A friend of mine was talking to me today about her faith and her views about being gay. Her claim was that it is a choice that is made by the person alone and that it is still considered to be a sin. Now I have every respect for her faith, in fact I think that faith is a wonderful thing to have, but when it come to this subject matter I can't understand how people can still accept this.
In a lot of ways it upsets me that people still believe that being gay is a choice someone makes. If you believe in the idea that 'you cannot choose who you fall in love with' for the opposite gender then how can you suggest that because you fall in love with someone of the same sex all of sudden you have chosen to do so? I didn't choose to fall in love with a male any more than my female friend fell in love with a woman. Love is an emotion that makes the human race very flawed. It is the one thing that we have no control over, desire isn't a thing that we can turn on and off.
The idea that you can do such a thing baffles me. If this were the case, we would settle for the first person that we 'chose'. It suggests that you can never fall in love with anyone else because we can choose not to do so. It is entirely possible to love more than one person and more often than not it causes heartbreak. We don't choose to fall in love with someone else because as I said before, love isn't a thing that you can control.
Dr Christian Jessen (Embarrassing bodies) is openly gay, he has recently filmed a documentary called 'Cure me, I'm gay' in which he goes undercover claiming he wants to be cured and tries out various 'cures' to see what would happen. Some of the 'treatments' he received were frankly horrific. In one clip he is made to drink a syrup that would make him sick, then put in a room with pictures of naked men and a recording telling him what a disgusting person he was for 'choosing' to be that way. At first, I didn't understand why people would put themselves through that. Then I realised, it's because of the view that homosexuality is a sin. People torture themselves this way because of this view, and the desire to be accepted is a strong one.
The beauty of love is that we don't understand it, we can't explain why it happens, we can't explain why we love. I to this day can't explain the love I feel for my boyfriend, I just accept that it happened. I didn't choose for it to happen, I had no idea that it would. Why is it okay for opposite genders to feel that for each other but not two people of the same?
There isn't a 'cure' for being gay. You can't change who people are. Let love exist, whether it be between two men, two women, an man and woman, transgenders, transexuals, genderqueer, bisexuals, asexuals, pansexuals and whoever else. Everyone deserves to love freely, not to be forced otherwise.
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