The recent New York Times article on the Cuddle Puddle at Stuyvesant High School unwittingly undermines the legal strategy of the Gay Rights movement. Because the article chronicles the sexual adventures of a group of metero-sexual students, you might think it would fall squarely in the pro-homosexual camp. Nonetheless, a close read of the piece completely dismantles one of the leading claims made by the gay rights legal strategists: the claim that sexual orientation is a fixed trait. You know the idea: People are born gay or straight. Only an ignoramus or a Neanderthal would even imagine that there is an element of choice, chance or change in sexual orientation.

But these heteroflexible kids in the Cuddle Puddle are messing around sexually because they are in an environment that considers it “cool.” An honest reader can’t get very far into this article and still believe that all these kids are just doing what they were born to do. Consider paragraph two:

“Alair is headed for the section of the second-floor hallway where her friends gather every day during their free tenth period for the “cuddle puddle” as she calls it. There are girls petting girls and girls petting guys. ... They are all 16, juniors at Stuyvesant. Alair slips into Jane’s lap, and Elle reclines next to them, watching cat-eyed. All three have hooked up with each other. All three have hooked up with boys–sometimes the same boys. But it’s not that they are gay or bisexual, not exactly. Not always....

Elle is watching, enthralled, as two boys lock lips across the hall. ‘Oh, my,’ she murmurs. ‘Homoerotica. There’s nothing more exciting than watching two men make out.’ And everyone is talking to another girl in the puddle who just ‘came out’ meaning she announced that she’s now open to sexual overtures from both boys and girls, which makes her a minor celebrity, for a little while.”

It strains the imagination to believe that these kids are completely impervious to the pressures of their little sub-culture. This behavior is almost completely peer-driven.

Now what does this have to do with the gay rights legal strategists? Sexual orientation as a fixed trait is central to their argument to have “sexual minorities” designated as “protected classes.” The argument builds on an analogy with race. If a person is born gay, then the argument for decriminalizing same-sex behavior, legalizing same-sex marriage and making homosexual persons members of a protected class falls neatly into place by a straightforward analogy with laws protecting racial minorities.