The ancient Greeks on the other hand, according to Foucault, did not see sexual orientation as an existential part of one’s identity at all. A person was not a homosexual or a heterosexual, they were just a sexual. If a man usually restricted himself to heterosexual encounters that was his choice. A break from this pattern would entail no soul-searching or identity crisis. Similarly, if a man engaged in homosexual activity on odd days and heterosexual on even days, it said nothing about who he was, just about his particular sexual preferences. To our minds, conditioned as they are by our location in space and time, this may seem either bizarre or difficult to grasp. I don’t think it is. In fact, I think it may even be biblical. We would desperately want to classify the first man as a heterosexual, and since the second man does not fit neatly into either the homo- or the hetero- category, we would feel the need to create a new one for him, perhaps ‘transsexual’ or ‘bisexual’. The idea of leaving them uncategorized is totally foreign to us. Just think of how categorized you have yourself.
Perhaps a different example will make things clearer. Suppose that Joe is only attracted to blonde women. He has never seen a brunette that interested him in the slightest. After years of observing him sleeping exclusively with blondes, we might be tempted to classify Joe as a ‘blondosexual’. One night, he sleeps with a brunette. In the morning, will he struggle with whether this makes him a ‘brunettosexual’? Of course not. Why not? Because he never conceived of himself as a ‘blondosexual’. He may view the previous night’s events as unusual and a little unexpected, but he wouldn’t be having an identity crisis! So he slept with a brunette, that doesn’t change who he is! Likewise the Greek man did not conceive of himself as a homo- or hetero-sexual, nor did he struggle with his identity the morning after. So we see that the Noun-Verb-Adjective form of expression is as suitable to the Greek conception as it is unsuitable to ours.
The Greek conception has much to say to our contemporary debates about homosexuality. If men and women are neither gay nor straight, but only choose to engage in activities which are gay or straight, that would lay to rest the endless debates about whether children can be born gay. They can’t be born gay. But, (and here’s the radical new twist) they can’t be born straight either. One thing we do know—they are born sinners. Sin is a manifestation of our rebellion against God. Heterosexual sin is such a manifestation. What about homosexuality? It too is a manifestation of this same rebellion but in a different way. To explore the differences, let’s turn to the most extensive passage on homosexuality in the New Testament: Romans 1.