When it comes to sexuality, younger generations prefer the wine, not the label
By Jo Ellison
This week I’ve been wondering whether I might become a lesbian. Or whether I should have been one in the past.
The speculation was prompted by the findings of an Ipsos Mori survey of 1,127 British adults that suggests when it comes to gender and the subject of relationships, the points of differentiation are increasingly now blurred. The Sunday Times poll (accompanied by another poll in the US in which the findings were quite similar) found just over half of 18- to 24-year-old respondents saying they were “only” attracted to people of the opposite sex: 35 per cent of Generation Z respondents checked categories that said they were mostly, or equally likely, to swing either way. Older respondents were far more rigid in their sexual preferences: 81 per cent of Baby Boomers claimed they were committed heterosexuals and 76 per cent of Generation Xers said they were “only” attracted to the opposite sex.
While only a tiny sample of the population, the survey represents a huge shift away from the binary expectations that have traditionally straitened our relationships. The biologist Alfred Kinsey first alighted on his sexual spectrum in 1948. But it has taken three further generations for his enlightened thinking to really percolate through the mainstream, with same-sex relationships now being seen as no big deal.
When I asked my own resident Gen Z representative (aged 15) how she felt about relationships she was similarly fluid. While she would probably tick the “only” attracted to the opposite sex at this point in her life, she could well imagine having a same-sex relationship sometime in the future, but she did still imagine herself getting married to a man. She attributed the spike in bi-curiosity to the growing visibility of same-sex relationships on television and in the media, before adding that she thought some women engage in same-sex liaisons to appease the male gaze. Using a same-sex relationship to titillate the bounds of heteronormativity seems a bit retrograde and twisted (very stag-do circa 1995) but I guess the patriarchy wasn’t built on men and woman indulging in the missionary position.
Mainly, the findings illustrate how comfortable young people are with almost any kind of sexuality. Neither do they share the obsession of older folk in naming things. It reminds me of the first season of Schitt’s Creek, in which David Rose explains his pansexual preferences: “Um, I do drink red wine. But I also drink white wine. And I’ve been known to sample the occasional rosé. And a couple summers back I tried a merlot that used to be a chardonnay, which got a bit complicated . . . I like the wine and not the label. Does that make sense?”
One explanation for the current vogue in bi-curiosity falls back on the traditional and, for many, maddening assertion that young people have always been open to “a phase” of experimentation before they “settle down”. But whatever the possible reason, it’s heartening to see the stigmas and insecurities around our sexual preferences eroding with such velocity. While straight people may assume that same-sex relationships have been legalised for decades, gay sex only ceased to be a crime in the UK in 2013, with the repeal of Scotland’s anti-sodomy laws, and sodomy is still technically outlawed in several US states.
Culturally also, it’s only comparatively recently that same-sex relationships have been normalised: Schitt’s Creek, which won another clutch of awards at the Golden Globes last Sunday, has been instrumental in projecting what would once have been a “gay best friend” into a fully rounded leading character. Russell T Davies’s It’s a Sin dared to suggest that gay sex is really fun. And I’ve lost count of how many same-sex relationships I’ve seen dramatised among the Bafta longlist. Most of those relationships were incidental to the drama: it just so happened that the character was gay. Having said that, lesbians have not been treated quite so kindly: currently there’s Kate Winslet, grunting over fossils in the lumpy Ammonite, and Rosamund Pike, platinum haired and evil as a lesbian con-artist in the solipsistic I Care a Lot.
Would I have preferred the wine and not the label had I been 20 years younger and less conditioned to be straight? At school, I was voted the classmate most likely to become a lesbian, and while I have yet to fulfil that early promise, I feel that in the current climate I shouldn’t rule it out. Mostly, when I look back on my relationships with homosexuality, I recall most clearly mooning over flop-haired individuals such as Hugh Grant in Maurice, Rupert Everett in Another Country, and Daniel Day-Lewis as the street punk in My Beautiful Laundrette. Each fixed on love affairs that were clandestine, illicit and always tortuously romantic, and each captured perfectly what I thought true love should be about.
It is the teenage girl’s prerogative, I think, to overly identify with heartbreakingly beautiful Merchant Ivory movies (see also Call Me By Your Name for a more contemporary example) in which the main protagonists will give not one single thought to girls. Some might read that as a sign of unconscionable repression: I would argue it sets in motion a habit of falling helplessly in love with unavailable gay men. Where was that box in the poll?
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