I'm highly skeptical that anyone has to show dogs how to do it. They routinely engage in mounting behaviors in a stereotyped way that doesn't at all look voluntary but completely instinctive. They cannot choose not to reproduce and avoid sex for life, the way human beings most certainly can (we are the only species that can). I assert that orientation in humans is learned. Pleasure and arousal are biological, but how that gets oriented is conditioned by early masturbatory fantasies. I assert that since all masturbation involves one's own form, there is a natural tendency for homosexual desire, and that civilization knows this and must fight it and use cultural, institutional enforcement to ensure the reproduction of the species. To the extent that an individual never bothers to fantasize about the opposite sex early in life, that possibility wanes as time goes on. It's like learning a native language. It isn't chosen and it isn't changeable but it is completely learned. Gender nonconformity makes opposite sex attraction less likely to the extent that heterosexuality is constructed in a gendered way. Nonconformity upsets this highly scripted way of relating. This is why liberation from the sexual division of labor and sex role stereotypes is contemporary with an expanding awareness of and acceptance of homosexuality in a potentially egalitarian form.

Finally, I am aware there is a political motivation to insist that homosexuality is unchosen, but I believe this to be a form of self hatred. I never liked it when I would hear people say "why would I choose this"? It is as if one is off the hook morally if they don't choose it. I dislike the implication in this framework that there is something negative or degrading about homosexual desire and that only complete lack of choice can justify it. Gay is good. There is nothing wrong with it and if someone were to choose it blatantly they would in no way be immoral. Straight, to the extent it is based on the subordination and objectification of women and the militarization of men, may be bad. Gay shows the way. That's old school liberation. It shows the way for everyone, not some fringe minority. Same sex desire is universal, even if opposite sex desire is not. In straight people it is just sublimated. Gay shows the way out of the inequality of heterosexuality, and this is why it is politically dangerous and opposed and so closely linked with women's lib. Besides, being born that way doesn't save anyone from the Nazis. There is no political cover in that.

Walt Whitman: "Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man — which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals of the profound saviours of every land and age, and which seems to promise, when thoroughly developed, cultivated, and recognized in manners and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these states will then be fully expressed. It is to the development, identification and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love [i.e. heterosexual love; the terms homosexual and heterosexual had not yet been coined] hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it) that I look for the counter-balance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy and for the spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream and will not follow my inferences: but I confidentially expect a time when there will be seen running through it like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown, not only giving tone to individual character and making it unprecedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic and refined, but having the deepest relation to general politics. I say democracy infers such loving comradeship as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain and incapable of perpetuating itself. Something more may be added, for while I am about it, I would make a full confession. I also sent out Leaves of Grass to arouse and set flowing in men's and women's hearts, young and old, endless streams of living, pulsating, terrible, irrepressible yearning, surely more or less down underneath in most human souls this never-satisfied appetite for sympathy and this boundless offering of sympathy — this universal democratic companionship, this old, eternal, yet ever- new exchange of adhesiveness, so fitly emblematic of America — I have given in that book undisguisedly, declaredly, the openest expression. Besides, important as they are in my purpose as emotional expressions for humanity, the special meaning of the "Calamus" cluster of Leaves of Grass, (and more or less running through the book and cropping out in Drumstaps), mainly resides in its political significance. In my opinion, it is by a fervent, accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west, — it is by this I say and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it that the United States of the future, I cannot too often repeat, are to be most effectively welded together, intercalated, anneal'd into a living union."

From the Nazis in 1928: "It is not necessary that you and I live, but it is necessary that the German people live. And it can live if it can fight, for life means fighting. [The] German nation... can only fight if it maintains its masculinity. It can only maintain its masculinity if it exercises discipline, especially in matters of love. Free love and deviance are undisciplined. Therefore, we reject you, as we reject anything which hurts our people. Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes them a plaything for our enemies. ... We therefore reject any form of unnatural sexuality, above all homosexuality, because it robs us of our last chance to liberate our people from the chains of slavery under which they now suffer."