Outside of the Box

Thinking outside the box is the new management sport. Every corporate management meeting includes a plea for employees to think outside the box. Every employment interview, stated or unstated, includes an evaluation of the candidate’s ability to think outside the box. What corporate managers want are individuals who will have imaginative solutions to problems, individuals who won’t be constricted by the way things have always been done in the past.

A recent Sunday edition of The New York Times (January 29, 2012) reinforced my long held belief that it’s time for lesbians and gays—and straights as well—to begin thinking outside the box in terms of how we categorize each other. Generally, we rely on boxes labeled gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual or straight. These boxes conveniently define who we are and who we think others are. The problem is that the boxes are artificial constructs. They don’t work for all the people all the time. Kinsey’s scale of sexuality, with complete homosexuality and complete heterosexuality at opposite poles and a fluid middle ground where the majority of us reside, is well worth remembering.

The Times devoted a full page (front section, page 23) to "A Publisher’s Contradictions of the Heart," an article about Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. His new book of poems, Left Handed, will be released in March. The poems, according to The Times, tell the story “of a married middle-aged man who backs into being gay.” Galassi was married 36 years and had two grown daughters before he and his wife divorced. He fell in love with a younger man. That could be my tale as anyone who’s read my book, Gray and Gay, might recall.

The previous week The Times Sunday Magazine published an extensive interview with Cynthia Nixon who played Miranda, the no nonsense young lawyer, in Sex and the City. Currently she’s the star of the Broadway revival of Wit. Nixon was married for fifteen years to a man and has two children from that union. Then “she formed a new family with a woman, to whom she’s engaged.” The interview created a stir when Nixon told her interviewer that for her “homosexuality is a choice.” Many readers interpreted that to mean Nixon is bisexual and won’t admit it. But Nixon says, “For many people it’s not (a choice). But they don’t get to define my gayness for me.” In later comments she clarified that she has had strong attractions to individuals of both sexes but she happens not to like the term bisexual.

That’s thinking outside the box. I’ll define my own gayness, thank you.

My 65 year old friend who claims he had no gay attraction or sexual contact until after his wife of many years died, and my condo neighbor who had his first male sexual contact in his late sixties after his wife of 45 years passed away, would agree with Nixon. You don’t get to define my gayness. Nixon, meanwhile has received a good bit of criticism from gays and lesbians who devoutly believe their sexual activities are pre-ordained at birth and can be boxed in one of the current sexual classifications.

Frank Bruni, an out gay Times writer, in an opinion piece titled Genetic or Not, Gay Won’t Go Away, on January 29, noted concerning Nixon, “She’s entitled to her own truth and manner of expressing it. Besides which, there are problems with some gay advocates’ insistence that homosexuality be discussed and regarded as something ingrained at the first breath.

By hinging a whole movement on a conclusion that hasn’t been—and perhaps won’t be—scientifically pinpointed and proved beyond all doubt, they hitch it to a moving target.” Most researchers in the field of sexuality are convinced homosexuality is multifactorial. There may be many factors involved in the determination of individual’s sexual interest and activity. “You don’t get to define my gayness.” You don’t get to put me in a box of your construction that defines who I am.

All of us, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and what-have-you need to begin thinking outside the box. Bruni says, “I honestly have no idea if I was born this way. My memory doesn’t stretch to the crib. …I know that being in a same sex relationship feels as central and natural to me as loyalty to my father, my pride in my siblings’ accomplishments, and my protectiveness of their children—all emotions that I didn’t exit the womb with but will not soon shake. And I know I’m a saner, kinder person this way than trapped in a contrivance or a lie.” The labels we attach to each other are contrivances and sometimes lies. It’s time to think outside the box and move on.

John Siegfried, a former Rehoboth resident, lives in Ft. Lauderdale. Email John Siegfried