i choose this: is queerness a choice?

this article discusses the criticism cynthia nixon received for stating that she chose to be gay.

i understand the strategic and political use of positioning queerness as inherent (if we can’t change it, maybe the homophobes will leave us alone and just accept that we were born this way). but i personally think it is really dangerous to refuse to allow other interpretations of queerness to exist. what about the whole movement of lesbian separatists who defined lesbianism as a choice? have we forgotten that chapter in queer history? and positioning sexual orientation as inherent normalizes our cultures obsession with heterosexuality. if queers were born queer than straights were born straight, and by looking around it seems like the vast majority of people just happened to be born straight. this makes heterosexuality seem normal and natural, queerness being an occasional deviation from the norm. but what if we considered that many of these people are choosing heterosexuality because of the societal punishments for making queer choices? that thought destabilizes heterosexuality. i am also suspicious of the word ‘natural’. do i really have ‘natural’ attractions? is there even such a thing? something innate within my own self before i was even born that determined i would be attracted sexually to both people with vulvas and people with penises, before i even knew what a vulva or penis is? this seems highly unlikely to me. to me, it makes more sense that my attractions and desires developed over time through a play between what i was exposed to, my reactions and my choices. i think my sexual desires developed the way my taste in music did, over time, and due to a whole number of factors, and always subject to change. i would never tell a person who feels they were born queer that they ‘really choose this’. it’s not my place to define another person’s understanding of their sexuality. likewise, it’s not cool to say that a person cannot have been straight and now is gay, that only one of those truths can be real. if both truths are real for her then they are. i think a lot of the political, transformative and radical power of queerness gets lost when we turn ourselves into a ‘minority group’. to me, the message shouldn’t be ‘we are just as natural as straight people!’… it should be more like ‘what the fuck is natural?’