Homosexuality and identity

Last updated on: December 23, 2014 at 8:29 pm by Kate Cousino

Homosexuality and identity 2014-12-23T20:29:00-04:00 Kate Cousino

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I caught a bit of controversy brewing in the wake of a piece by Austin Ruse–which I’ll not promote by linking–in which he criticizes what he calls a new “homophilia” in conservative Catholic circles’ reception of the works of celibate homosexual Catholics like Eve Tushnet and Joshua Gonnerman. Somewhere in the discussion, someone offered a timid defense of Ruse by saying:

“I do think there is a point about not defining ourselves solely by our sexuality as that only comprises one aspect of who we are as a human person.”

I started to reply, then realized I had more to say than would be really polite to jam into someone else’s Facebook thread. Here’s my response:

This is actually the point where my understanding has grown most over the last decade. As a college student, I would have happily chirped to you that there is no such thing as a “gay man” or “lesbian woman,” and solemnly talked only about men and women who are SSA (same-sex attracted), “because homosexual attraction is a temptation, not an identity.”

What’s changed in my thinking is the way I’ve come to understand identity and all the things that make it up. I don’t assume anymore that someone who identifies as a “gay Catholic” is defining themselves by their sexual attractions. I tend to think they are doing the same thing I do when I identify myself as a “single Catholic mother”–they are identifying a circumstance that cannot help but shape their growth and their opportunities around it. My marital difficulties do not say everything about me that could be said, and my core identity is unaffected by the trials and temptations of being separated from my husband. At the core of my being, I stand alone before God. But my identity within the world and the Church is more complicated. So. This is what is shaping me and testing me, all at once. And as hard as it is, this is also how God is calling me–to walk this path, the path of my particular temptations and trials and circumstances, and none other.

I don’t know what it was like to experience homosexual inclinations in the days before there was a word for having primarily homosexual inclinations. I’m sure it was very different and shaped a man or woman very differently in other ages and societies than it does in this age, in this society. But reading and listening to the experiences of men and women who have come into their sense of self in *this* age, in *this* society, it seems to me that homosexual inclinations now are the sort of boulder around which the entire stream must be routed, one way or another. And the shape of that rerouting, apart from the sexual attractions themselves, has its own character and patterns that *are* different from those whose outcroppings and obstacles fall in different locations. I would not deny any gay man or woman, wherever they are along the path, the words they find best describe and help them relate to one another the identity thus formed and the paths they have had to choose from. Sure, not every woman or man who experiences homosexual desires will choose to identify themselves as gay or lesbian or by any label at all. Some will prefer “SSA” and some will prefer “homosexual.” Some will associate some or any of these labels with activism and prejudice and try to avoid the whole mess. And some will claim one or more of these labels for themselves as they forge their own path towards wholeness and self-knowledge, seeking to find the sense and meaning in their own particular course around the rocks scattered along the way.

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