Consider a heterosexual man confronted with a physically and psychologically exact adult duplicate of himself. Both instances retain the original’s memories, aesthetic judgments, and conviction that few people adequately appreciate his intellectual qualities. Suppose they voluntarily have sex. The ordinary classification is that two men have engaged in a homosexual act. The difficulty is that this answer presupposes a theory of personal identity, and I am unwilling to let the number of bodies in the room settle a metaphysical question of this importance.
\nWe should first distinguish ordinary genetic cloning from the stronger copying operation relevant here. A man who shares your genome is plainly capable of developing a different psychology. For the present experiment, stipulate continuity of memory, character, deliberative procedure, and sexual preferences up to the instant of duplication. The resulting case forces us to ask whether sexual orientation tracks the properties of an external object or the relation between an agent and that object. An attraction to oneself is not ordinarily classified by asking what sex one happens to be.
\nOne natural approach is to treat persons as physical tokens. There are two bodies, both male, and the conclusion follows. This is economical, but it becomes less attractive once we consider substrate independence. If I were instantiated twice in a virtual environment, would the moral and sexual description of an interaction depend on whether the instances ran on one processor or two? If not, why should the distribution of my cognition across two biological implementations settle whether I have discovered a new orientation?
\nA psychological-continuity account encounters a different problem. Immediately after copying, each instance remembers being the original. Each has the same autobiographical evidence for his identity and the same grounds for regarding the other as a continuation. It seems arbitrary to say that one retains the right to classify self-directed desire as masturbation while the other transforms the same desire into homosexuality merely by being numerically distinct. The location of the original chair should not do so much work in our theory.
\nA critic may object that the encounter still involves attraction to a male body. But this fails to distinguish attraction to maleness from attraction to the particular configuration of qualities that happens, in this case, to constitute me. Suppose I remain entirely unmoved by every other man while finding an individual with my intelligence, humor, judgment, and unusually favorable understanding of my achievements difficult to resist. Generalizing from this case to a preference for men would discard nearly all the information that makes the case intelligible.
\nThe problem becomes more interesting as the copies diverge. After an hour, they have had different visual experiences. After a week, one may have read a book the other has not. If their initial encounter is self-directed but a later encounter is gay, we need a principled threshold at which accumulated informational asymmetry becomes sufficient to generate another person for sexual purposes. A rule that changes the classification because one instance has received a parcel while the other was upstairs seems unlikely to survive reflection.
\nWe should also resist allowing social consensus to substitute for conceptual analysis. If ten friends call the hypothetical encounter gay, we have learned something about ten friends’ classification procedures. We have not established that those procedures carve the relevant state space at its natural joints. Their confidence may largely reflect a shared heuristic adapted to a world in which exact psychological duplication is rare and encounters between two male bodies usually involve men with less in common.
\nThere is, finally, a coordination issue. Each instance would presumably regard himself as the original and the other as the uniquely suitable partner. If each also valued being the person whose exceptional qualities elicited the attraction, their identical preferences could produce conflict rather than harmony. This is an important complication, but it concerns the distribution of recognition within the relationship. It would be premature to redescribe the entire arrangement as homosexuality because two versions of an unusually admirable man might each prefer to be admired.
\nMy provisional view is that classification should remain suspended until we possess a more adequate account of identity under copying. In the meantime, the thought experiment gives us reason to question how much confidence we place in ordinary sexual categories when they encounter an agent of this specificity. Under the stipulated conditions, I would expect considerable attraction, sustained intellectual compatibility, and unusually low explanatory overhead. I do not see why those advantages should be dismissed merely because the only person capable of providing them would also be me.
\n","excerpt":"Consider a heterosexual man confronted with a physically and psychologically exact adult duplicate of himself. Both instances retain the original’s memories, aesthetic judgments, and conviction that few people adequately appreciate his intellectual qualities. Suppose they voluntarily have sex. The ordinary classification is that two men have engaged in a homosexual act. The difficulty is that this answer presupposes a theory of personal identity, and I am unwilling to let the number of bodies in the room settle a metaphysical question of this importance.","tags":["Philosophy","Identity","Thought Experiments"],"score":341,"displayOrder":640,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/is-fucking-your-clone-gay-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/is-fucking-your-clone-gay.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-01T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":6,"status":"published"},"comments":[{"id":"seed-is-fucking-your-clone-gay-0","author":"branch_index","text":"The stipulation gets you qualitative identity at one instant. Once one of them sees the other from the opposite side of the room, their experiences diverge. I don't see why your preferred classification should survive that branch point.","parentId":null,"score":47,"date":"2026-10-01T00:32:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-is-fucking-your-clone-gay-1","author":"identity_preserving","text":"Ordinary relationships survive much larger differences in perspective. It would be strange if a change in viewing angle did more classificatory work than complete psychological continuity.","parentId":"seed-is-fucking-your-clone-gay-0","score":22,"date":"2026-10-01T01:31:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-is-fucking-your-clone-gay-2","author":"two_chairs","text":"I am happy to grant all the copying assumptions. There are still two people with separate bodies who each have to agree. Your description keeps promoting similarity into authority over the other person's interpretation.","parentId":null,"score":54,"date":"2026-10-01T03:27:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-is-fucking-your-clone-gay-3","author":"label_cost","text":"What prediction changes if you call it gay? So far the variable seems to affect only whether the imagined man is willing to acknowledge his own stipulated attraction.","parentId":null,"score":31,"date":"2026-10-01T06:24:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-is-fucking-your-clone-gay-4","author":"symmetry_breakfast","text":"The recognition problem is more interesting than the label. Neither copy is going to believe that the other one made the more original contribution to the conversation. This would become exhausting before lunch.","parentId":null,"score":16,"date":"2026-10-01T11:59:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-is-fucking-your-clone-gay-5","author":"exact_duplicate","text":"I appreciate that this is a thought experiment. I would nevertheless like to hear from the other hypothetical man. He may be equally confident that you are misunderstanding the arrangement.","parentId":null,"score":43,"date":"2026-10-02T02:46:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false}]}