At this year’s Prague Pride one could spot a banner declaring: “Being queer is not a choice, being a communist unfortunately is.” Clever enough, at first glance. But why should that slogan be any truer than its mirror image: “Being a communist is not a choice, being queer unfortunately is”? Who, exactly, has the authority to decide which of the two versions better reflects reality?
In truth, both involve innate components. Many of those who today adopt the fashionable label “queer” do indeed exhibit predispositions toward unconventional forms of desire. Yet biology also lends itself to other predispositions: a heightened need for solidarity, a willingness to march with one’s own group against outsiders. Those hereditary inclinations have always made fertile ground for collectivist ideologies, communism among them.
But a predisposition is not a destiny. A person may feel unusual sexual urges without feeling obliged to join a subculture with its costumes, masks, and rituals. No one, after all, is born wearing a puppy mask. Nor does such a predisposition confer the right to demand public recognition, or to build a career around one’s private eccentricities. Similarly, the natural craving for cohesion does not automatically require a party card stamped with the hammer and sickle.
Some would prefer to quantify things, assuring us that the “innate component” of LGBT identity might be calculated at precisely seventy-two percent, while communism registers only fifty-four. But no serious research supports such statistical precision. And even if such figures were ever established, what principle dictates that the line of legitimacy be drawn somewhere between fifty-four and seventy-two? Why not admit both as equally innate—or equally chosen?
The reality is simpler, and perhaps more unsettling: whether we deem a trait “chosen” or “unchosen” depends less on biology than on politics. What we sympathize with, we ennoble as immutable. What we dislike, we condemn as voluntary. The boundaries of choice and compulsion are not traced by science, but by the cultural prejudices of those who draw them.