Charting Sexuality:
Toward a New Model


by Todd Morman

Look, there aren't just two kinds of human beings, okay? There aren't just "gay" people and "straight" people. Sexuality falls along a continuum, with strict heterosexuals at one end and strict homosexuals at the other, and most of in-between. Got it?

Well, actually, no.

The above idea, based on Kinsey's famous 1-to-6 scale (see Figure 1), has become accepted in some circles as the enlightened view of sexual preference.

Unfortunately, as a visual metaphor for the range of human desire, it's pretty inadequate. Take, for instance, a woman strongly attracted to her own sex - she's a 5 or 6, right? But what if she's also strongly attracted to some men? It's certainly possible (although I know some lesbians who'd deny it), but where does she fit on the scale? A 1 and a 6? How about a 3.5? Or should that be reserved for someone who's only mildly interested in sex, or perhaps someone who honestly doesn't care what sex their partner is, so long as she/he is friendly? The problem with this scale is that it doesn't allow for a range and variety of desires within the same person, something which seems pretty common, at least in my experience (This is also why I'm currently convinced that the search for a genetic basis for homosexuality is going to prove fruitless [ha ha], but that's another article).

A better graph would start with a Cartesian coordinate system of x- and y-axes. Let the x-axis represent intensity of attraction to the same sex and the y-axis represent intensity of attraction to the opposite sex. Note that the negative axes allow us to graph repulsion as well as attraction. Now, use the graph to plot some of your friends, like so:

a. Dave, who loves sex with guys and is sexually indifferent to women

b. Diane, who also loves guys, but has been known to sleep with her female friends on occasion

c. Jeffrey, who, for awhile, was disgusted by the idea of sex with anyone

d. Paul, who's straight, married, and amazed that any guy could find another guy sexually attractive

e. A lesbian manhater or gay male womanhater (I don't know any, but people say they're out there)

You get the idea. The addition of a second dimension allows for a more accurate representation of the possibilities of attraction. A third dimension (the z-axis) was suggested by a friend, who noted that people can be (and often are) strongly sexually attracted to objects; that could work but I prefer to use the z-axis to represent time (see Figure 3), so that the changes in sexual desire we experience over the course of our lives could be plotted as well.

The graph is still, of course, ridiculously simple. Where, for instance, would you put a "straight" man who likes to watch two women have sex? Or the extremely homophobic person who really is unable to admit to her/his same-sex attraction? Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying everyone who finds homosex uninteresting or even disgusting is a closet case, but there clearly are some folks for whom this is true. Just ask someone whose coming out process was a particularly difficult one how much they once hated gay and lesbian people.

Anyway, this graph is at least better than the tired old Kinsey scale. I tend to think that the graph which most accurately models human sexual desire will end up looking like one of those beautiful fractal patterns chaos theoreticians come up with. Until that comes along, I'll use this.

Return to Stay Free 5 Table of Contents