In Cock, John is caught between two loves: his long-term boyfriend, with whom he shares an apartment and a family life, and a recent female lover, with whom he shares a few nights of passion and compatible values. Figuring out what he wants is hard enough—especially for a guy who can barely decide what to eat for breakfast—but the situation becomes even more complicated when characters around him disregard his feelings as a “blip” of “confusion,” and demand that he sexually, politically, and philosophically “work out what you are.” Everyone asks him, “Who are you really?” John can only respond, “Why are you telling me that what I sleep with is more important than who I sleep with? Why are you telling me I have to know what I am?”
John’s anxiety and the pressure placed on him resonate over half a century. In 1948, Alfred Kinsey observed and articulated similar pressures in his book Sexual Desire in the Human Male: “The problem [of sexual preference] is, after all, part of the broader problem of choices in general… of the endless… things one is constantly choosing. A choice of a partner in a sexual relation becomes more significant only because society demands that there be a particular choice in this matter, and does not so often dictate one’s choice of food or clothing.” Kinsey came to this conclusion after he and his colleagues conducted a series of interviews with men (and, later, women) about their sexual histories. The interviews were based both on the subjects’ personal identities and on the subjects’ erotic fantasies. They found that, although the participants articulated their sexuality in exclusive heterosexual or homosexual terms, the dichotomy between heterosexuality and homosexuality was far from clear-cut.
From these interviews, Kinsey developed his famous seven-point scale, which charts a range of sexual preferences from exclusively heterosexual (0) to exclusively homosexual (6). He found that most people fall between the poles, rather than on the poles themselves. Many people reported erotic feelings and fantasies that deviated from their identity, indicating that sexuality is not simply dichotomous or consistent across time. “It is a characteristic of the human mind that tries to dichotomize in its classification of phenomena,” writes Kinsey. “Sexual behavior is either normal or abnormal, heterosexual or homosexual; and many persons do not want to believe that there are gradations in these matters from one to the other extreme. [But] the world is not to be divided into sheep and goats…. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.”
Kinsey’s scale revolutionized how Americans thought about sex, and laid the groundwork for the field of sexology as it is known today. However, later sexologists found its bipolar, unidimensional nature problematic. Rather than portraying the breadth of human sexuality, Kinsey’s scale assumes two sexes, and still bases sexuality on the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” with the “bisexual” areas in between defined as more or less heterosexual or homosexual. Moreover, Kinsey’s scale was developed based on two elements—sexual behavior and sexual response—but a person’s sexual identity is comprised of a myriad of emotional and social dimensions, not just basic erotic attraction.
Fritz Klein hoped to correct those problems with the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (KSOG). In his 1987 book The Bisexual Option, Klein detailed a grid that rated sexuality in seven values (sexual attraction, sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, lifestyle preference, self-identification) over three temporal situations (past, present, ideal). In spite of the ambiguity of Klein’s language—how do you extricate the social implications of “ideal” or the subjectivity of “past,” and what are the implications of the grid itself?—the KSOG portrays sexuality as socially influenced and dynamic and allows for the depiction of fluid sexual identity.
Since Kinsey and Klein, the concept of sexuality as a spectrum has permeated psychology and sociology and has even extended into what may be thought of as “hard science.” Janis Walworth and Michele Kammerer, founders of the Center for Gender Sanity, an organization dedicated to helping transgender people plan a successful transition, promote a "Diagram of Sex and Gender" that includes four spectra. “Using the model… is something like using a spectrum of colors to view the world, instead of only black and white,” says Walworth and Kammerer. “It doesn’t fully account for all the complex shadings that exist, but it gives us a richer, more interesting picture.” In addition to the familiar spectrum of sexual orientation (defined as romantic/erotic response), the diagram includes spectra of gender presentation (communication of gender), gender identity (psychological sense of self) and, perhaps surprisingly, biological sex.
Recently, scientists have begun debating whether physical sex coheres to the male-female dichotomy. Chromosomal disorders such as Kleinfelter syndrome (XXY verses XY), Turner syndrome (X versus XX or XY), and androgen insensitivity syndrome (a person who is XY and externally manifests as a physical female) complicate the notion that biological sex is discrete, to say nothing of the minutiae of anatomical genital variation that confuse physical proof of biological sex. Although most people fall very close to the male or female poles, very few people cohere perfectly to their physiological sex, and the variability in the manifestation of biological sex leads some to believe that biological sex is far from cut and dried.
The conflict of Cock is not a choice between sexual orientations. Instead, it is the challenge of navigating through vast variability of human sexual experience. John is being asked (or compelled) to locate himself in the miasma of biology, society, compatibility, and love.
— Erin Washburn