ABSTRACT
This chapter describes individuals in terms of their orientations, as “gay,” “lesbian,” “straight,” and “bisexual,” though, these hardly scratch the surface of the many ways people experience attraction and orientation. “Orientation” has become one of our society’s principal terms for discussing how people experience attraction and love. Sexual orientations and identities have to do with the question of whom a person has sex with or wants to have sex with; these are distinct from sex and gender identities, which concern which sex or gender a person is. Any analysis of sexual orientations has to start by observing that people whose sexuality is seen as different from the socially dominant norms have been subjected to extraordinary persecution and violence. If orientations are inborn and unchangeable, rather than a matter of choice, the thinking goes, it would be wrong to make laws and other policies that discriminate against people who are born this way.
