tick any of "heterosexual/straight", "gay/lesbian" or "bisexual" when impertinently surveyed by the Office of National Statistics (which has now devised show cards for this purpose...).

So a box marked "Other" has been added.

We should all tick it.

"Heterosexual/straight" and "bisexual" exist only in relation to "gay/lesbian". And what does that mean? Active participation in homosexual activity? An inclination towards such activity? Such an inclination greater than any towards heterosexual activity? No heterosexual inclination whatever? No heterosexual experience whatever (extremely rare, even among self-defining "gays" and "lesbians")? What, exactly? And why, exactly?

The idea that such activity or inclination constitutes any basis for individual or collective economic, social, cultural or political identity is not yet forty years old, and was invented (several years after our own humane and necessary decriminalisation of male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private) by those whose main or only sexual interest was in teenage boys, an interest which they pursued, and pursue, rapaciously.

I was an undergraduate, hardly the day before yesterday now, when I first knowing encountered those who engaged in homosexual acts or who were inclined to do so. The idea of such acts or inclinations as an identity was already on the way out even then, and increasingly seemed to be confined to certain rather separatist ecclesiastical circles.

I vividly recall, in my first term, a dear friend coming back from a meeting of "the LGB". He exclaimed, not only that "the L stands for Lumberjack", but also that "they only have one thing in common", and that he pitied anyone about whom that was the most interesting thing. It is certainly not the most interesting thing about him.

Or any of us, mutatis mutandis.

Tick "Other".

Or refuse to answer the question.