ABSTRACT
Identity has two faces, one subjective, one objective. At the subjective level, it can be an affirmation of self, as it was for Zack when he said about being gay, “It’s the nomenclature of my life.” But at the objective level, it is a construct—a label and a set of assumptions imposed on someone by others, as he also realized. In this sense heterosexuality, as well as homosexuality, is a construct that exists outside the self. In Greek legend, Procrustes, an outlaw living on the road to Athens, invited travelers who stopped with him to use a special bed. Those who were too short were stretched on a rack to fit it, and those who were too long had their legs chopped off to the appropriate length. Each construct—heterosexuality as well as homosexuality—functions as a Procrustean bed on which people are stretched or shrunk to fit. The difference is that the man who is gay has to resist being stretched or shrunk to fit the stereotype of “the homosexual,” whereas the man who is not gay may have to stretch or shrink the truth about himself to fit the stereotype of “the heterosexual.”
