Catharsis #1 My response to "You chose to be gay"

“It’s not a choice!” But that’s not the question—though it may well reveal the answer. Maybe our rush to defensiveness exposes the implied conclusion: “Because if it were, I wouldn’t choose it.”...To say that we have no choice in being gay is to say that being gay is only the desire to love another man or another woman, that it is only about sex. But being gay is not simply a desire for sex with the same sex. That’s homosexual. Gay is an identity, a culture, a community, a place. And while we are born homosexual, we choose to be gay. We must build the strength and develop the courage to forge our lives as gay people, to create a space in which we can define our lives as fundamentally and necessarily gay. And that is something we choose to do every day. It is a choice we may struggle with, a choice we make sacrifices for, and a choice we fight for. To deny our active involvement in that choice is to deny our active involvement in that struggle, in those sacrifices, in that fight. And to deny our active involvement is to deny our right to be proud.We could have chosen to live in the shadows. We could have chosen a life of denial and deception. We could have hollowed out our insides and vigilantly stood guard against our natural desires every time they poked up from beneath the surface. That too is a choice. Not a comfortable choice, not a painless choice, but a choice nonetheless—a choice that many have made—a choice we could have made, but we did not.The desire to love another man, to love another woman, we do not choose. It may not even be completely our choice when we act on these desires. But living our lives and creating our identities based on these desires, based on the nurturing and celebration of these desires, is our choice. And it is a difficult choice to make. We could have accepted what we were told about ourselves, about who we should be and what we should not do or feel. Going in search of another answer is grueling and treacherous. To bushwhack through the dogma and the tauntings and the lessons carved into to our bodies by hundreds of years of tradition and emerge at a clearing of calm and beauty takes sweat and muscle and resilience. To make that effort is a hard choice, the choice less traveled. And the fact that we make that choice is something of which we can be truly proud.