What is it Like to be Gay?

What is it Like to be Gay?

Answer: I don’t know, and neither do you if you are a straight man. For I have never had the desires or experiences of a gay man; I therefore don’t know what it is like to have such desires or experiences. The case is just like the bat or the blind. Of course, I have some idea of what it’s like to be a gay man, since I have knowledge of heterosexual sex and there is obviously an overlap. Again, it is like the bat case, since I do have the sense of hearing and I know what it is like to navigate through space by means of sense perception. But my knowledge is only partial; there is something about it that I don’t get. Presumably, the gay man feels the same about me: he doesn’t know it is like to be sexually attracted to women (as lesbians don’t know what it’s like to be attracted to a man). We are all aliens to each other in our sexual predilections (and vive la difference!). We don’t need to go to the order of bats in order to make this point. We could make all the same points about the mind-body problem by starting with the sexual preference case. It may be that some supporters of the gay lifestyle will resist my assertion of ignorance, insisting that I do know; but the same could be said by supporters of bat rights—I know what it’s like for them too (some people do say this). The point is that the familiar line of thought applies equally to the gay and the bat-like. And the same point about sexual orientation could be made by going further afield zoologically: do we humans know what it is like to be sexually attracted to an octopus or a warthog or a snake? Doubtful—though we can understand a description of their brains (ditto gay men). The sex cases provide good examples with which to make the point made by reference to bats.[1]

[1] This is another exercise in sexual philosophy: being open to sexual subject matter in the course of philosophical inquiry. I am sure that phenomenological ignorance of the gay mind has fueled intolerance of that mode of life, but that is not a topic I am discussing here. My point is that the argument of “What is it Like to be a Bat?” can be made by a case closer to home (not that its author ever said anything different); it has nothing essentially to do with alien species and strange senses. I note that the author of that paper also published a paper called “Sexual Perversion” so he is not averse to sexual subject matter. He could have decided to write a paper called “What is it Like to be a Pervert?” and made the same points (or a perverted bat).