Lost options under a sexual ID system

Here is a question which might seem at first tangential to the current arguments about the public profession of sexual identity. My question is: if two unrelated women set up house together, and the arrangement proves a success, so that it lasts a lifetime, are these women to be understood to be lesbians? The answer must surely be: not on the basis of the facts outlined so far. One cannot insist that mere cohabitation constitutes a sexual relationship. It would be barmy to do so.

A lifetime's living together most probably indicates a highly successful friendship (unless one woman is the prisoner of the other, as would happen in the case of the paid companion with nowhere else to go) but the example as given so far could easily cover women who had "missed their chance" and yet need companionship, and who live together because living on unmarried terms with a male friend would cause a scandal, and involve other unwelcome complications.

Women have, until recently, been able to cohabit "respectably". But the way sexual discourse is taking us, that option appears to be shrinking. If everyone is to be identified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual in inclination, and if everyone is required to carry a sort of sexual identity disc, and to produce it on demand, then the kind of friendship that thrived because no questions were asked will become more and more difficult.

Just as single men have lost the option to be bachelors with no questions asked, so the very successful cohabitings of unmarried women will be forced into categories they previously resisted: active lesbian, sublimated lesbian, shamefully half-hearted lesbian, whatever. And this process - which is already well advanced - represents a kind of coercion, and the lost option begins to look like a lost option for women.

The coercion in question comes not just from the Peter Tatchells of the world. It comes from the general agreement on the terms of forensic sexual discourse: that there are only three sexual identification tags - homo, hetero and bi. These are the three "inclinations", the three probably innate conditions. Most people feel there is a loss of freedom involved in the legal moves to introduce ID cards. Is there not a similar loss of freedom involved in this sexual ID system? As if the complications of the psyche can be reduced to three options. As if the mysteries of the individual can be colour-coded.

Sometimes a car comes on the market which is very valuable because it has practically never been driven. I see a Daimler, perhaps, with leather seats and a walnut dashboard. Bought on the basis of the best advice, garaged and tended with care, but somehow, for some elusive reason, never actually taken for a spin. And some people's sexuality is like that - a present that never came out of the wrappings - but with this difference. If you have a Daimler in the garage, you can normally tell fairly easily what kind of Daimler it is. But if you keep your sexuality in the garage, you can't easily predict what would happen if you were one day to pluck up courage, put on your cap and goggles, and head for the open road.

The Bishop of London described his own sexuality last week as "ambiguous". One wanted to take him to one side and say: "Honey, whose isn't?" Anyway, since he said he hasn't been in the habit of taking it out for a spin, "ambiguous" is probably as far as anyone should go in describing an apparatus that has never been seen in action. But "ambiguous" was not enough for Mr Tatchell. It was an evasion.

We are all familiar with the horrors of male heterosexual coerciveness. Fathers who scream at their sons to make them prove that they are men: Get on that horse! Put on those boxing gloves! Get hurt! Don't blub! Hit back! Be a man! What we appear to be witnessing in the case of Mr Tatchell and the Bishop of London is male homosexual coerciveness, the son screaming at the father to admit that he's a faggot: Where's your ID? Where's your pink triangle? Show it! Hold it up so that everyone can see! And people recoil at the sight of such baiting - viciousness parading itself as virtue.

But they do not recoil enough from the reductiveness of the psychology which underpins it. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are not eternal categories that we have always lived with and always must. They are terms derived from 19th-century psychology and medicine. In a few years' time they could easily be dropped in favour of something that seems more illuminating, just as all theories change, just as the terminology of sexual and racial politics has changed rapidly in the last few years.

The belief that there are three types of being (homo, hetero and bi) looks particularly vulnerable. It implies that there are no phases in a person's life other than a denial and then an acceptance of one's inherent nature. So it is a view of human nature that has no dimension in time. It is essentialist.

It is also a way of saying that not all people are bisexual. But one could easily imagine a popular orthodoxy that bisexuality was absolutely the norm; under this, to call yourself homosexual would count as a gross evasion; and there would be no heterosexuals at all.

One supposes that, while theories change, while the terminologies have their day, while cultures move from more to less persecutory modes and back, certain things do not change so very much. People go on with the same forms of actual sexual activity, they go on affecting each other subliminally in the sexual sphere, they continue to seek the obvious forms of relation and release.

Thus in societies which had a strict theoretical taboo against homosexual relations, things nevertheless went on which were not considered to "count". Using your page, or the farmhand, as a hot-water bottle didn't "count" as sodomy (which is what the term would have been). That was what pages and farmhands were for. That was the kind of thing that tended to happen. In bed. On a Saturday night. It raised no questions about one's identity. It did not define one, because the definition did not yet exist. The word had not been thought up.

And to return to the question of the tact that surrounded the relations of women, one supposes that there must have been a wealth of nuance in their friendships, affections, loves. Women found that they could play certain roles happily together, that they could minister to each other's needs, whether symbolically, or materially, or in some erotic suspension which involved both the material and the symbolic.

And I suppose that this great freedom that women had, they still retain in some degree today, because it seems that women are rather less vicious towards each other than men, when it comes to this question of sexual categorisation. Maybe they are better able to distinguish between the bed, the confessional, the analyst's couch and the dock. But wherever it comes from, this sexual coercion should be resisted. There should be a sexual right of silence, even in this imperfect world.