Lesbian tennis legend Martina Navratilova has asked one of her former competitors, who has spoken out against gay marriage in Australia, whether she is suppressing her own attraction to the same sex.
Navratilova, 55, wrote an open letter to the Herald Sun after three-time Wimbledon champion Margaret Court claimed being gay is a matter of choice and that many people are gay because they suffered from sexual abuse as children.
In the letter, Navratilova asked Court whether she had spurned feelings for women. “You say it is a choice to be gay; do you mean to say you had feelings for women as well as men and chose men? That might explain your certainty on the issue,” she wrote, as The Advocate reports.
“People [the straight ones] often ask: Why are people gay? I say, well, why are people straight? There is no straight answer here, so to speak. Human sexuality is multi-faceted, complex and quite fluid; genes play a part as well. How much? Who knows? But that’s not really the point anyway.”
Court, who now works as a senior minister at Perth’s Victory Life Centre, has caused controversy in her home country for suggesting many gay people are gay because they were child abuse victims.
The 69-year-old, who also recently stated that gay marriage campaigners were attempting “to legitimise what God calls abominable sexual practices”, told the Herald Sun: “We get them [homosexuals] in [at church] and you’ll find that many, many of them have been abused”. When asked if she believed this had ‘turned’ them gay, Court said: “Yes. You look at a lot of them, that’s happened.
