Dan Savage Doesn’t Understand Being Gay

Which is kind of sad, because he’s married to another guy. But I’ve got conclusive evidence. Witness this piece of… um, this piece:

THE CHOICER CHALLENGE: Last week, the leader of British Columbia Conservative Party, John Cummins, told a radio interviewer that gay people shouldn’t be covered by the BC Human Rights Act because being gay is “a conscious choice.”

Like truthers (9/11 was an inside job!), birthers (Barack Obama was born in Kenya!), and deathers (Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living in West Hollywood!), choicers would appear to be just another group of deranged conspiracy theorists who can’t be dissuaded by science of evidence or facts. And John Cummins isn’t the only choicer out there. We have lots of choicers right here in the United States.

But what if the choicers are right? What if being gay is something people consciously choose? Gee, if only there were a way for choicers to prove that they’re right and everyone else is wrong… Actually, there is a way for choicers to prove that they’re right!

I hereby publicly invite—I publicly challenge—John Cummins to prove that being gay is a choice choosing it himself.

Suck my dick, John.

I’m completely serious about this, John. You’re not my type, but I have just as much interest as you do in seeing this gay-is-a-choice argument resolved once and for all. You name the time and the place, and I’ll show up with my dick and a camera crew. Then you can show the world how it’s done. You can demonstrate how this “conscious choice” is made. You can flip the switch, John, make the choice, then sink to your boney old knees and suck my dick. And after you’ve swallowed my load, we’ll upload the video to the Internet and you’ll be a hero to other choicers everywhere.

It’s time to put your mouth where your mouth is, John. If being gay is a choice, choose it. Show us how it’s done.

Suck my dick.

1. You have to be really, really repressed and borderline homophobic to not understand that “being gay” doesn’t mean that you will have sex with men, but that you want to have sex with and fall in love with men (exclusively or mostly exclusively, but it’s likely that Cummins doesn’t differentiate between bi and gay). Sexual orientation is about a helluva lot more than who you have sex with (otherwise all gay men who have been forced into straight relationships are straight, same for all lesbians, etc.) and far more to do with the emotional aspects—who you want to have a sexual and romantic relationship with. Not just “relations.”

So, basically, just like the homophobes telling gay men that all they need to do is choose not to have sex with men, Dan Savage has just completely reduced being gay to a set of actions. Bravo, you fucking ignoramus; you can reiterate their own fucking arguments and pretend that you’re just so clever for using their argument against them.

But in fact, you just backed them up.

2. The sexual violence overtones of this are pretty disturbing to me. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Dan Savage isn’t “making an offer;” he’s making a threat. And the threat is suffer sexual violence or it means you’re wrong. This is fucking repulsive, and more evidence on the pile that you don’t have to be straight to absorb the same stew of sexual violence as the rest of ’em.

I assert that any denial of the de facto threat of sexual violence here is disingenuous at best, and probably an outright apologist lie.