Is Gay a Choice? The Science Behind Actress Cynthia Nixon's Controversial Remarks

Activists have long combated extremist attacks on LGBT identities by highlighting the science showing that homosexuality is genetic — or, in the words of Lady Gaga, that gay people are “born that way.” It may be that simple for some, but research increasingly suggests that it isn’t for all — especially for gay women.

Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, spent over a decade tracking sexual identity changes in a group of 100 women for her book “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire.” She wrote, “Women’s sexuality is fundamentally more fluid than men’s, permitting greater variability in its development and expression over the life course.” Based on her research, she describes three main ways that sexual fluidity is expressed: “nonexclusivity in attractions” (i.e., the capacity to find all genders sexually attractive), “changes in attractions” (i.e., suddenly becoming romantically involved with a woman after a lifetime dating men) and the capacity to become attracted to ‘the person and not the gender’” (i.e., a partner’s sex is irrelevant).

Diamond also differentiates between “change, choice, and control” as “totally separate phenomena.” As psychologist John Michael Bailey of Northwestern University told me in an email, “The sentence ‘I choose to prefer sex with women to sex with men’ is meaningless. Schopenhauer wrote: ‘Man can do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants,’” he says. “We choose our behaviors but not our desires.” But it may be that women generally have a broader range of desires to choose from.

More than a decade ago, social psychologist Roy Baumeister proposed the idea of female “erotic plasticity.” In a paper on the subject, he explained that men tend to have rigid sexual preferences that “generally remain the same for the rest of the man’s life.” Women, on the other hand, “are more likely to switch back and forth,” he wrote. “Some heterosexual women may begin to experiment with lesbian activities in their 30s or 40s. Some lesbians begin desiring sex with men after many years of exclusive same-sex orientation.”

Copious research has revealed striking differences in male and female sexual orientation and arousal. In immensely awkward studies measuring men’s hard-ons while viewing various sexual stimuli, most guys have a strong response to either males or females; and their sexual orientation generally predicts their physical reaction. On the other hand, Bailey explains, “Women’s genital sexual arousal pattern is much less predictive of their sexual identity and their stated preferences,” he says. “Lesbians have a relatively weaker arousal preference for female sexual stimuli, on average, and straight women have no preference at all, on average.”