Judith Butler, in "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" argues (if I may brutalize it into a relative ordinary-speak) that gay identities, when they participate in or allude to butch/femme identities that would seem to derive from the heterosexual norms, are not in fact derivative—on the contrary (Butler argues), for a man or woman to play a butch or femme identity is only to underscore the fact that men everyday play their masculine role, and women play their feminine one: that gender roles are roles that we take on, and not just roles that we are.

The idea that we play our everyday roles like parts in a play, is one that has an older history than this: Sartre makes an attractive caricature of the perspicacious waiter in a cafe, who moves so briskly, holds his tray so high, and asks you so devoutly What the gentleman would like?

By drawing this character so sharply (and when you read the passage, I think you recognize the behavior), Sartre makes a satire of this waiter's fawning sincerity, his high class, his mastery of the menu and of the varieties of wines. It is absurd, when you think about it, that a person could love his job so intensely, that he would naturally be so deeply interested in each of these wines, that he would so enjoy knowing how the cheesecake is prepared and how it differs from other cheesecakes you may have had, and that he would hold himself in that ridiculous posture as he scuttles back to the kitchen, and so on. As Sartre says, "he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe," rather as kids having a tea party play at the same thing, or kids playing "house" play their roles of mom and dad. Isn't it possible, then, that our gender roles are as made-up as our waiter-roles?

Yes, I believe it is possible.

But now here's Judith Butler:

"Reconsider then the homophobic charge that queens and butches and femmes are imitations of the heterosexual real [or origin]. ... Logically, this notion of an 'origin' is suspect, ... the origin requires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an origin, for origins only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives."

Isn't it possible, on the contrary, that origins make sense because they come before in some historical chronology? Perhaps their being origins is only due to the fact that their is something after them, but that need not destabilize their priority or their naturalness. One theory might show how heterosexuality evolved over billions of years of evolutionary need, and homosexuality evolved over a few thousands years out of some excess survival power, or out of a growth of the symbolic imaginary world of the human being, the first animal that has names for things and can talk itself into things.

My beef here may be just that these psychoanalytic starting points aren't interesting or compelling to me. The theories that come out of biology and anthropology are the ones that need a response. In the contexts where Butler publishes, a discussion of arguments from the biological sciences would be condemned as bowing to a scientific worldview that (the editors might imagine) needs to be overthrown. I simply don't agree. An appeal to evidence, even subjective evidence, is a natural (!) aspect of the human being. Each of us has a natural curiosity to ponder the slow opening of the pine cone's bristles, and to ponder why that person makes us feel soft inside, and why this person does not.