On Not Liking Cheese

I don't like cheese. Even as a child I didn't like cheese. Something about the taste of normal cheese is just loathsome to me. Over the years, I have managed to discover that it's OK on pizza (when combined with lots of other things), and that eventually led me to tolerate it melted on toast. I'm fine with cheese-flavoured chips, but I don't think that has anything to do with actual cheese.

I really wish I liked cheese. I've tried to like it, over the years. My mental image of cheese is quite nice; it's only when I come to actually taste it that I fully understand that I still don't like it. If I had a choice, I would like cheese. I don't.

Not liking cheese is a mild social handicap - at wine and cheese nights people look at you funny when you stick to the crackers - but there's usually something else to eat. Nobody's ever made even the slightest threat to me about not eating cheese.

I find women attractive. This has been true for as long as I can recall; even when I was little and girls had "girl's germs", there was still something mysterious and attractive about them. I find them more pleasant to talk to than men.

I have never tried to change this. It's not my choice, but if I did have a choice it's the one I would have made. Finding women attractive is not a social handicap in any circle I mix with. Nobody finds it odd. Nobody threatens to kill you for being straight.

I hear so often that gays are making a "lifestyle choice", as if they could be straight if they wanted to be. But I hear gay people talk about wanting to be straight, desperately wanting to fit in, and finding they couldn't do it. Some commit suicide. We have a senator here who is gay, and who tried electroshock therapy in his youth to try to be straight. It didn't work. Being gay can get you shunned or beaten or killed; why would anyone choose it? What's in it for them? There are plenty of ways to be sexually diverse that are actually attractive to straight people and won't get you attacked in the street.

No doubt there are some people who find both sexes attractive, and do have a choice. But there are clearly a lot of people for whom it's an agonizing realization that they fight every step - and lose. Being gay could be a mental disorder for all that I know differently. It could be an accident. It could just be an ordinary variation, like being left-handed or liking cheese. But I don't believe it's a choice for these people, any more than my own sexual orientation was a choice. I could eat cheese if I had to. But I don't want to; it tastes bad, and I'd rather eat fruit. You can do what you want, as they say, but you can't want what you want.

And whatever homosexuality is, the people who have it are entitled to work out for themselves what they want to do about it. If they are happy getting together as gay couples and finding a little companionship in this world, that neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Much better than forcing them into faked, unhappy relationships.

Religious types have a theory that no-one's really gay. As far as I'm concerned, it's an incorrect theory. Time to move on.