To Know Yourself Is To Question Labels

Only 'Out and proud' gay men and lesbians
declare that they 'knew their sexuality since birth'.
I don't how they be so certain,
particularly when they are in such a small minority.
My uncertainty is not from a lack of empathy
with their lives, though I loathe the word lifestyle.
No, my problem is how with their sense of self belief
comes a sense of predestination, a determinism
they have unknowingly stolen, not merely borrowed,
from fundamentalist Christianity,
and from that ancient arch-critic of all sexuality, St Paul.
I accept that we all need surety. But to defend ourselves
by stealing the most brittle and inflexible arguments
of our enemies is to reverse ourselves into the loneliest
and most ignorant of intellectual cul-de-sacs.
Who in their maturity would want to do that?