Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 Virtually Normal is a deeply underappreciated book in the history of struggles for minority rights in America. When it came out, the prediction that gay acceptance would be not only possible but actually so total that it would be unremarkable for gay people to marry and be treated more or less like straight people seemed at best like wishful thinking from the young gay writer. Fast forward, and Sullivan was vindicated. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign ran on marriage being between one man and one woman. Now, such a position would be unthinkable for perhaps even a Republican at that political level. How quickly we forget.
In the book, Sullivan quotes queer theorist David Halperin: “The effort to discover a scientific or hormonal basis for sexual preference [will] eventually come to nothing, not so much for lack of scientific progress (which has never stopped research, if other motives for it remained) as for lack of social credibility.”
Halperin is a chaired professor of the theory of sexuality, and he founded the journal GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. I mention this because, as of this writing, there is a sleazy effort to pretend that uttering the term “sexual preference” is obviously homophobic and either always was or always should have been.
The occasion is Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s testimony before the Senate. Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Barrett if she would “be a consistent vote to roll back hard-fought freedoms and protections for the LGBT community?” As part of her reply, Barrett said, “I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.”
Apparently, this phrase is verboten, and “sexual orientation” is the exclusive accepted term. Sens. Mazie Hirono and Cory Booker hit Barrett for using the term, with Hirono calling it “offensive and outdated.” Slate’s hack legal correspondent Mark Joseph Stern went all in, calling it an “anti-gay dog whistle to the religious right.” Barrett, seemingly as genuinely surprised to hear about this as I am, apologized, saying she “would never mean to use a term that would cause any offense to the LGBTQ community.”
I asked several gay friends, including Sullivan, what they think of the phrase, and they all told me they wince slightly at its usage, if not actually taking any serious hurt from it. But even if we acknowledge that “sexual preference” is now best avoided, the story here is still mainly one of people using claims about words to play politics. Pretending that “sexual preference” is obviously something that only a bigoted homophobe would ever use is a politically exigent idea invented for the purpose of assassinating Barrett’s character. That’s why you can find a queer theorist quoted using it without issue in Sullivan’s book. Never mind that Joe Biden used it in May, Ruth Bader Ginsburg used it in 2017, and gay culture magazines such as the Advocate are still using it this year. Curiously, few Slate articles were written about any of that.
Using trumped-up claims about what is offensive to slime a woman is bad enough. But the enlistment of lexicography in partisan politics crossed yet another line after Merriam-Webster actually changed the dictionary in real time to support the claims of a party agenda. Within hours of the Barrett brouhaha, their online definition of “preference” was changed to include an added label of “offensive” usage and a link directing readers to a usage paragraph reading, “The term preference as used to refer to sexual orientation is widely considered offensive in its implied suggestion that a person can choose who they are sexually or romantically attracted to.” Of course, it wasn’t so “widely considered offensive” that Merriam-Webster knew about it five hours before a political debate started playing out on the floor of the Senate. But that’s not what this is about, really.
