If his tweets were any indication, Michelangelo Signorile dedicated his entire radio show yesterday to the question of Cynthia Nixon’s sexuality.

That’s weird.

It’s true that the public loves a good riff on some variation of the is-she-or-isn’t-she question, but in this case, we know. Cynthia Nixon is gay. She has a girlfriend. She isn’t hiding anything or campaigning against gay rights or donating millions of dollars to the Mormon church to help defeat same-sex marriage. The how or why is better left to the scientists, but the what — that she is an out lesbian woman — is well established.

Amateur biologists that we are, however, many of us just couldn’t resist taking the bait when Nixon gave an interview in which she asserted that “for me, [my sexuality] is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.” Of course, that didn’t stop Signorile’s followers on Twitter (and others) from doing just that, dismissing the comment as a byproduct of misguided bisexuality, using it to illustrate “another example of the difference between gay men and lesbians,” or just chalking it up to the very male perception that “women are allowed to be more sexually open in our culture.” (Really?) Incredibly, only a few people — all women, it seems — actually gave unconditional credence to the notion that Cynthia Nixon has a right to define her own experience, even when it appears to threaten everything we believe about ourselves.

First, the obvious. Cynthia Nixon “knows” that her being gay is a choice in the same way that I “know” my being gay is an inborn trait. We just feel it. Of course, sheer introspection is not a sound epistemological method by any stretch — for either of us! — but in lieu of a credible and falsifiable explanation, it’s all we have. So in this case, it’s not even a situation of respectful disagreement, but personal truth: Nixon is not telling me that I chose to be gay, but that she did. I can’t possibly know whether or not that is true because I do not inhabit Cynthia Nixon’s body and mind.

I can, however, think about choice and freewill and the fact that we are a species famous for claiming categorical agency when we have none. For example, most of us don’t ever question the moment we “chose” to be right-handed or left-handed, but this predicament was actually one of my childhood’s most pressing questions. I practiced writing left-handed for years, I mimicked certain left-handed affectations that I’d see on television or elsewhere, I even started wearing a watch on my right hand. I heard about this thing called ambidextrousness — supposedly my grandmother had it — and I thought maybe that was me, too. At one point, I realized that my handwriting as a lefty actually got pretty good! But in the end, I “decided” that it felt more natural for me to be a righty. Just like Nixon, who said, “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better,” I tried righty and I tried lefty, and righty is better. As far as I was concerned, I made that choice, and there was nothing you could have told the 14-year-old me to convince him otherwise. It was as obvious to me as the fact that Knightwatch was going to become legendary television. (It didn’t.)

I realize now that it’s more complicated than that. That even if there is a “choice” involved, it’s not one of unmitigated freewill, and that — as with most of, if not all of the major markers that we use to construct identity — there is also some sort of genetic influence or predisposition. But what if there isn’t?

It seems obvious that the row over Nixon’s comments go way beyond personal truth and more into the thorny territory between social perception and civil rights: If “they” think we choose our sexuality, some argue, gay people will never be free from discrimination and oppression. But considering that the lack of choice that went into my identity as a person of color failed to provide any such immunity from the discrimination and oppression of being Hispanic or nonwhite in America, I struggle to see the logic (or dignity) in such a fear. At its worst, this argument proposes that a pure biological basis for homosexuality is the only escape-hatch from the moral argument against LGBT people, and in turn, submits that without this basis, there may be something to that moral argument in the first place. But there isn’t. Let’s not forget that the rhetoric of an “innate nature” is historically fraught with ideological self-interest, and that this point is not exclusive to a queer context: Late nineteenth-century theorists, for example, “presented the nonwhite person — ‘the savage’ — as lower down the evolutionary scale than the white” in an attempt to perpetuate a myth about the sexual insatiability of non-Europeans and to curb “the threat they consequently pose for the purity of the white race.” (If this sounds familiar, consider Pat Robertson’s recent warning that “there isn’t one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality,” and that “if history is any guide, the same thing is going to happen to us.”) Still, at its core, this fear also enforces the wrongful assertion that nature operates in clean divisions of inborn and acquired traits, and totally disregards those evolutionary certainties that factually exist in-between the binaries — such as the way many “plants and animals are hermaphroditic before they are bisexual and are bisexual before they are heterosexual” or how “bees and flowers coevolve through mutually beneficial ‘deviations.’” (Timothy Morton can speak more about this point.) In other words, by placing a caveat-free premium on innate sexuality, gay people are actually making the same argument they are being oppressed with — that there are certain immutable “natural” binaries that exist for human beings in a way that defies the reality of pretty much every other plant and animal species on the planet. By yielding to such exceptionalism, we are clamoring to squeeze human sexuality and gender expression into a rigid box that we invented, which as such, enjoys no right to an existence in perpetuity.

The other thing, then, is this: Without any sort of real epistemic evidence for nature or nurture or neither, gay people ask straight people for the right to define our own experience every single day — even when it appears to threaten everything heterosexuals believe about themselves. Straight people certainly can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up gay, and many of the less sophisticated in their ranks can’t even imagine the possibility that two men or two women can love each other with the same kind of affection, desire, and commitment that they enjoy with their opposite-sex partners. Similarly, I have no idea what it must feel like to grow up with common, uncomplicated worries — such as whether or not a girl I like thinks I’m cute — and without attaching the fears of sin, morality, impending antigay violence, mental illness, and total ruin to every basic boyhood crush. Until we figure out how to inhabit the bodies and minds of other people, we might never know these things of each other.

Which is to say that, as improbable as Cynthia Nixon’s claim plays out in my own experience, I have no choice but to afford her the same benefit of the doubt that I demand for my own personal truth, which persists, unaffected. I mean, I believe I was born this way. But there is nothing about my personhood that would change if I weren’t.

“I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

I’ve been reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” today, and this excerpt stood out as still particularly relevant — especially in a country where political expediency is often more valued (or at least more practiced) than the unmediated justice our so-called principles demand.

These are the ideas we should consider when conservative Republicans and Libertarians try to shore up MLK as a member of their side, even when they belittle the civil disobedience of Occupy Wall Street as “socialism” or “class warfare,” and not the inevitable pushback of economic oppression. This is the argument we should present when Democrats try to shore up MLK as a member of their side, even as they regularly inform millions of gay Americans that the heterosexists are not yet ready to cede power, and that 2012 is still too inconvenient a time for full equality under the law.

What King says here is clear: Dismantling the ideology of the oppressor is an active pursuit, not a passive one, and the right time will always be now. There are no exceptions. Let’s not get it twisted.

I can only imagine that most people look to their parents for a relationship model, but that was never an option for me. It’s not that my mother and father were willfully antagonistic towards one another — apathetic is, perhaps, a better word — but that their marriage reeked more of obligation than love. In fact, my mother openly confessed that there were only two things that stood in the way of a divorce: a religious prohibition and me. But being a more devoted Christian than mother, she wasn’t about to blame God.

“If it weren’t for you,” she often told me, pointing the finger, “your father and I wouldn’t even be together.”

Without a blueprint to follow, I did what most of the kids from my generation did whenever reality failed to deliver a healthy archetype: I used movies and television to mediate my impression of how “normal” people did things. I waited for boys with boomboxes to woo me from the sidewalk. I figured true love would rush to my side at an airport gate, begging me not to leave. I imagined a 25th anniversary party for my partner and me in which both of us somehow still look 30. Obviously, I was single for a long time.

Before I met John, I celebrated anniversaries by the month. Two months was a big deal, three months a lifetime. The transient nature of my relationships reflected both my cynicism about romance and my idealization of it. Even the best romantic comedy can only sustain itself for two hours before the suspense of disbelief feels like holding your breath; a good breakup — romantic in its own right — was, in my mind, the way a heart exhales. I craved that breakup as much as the chase.

But the chase is sweet, and as my relationship with John developed in those first six months of 2006, I found myself wondering how this plot might play out if we resisted the impulse to rush to the credits. I thought about my favorite romantic comedy of all time — 1999’s Never Been Kissed, starring Drew Barrymore — and how unsatisfying it actually was to end a movie like that with just a kiss. I wanted to see Never Been Loved in the First Place or Never Been Forgiven For Being Such a Terrible Person. For the first time ever, I wanted to know how a movie called Never Been In a Real Relationship might end, and be perfectly happy if it never did.

I told John about my thing for Drew Barrymore very early on. I told him about Never Been Kissed, and about that time I watched Boys on the Side at 2 a.m. in a Los Angeles hotel room and went to sleep totally wrecked. I even told him about Home Fries. Fucking Home Fries! He politely humored me, as any good boyfriend should, but I insisted, somewhat jokingly, that Drew Barrymore had something to do with our relationship. I liked the idea of having some sort of fairy godmother that was technically younger than me.

So here’s the thing: I’m not superstitious or anything, but if you were to ask me when I knew this relationship was going to work out, I’d tell you it happened at a Starbucks in Chelsea, around the time of our four-month anniversary — a diamond anniversary in the relative history of my love life! I was sitting at a table, head down in my laptop, when I instantly recognized the voice ordering coffee. Without even looking up to confirm, I frantically approached strangers to borrow a pen or paper or anything but a napkin, and when I finally had what I needed, I sprinted to the milk-and-sugar station, where she was fixing her latte.

“I’m about to ask you for something stupid,” I said.

Drew Barrymore laughed as if that were the most wonderful thing she’d ever heard. If you know anything about the scientific correlation between oxytocin levels and looking at a cute puppy, it kind of felt like that.

I told her about my new boyfriend and how great I felt about our relationship. I also mentioned that she’s become something of a silent figure attached to all of it. I told her that John hates romantic comedies, but that if she could just write him a quick note, it would really crystallize the connection and maybe soften him up a bit.

It looked as if she were about to explode.

“Oh my God, yes!” she said, as she grabbed the pen and paper out of my hands and began to scribble the words “John,” “Love,” and “Drew Barrymore” across the sheet. Drew Barrymore hugged me and thanked me and wished us luck. It couldn’t have felt less feigned.

Later, when I went home, I hastily added a postscript: “Two hearts? Clearly, Drew loves you.” I framed the page and wrapped it up, still euphoric and eager to present this gift to John. Neither of us seemed to realize at the time that she actually drew three hearts on the sheet, not two. But it doesn’t matter. Somewhere, Olympia Dukakis — in the role of somebody’s wise mother — is waiting to interpret this as a plot-making metaphor in which love is neither quantifiable nor perfect.

The frame in this photo sits on our bedroom dresser today, on January 4, 2012, the sixth anniversary of our first date. Despite his aversion to the genre, John actually took me to see Music and Lyrics in 2007. I think he kind of liked it.