I have the answer to this question. It's both. I know this because my own life history tells me so. The personal is political.
I grew up as the good daughter. When I got to be a teenager, I started dating boys. I liked it and dated a fair amount of them. I followed the rules.
Before college, I had thought that homosexuality must be innate because being anything but heterosexual was so strongly socially stigmatized. "Who would choose a life of such persecution and depression?" I wondered. Later I learned otherwise.
In my first year of college, a very important relationship in my life ended. I had really loved this guy. I was crushed when we broke up and did not have the energy or the heart to date anyone else for over a year.
During this time, I started becoming active on campus. I learned about the progressive issues I later devoted this weekly column to. I took my first women's studies course and loved it.
My ideas about the world were changing. I saw many problems I had never considered before and understood that I, being the "good girl" I was taught to be, was acting way too compliant in these destructive systems. I began changing my life, the places I shopped, foods I ate and the way I spent my time -- and speaking out against political hypocrisy, environmental destruction and sexism.
I took courses that reflected my new interests. In one class, I read Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality." In her article I learned about the powerful social forces that maintain the institution of heterosexuality -- something we are taught is normal and natural. Rich describes a "lesbian continuum" along which all women travel, be they in mother/daughter relationships, close friendships or sexual relationships. Rich's theory resonated with me, but I thought to myself, "Sure, there's a lesbian continuum, but I'm way on the heterosexual end!"
I read and learned other theories as well. One proposes that sexuality falls along a continuum through which people can move fluidly throughout their lives. Another suggests that all humans are innately bisexual but that most people deny the socially deviant part of their identity in favor of the socially acceptable part.
I tend to believe a combination of these theories: that we all fall on a continuum of bisexuality, where only those who are definitively toward the queer side reject the heterosexual norm. This is because they have grown up with a strong voice in the back of their heads saying, "This is not me. I am not like these other people." The vast majority are in the center of the continuum, which is shaped like a normal curve, but these people get sucked over to the straight side by societal norms.
