Is Sexual Orientation Obsolete?

Not yet, but maybe it can (and should) be soon

Since the 1860s people have begun to describe themselves as possessing a sexual “orientation” which predetermines their sexual preferences and to a large extent dictates their sexual behavior. For a century and a half this new way of thinking about sexuality has come to dominate the popular imagination as well as our institutions of learning.

Where did this idea of sexual orientation come from? How does it function in society today? Is this still a useful way of understanding and explaining human sexual behavior?

I suggest that sexual orientation has lost its political utility. We can instead congeal around sexual behaviors that we want to see protected, accepted, and celebrated. We should strive to cultivate nurturance culture instead of rape culture, which means understanding our sexual identities not as atomized individual experiences but as part of an interrelated whole. We can envision ourselves as people in process, sexual becoming.

This is important because the gay rights movement has largely lost its teeth. Christofascism is ascendant in the US, trans people are targeted with genocidal rhetoric and legislation, and since we’ve lost Roe v. Wade, Obergefell might be next. Cops and banks march in our Pride parades, meanwhile young queer people continue to end up on the streets. In some ways we’ve made incredible strides this century; in others, our efforts pale in comparison to the radical ideals of the century before, or even the subversive rebellions of the late 1800s.

If orientation is out, what’s in? How can we reimagine sexual identity as sexual becoming? One way to frame this shift is to focus less on who people are attracted to, and more on how we interact sexually with them. This does several things: most importantly, it refuses to center straight and cisgender experience as “normal.” It’s easy for straight and cis people not to examine their desires or behavior because so much is taken for granted and expected of them. Identifying not by whom you find attractive but by what kind of sexual relations you want (or practice) with those people forces you to get much more specific; it dispels some of the homogenizing effects of heterosexuality. It means the straights aren’t destined by their unfortunate constitution to a life of sexual mediocrity. The benefits of queerness — self-awareness, resilience, the thrill of experimentation — can be available to everyone.

On the flip side, learning to articulate healthy patterns of behavior also helps us to do the reverse: to better identify abuse and manipulation, wherever it occurs. Such clarity allows us to equally call out sexual violence in patriarchal contexts and in queer spaces, recognizing for instance that men and boys are also sometimes victims not only perpetrators. This encourages both a rejection of patriarchal values and the humility not to replace them with equally complacent ones.

It might be said that we’re already doing this work, and have been for decades. I agree. My worldview is built on it. It’s for that reason that I think a culture-wide shift away from the identity politics of orientation toward a practical politics of behavior would be a huge help in popularizing this already existing work, and in moving a generation from marketable demographics to ungovernable networks.

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I know that most people today believe orientation is a biological reality, and I’ll get to the science (or lack thereof) later. First I’m going to insist that orientation, like all our social realities, was constructed for a reason and can therefore be de- or reconstructed for others.

The history of sexual orientation begins with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, the first person to ever “come out” (which he did in 1862 to his family and friends). It was his friend Karl-Maria Kertbeny who, in a letter to Ulrichs in 1868, coined the term “homosexual.” Many before and after them also made waves for the movement, but their conception of homosexuality was based on Greek pederasty, not the new idea of orientation. That mantle was taken up by Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician and sexologist, who created the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first gay rights advocacy organization in the early 1900s. They made huge progress especially in Germany, which was abruptly cut short when the Nazis burned the Institute of Sexology with all of Hirschfeld’s research in 1933. Panning back, Hirschfeld’s contemporary, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, wrote “Sexual Pathology” in 1886, a foundational text in sexology. From Ulrichs to Ebing, the idea slowly coalesced that people possessed inborn traits that predisposed them to gendered sexual preferences. At this point no distinction was made between gay and trans experience; it was believed that gay men and trans women had a “female psyche in a man’s body,” while cis women, as always, were more mysterious.

Things went underground after WWII, and in the US they reemerged with Harry Hay and the Mattchine Society, founded in 1950. Harry Hay brought his communist politics to the nascent gay liberation movement, from which he was quickly expelled, and he maintained a strong critique of assimilation throughout his life. After Stonewall in 1969, radical ideas exploded throughout the culture, including the practice of “coming out” and “outing,” but a decade later the AIDS crisis decimated nearly an entire generation. The 90s saw a conservative ebb, where gay marriage advocates slowly but surely took over the movement and made their agenda our top political priority. Finally in 2015 the Supreme Court legalized marriage equality — and now that decision stands at risk of being revoked as part of Project 2025. From its previous framing as a sexual pathology, homosexuality gradually became accepted as simply a variation on the straight norm. In response to intense activist pressure, for example, homosexuality was stricken from the DSM in 1973, and over the next decades orientation became widely accepted as referring to a person’s unchosen, innate, probably genetic disposition.

This would all be well and good, except that in 2016 queer history turned a new chapter. Besides being the year Trump got elected, it was also The Transgender Tipping Point, with Laverne Cox on the cover of TIME magazine. In the past 25 years, as the gay movement shifted from radical demands (like universal healthcare, youth liberation, and prison abolition) to demands for civil rights (marriage equality, adoption, hate crime legislation), fascist Christianity has nurtured a counterculture that does not respect our liberal institutions, does not respect our democratic government, and does not respect queer people or our way of life. While trans people are the new front line in the culture war, It’s vital to remember it never stops with just one group (“First they came for the Jews”). While we’ve accomplished significant changes in the last century, queerness is not nearly so universally accepted as many pundits of progress would have us believe.

We need new and powerful tools of affecting change in the culture if we are going to keep each other safe and get free. We cannot rely on the courts — we’ve seen how they fold quickly under the fascist creep. We cannot rely on the administration — we’ve seen how Democrats fail their noble promises and Republicans keep their ignoble ones. We cannot rely on the law — we’ve seen how it’s unequally enforced, always in the service of property and patriarchy.

In the next installment in this series, I’ll focus more on reframing our conception of sexuality from “who” to “how.” In the meantime, the most important thing is what queer people already do best: create found family in each other, forming networks of care and support that help us rise to any challenge. We did this during McCarthyism, we did this during the AIDS crisis, we can do it again during the Christofascist resurgence.

Whatever words we use to describe ourselves, we will always find each other. To steal from a passage of Scripture: “they will know us by our love.”

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