Reply #21: There's a bit of a fraught history involving these terms [View All]

[markpkessinger]

There was a point in the gay rights struggle when some in the gay community embraced the term "sexual preference" (along with the implication of "choice" that term carries) as a means of breaking free of a disease model of any sexuality other than heterosexuality. The understanding of homosexuality as a disease or a mental disorder was very widespread until the 1960s. So those who embraced the term "sexual preference" did so mainly as a political act of defiance against a prevailing understanding of homosexuality as pathology. The underlying political strategy was to foster the idea that it was an individual's fundamental right to choose his/her mode of sexual expression, as opposed to seeing homosexuality as a disease or disorder in need of a cure or treatment.

As a political strategy, it had some success, but of course was unconvincing to the religious moralists, who frankly didn't accept the validity of that kind of personal autonomy. Religious moralists seized upon the implied "choice" involved in the term "sexual preference," in order to characterize it as a moral failing -- a sin -- which they asserted one did not have to choose. But I doubt any of those who chose the term "sexual preference" would have ever said they had "chosen" to be gay; if anything, their "choice" was that of deciding to live openly as gay people. It wasn't long before people began speaking of choosing to live a "gay lifestyle." But that term proved to be rather problematic, too, because it tended to reduce the matter of one's sexuality to a political idea of a particular, ghettoized subculture in one of the nation's major metropolitan centers. But of course, gay people knew, and still know, that the intrinsic aspect of a person's sexuality can be quite distinct from one's extrinsic expression of sexuality in the context of a particular subculture. Eventually, "sexual orientation" became the more preferred term, both because it resonated more with the experience of most gay people that their sexuality was something instrinsic, something that had always been a part of who they were, even as children. But there was, initially at least, some resistance to the term "sexual orientation," because people feared it could be too easily be co-opted by the old, homosexuality-as-pathology model. But in time, as more and more research concluded that there was simply no valid basis for the old pathological understanding, those fears began to subside. Nowadays,"sexual orientation" is, by far, the preferred term and, I think, the most accurate.