Seriously, this is the best picture of George Rekers available. I defy you to find one on the internet that isn't just twelve big pixels and a mustache.

If you love the vague area between hypocrisy and irony the way I love the vague area between et cetera, you probably already know that George Rekers—psychologist, co-founder of the Family Research Council and general anti-gay crusader—recently took a vacation with a male prostitute he met on Rentboy.com. It should be stressed, here, that unlike most men who use male prostitution websites to purchase escorts for their Bahaman vacations, Rekers is not gay. It says so right on his website: “I am not gay and never have been,” just before the warning about “misleading media reports about Professor George Rekers” and slightly after the link to the section on “natural parenting versus gay parenting.” George Rekers is straight as a marching band major. It doesn’t matter what the media or his choice of a travel assistant with a “sweet, tight ass” or his endocrine system says. It matters what George Rekers says, because Rekers knows that sexual orientation is a choice.

That was sort of his whole thing, before this became his whole thing. Rekers is the author of several methods and publications for the treatment of inappropriate attraction, all of which are predicated on the idea that sexual identity is not part of the hard, tight wiring of the human psyche. Books like “Shaping Your Child’s Sexuality” and “Growing Up Straight,” along with memos like this one from the convincingly-named American College of Pediatricians, operate on the assumption that gay urges are a common element of child development that can and should be institutionally corrected:

In dealing with adolescents experiencing same-sex attraction, it is essential to understand there is no scientific evidence that an individual is born “gay” or “transgender. It is also critical to understand that these conditions can respond well to therapy.

That’s a pretty straightforward assessment borne out by common childhood experience—particularly if your childhood happened to be that of a gay man trying desperately to overcome his instinctive attractions and be normal. Of course sexual orientation is a choice. Just look at how George Rekers has chosen to orient himself toward women, even though he has no sexual interest in them whatsoever. We all long for meaty, uncut cock from time to time, but everybody knows that’s just a common impulse we all have to overcome. Jesus, why don’t you people get this?

It’s no coincidence that people like Rekers, who have devoted their lives to the idea that homosexuality can be cured, keep getting caught doing homosexual stuff. As gay men living almost totally straight lives, they are perhaps the only segment of society to whom their construction of human sexuality makes sense. It’s easy, fun, and I daresay productive to laugh at such people, but in so doing we run the risk of overlooking a valuable element of their argument. On a certain level, George Rekers is right.

The Pray/Train/Systematically Oppress the Gay Away Argument is predicated on a fundamental distinction that our thankfully progressive society tends to forget: there’s a difference between being gay and doing gay. As many of us demonstrated in high school, one can have overwhelming sexual urges and never act on them. Why anyone would want to is another question,* but let us imagine, for a moment, a perfectly gay man—we’ll call him George—who has never had any romantic or sexual contact with another man. Moreover, George has hidden his orientation so perfectly—for example, by being careful not to embark on a career obsessively focused on homosexuality—that no one has ever observed in him any signs of attraction to other men. In what way, then, is George homosexual?

The answer, of course, is in the urges that bombard him constantly and make his life a hell of insecurity and self-denial. But George does not identify with those urges, and it’s hard to blame him—he hates them, after all, and they come to him unbidden. By all reasonable assessments, they are not a part of his self. George’s homosexuality, when confined to this context, is a part of what Sartre* would call his facticity—those elements of his background, physicality and cultural moment that were given at his birth, and over which he exercised no control. They are the elements of his life he did not choose.

A ha. It seems we have found the flaw in George’s presumptions, here, but that’s because we think of people like Rekers as against being gay. They’re not. They’re against doing gay, and when they talk about preventing gay people from adopting or being teachers or serving in the military, “gay people” means people who do gay. People who just are gay can continue to lead normal lives—”normal” being used in the classical sense, to mean “characterized by quiet desperation.” Sure, they’ll be sad, but for Rekers and company the choice was between sad and gay and acting straight or sad and gay and acting gay anyway.

It goes without saying that such a choice is unnecessary and stupid. As a society, we could just stop being jerks to gay people and then they could act in accordance with their wishes without having to issue absurd denials. That is not, however, a choice we have historically offered. Until we do, people like Rekers will continue to amuse and frustrate with their alternate idea of choice. It’s a risible argument from our progressive perspective, but from the perspective of our progressing history, it’s also right—in a sadly narrow sense of the word.

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