Born Gay?

My view is that this belongs in the "Philosophy and Debate" forums, as homosexuality is more of a nature vs. nurture debate rather than a science vs. religion debate.

There is evidence to suggest that homosexuality is a rather complicated situation, with evidence proving that genetics, epigenetics and social environment all have a role. To state that it is one or the other is wrong.

Um, recent studies have shown that the brain activity in gay males while viewing other men is closer to the brain activity in females than it is to other males.

people make a choice to become gay. people also make a choice to become straight. like i could just have sex with men. i am capable of doing that. i wouldn't like it, however, so i have sex with women, making me straight. obviously it is a choice and the bible was right.

Proof?

I didn't choose men. I naturally liked men.

I'm sorry, but that is just naive.

Being homosexual doesn't mean having sex with men. Being homosexual means loving someone of the same gender in the same way that a heterosexual man loves a woman.

I can never look at a woman and think, I'd love to have sex with her. I could choose to have sex with her and choose to love her, but it wouldn't be the same as heterosexual love. I wouldn't enjoy having sex with her. I wouldn't love her in the way a heterosexual man would love a woman. It'd be more of a brother-sister love or the love of a friend.

To narrow things down to choice and choice only is naive.

These studies alone suggest that homosexuality is more than just choice and has other biological aspects to its cause:

Swaab F. Sexual differentiation of the human brain: relevance for gender identity, transsexualism and sexual orientation. Gynecol Endocrinol. 2004 Dec;19(6):301-12.

Klar AJ. Excess of counterclockwise scalp hair-whorl rotation in homosexual men. J Genet. 2004 Dec;83(3):251-5.

Camperio-Ciani A, Corna F, Capiluppi C. Evidence for maternally inherited factors favouring male homosexuality and promoting female fecundity. Proc Biol Sci. 2004 Nov 7;271(1554):2217-21.

Lyons MJ, Koenen KC, Buchting F, Meyer JM, Eaves L, Toomey R, Eisen SA, Goldberg J, Faraone SV, Ban RJ, Jerskey BA, Tsuang MT. A twin study of sexual behavior in men Arch Sex Behav. 2004 Apr;33(2):129-36.

It is a choice, but at the end of the day you are gay, straight or bisexual.

Its a choice as in you can CHOOSE to sleep with someone you dont find attractive, no matter what your sexuality, just coz you fancy a bit of fun.

Well in that case, it's not a choice, is it? Merely who you sleep with is the choice, not the sexuality.

Huh?
eg Im straight but choose to sleep with a woman, my sexuality doesnt matter, but I would still be straight.

There are signs of homosexuality everywhere in nature. Animals don't choose so why would you think humans do?


Sodomy in Nature
Same Sex Preference
Homo Penguins?
Birds do it...Bees do it...
Same Sex Preference

So these animals are actively choosing to be gay or engage in homosexual acts?

Exactly.

Ive successfully confused myself, which admittedly doesnt take much.

the question-Do gay people choose to be gay and experiment in the gay world?

Question 1-Do Gay people(-eg, a gay man)choose to be gay?-a gay man is gay, and does not choose his sexuality( nobody chooses their sexuality),
so in conclusion-the gay man did not choose his sexuality, he is gay.

Question 2-Do gay people experiment in the gay world?
Er yeah, same as straight and bisexual people, which means experimenting with any gender,any sexuality and any person because as we know people just end up with people coz they want a 'bit'.

Im still confused.What do I think?

You think exactly what you stated.

What I'm quite interested in, is whether the McKinsey scale is correct and that people fall within a sexuality scale. Do supposedly straight people have unconscious gay tendencies? Do gay people have unconscious straight tendencies?

Choice however is solely the realm of the bisexual and even in that case, a bisexual cannot be called straight or gay and doesn't choose sexuality. They are bisexual, which is a third sexual category altogether.

Why are you asking!!?
Im sure your human.Ask yourself!!

As far as i can work out Im straight but I find the female form gorgeous.
Ive had dreams about woman and not been disgusted by them.
I dont think id physically do anything about it tho.

Yep, I like the idea of this scale you mentioned and totally believe it.
Its something to do with hormones whilst being in the womb.
We were all female at one point and therefore have female hormones, if the body changes to male but the hormones stay the same then thats when the differnt scale thing happens.

Then we can start talking about people with male bodies but think they are a girl on the inside which is a whole new thread.Dont get me started on that one.

Re: Born Gay?

I doubt that DNA analysis will tell us much. The immediate information contained in our DNA describes the synthesis of proteins. Homosexuality is a high-level feature that is likely controlled by several genes, maybe thousands, and each of these genes influences other high-level features of our bodies too. My guess is that we will never learn anything meaningful about people's sexual orientation by parsing their genomes -- just as we will never learn anything meaningful about a Beethoven symphony by monitoring the change of air pressure while the orchestra plays it.

But I think there is a method that can give us insights into your questions: twin studies. You look at pairs of identical twins where one of the twins is gay, and you observe whether the other twin is gay too. To control for any effects from the "nurture" side, you repeat the experiment with non-identical twins. If people are gay by choice only, identical twins of gays will be just as likely to be gay than non-identical ones. If being gay is entirely hereditary, all identical twins of gays will be gay.

I have a vague memory of an article about twin studies in Scientific American years ago. It described the principle of the method, as well as some application of it to specific physical and behavioral traits. One of those features was homosexuality. If my memory serves -- and that's a big "if"! -- it turned out that 5-10% of the gay's non-identical twins were also gay, and about 50% of the identical twins were.

Based on these numbers -- and again, this is by memory! -- I would conclude that our genes do have an important influence on our sexual orientation. Whether it's the only influence depends on how honest the twins' responses to the scientists were. If every respondent was honest, 50% means that there are other influences too, one of which may be choice. If all identical twins who said they were straight were in fact inside-the-closet gays who just said they were straight, that means that genes are entirely controlling sexual orientation, and the only choice for a gay respondent is to be inside or outside the closet. Without further information, it could be either.

Summing up, from the empirical evidence, there is a range of explanations for someone's sexual orientation, but "choice and nothing else" seems to be firmly outside that range.

Hmm, dna ie what makes us us, or a combo of our 2 parents,genetics.

If gay people are gay, how to they reproduce?Thats always confused me.

There are several possibilities. The first one I can pull off the top of my head is to look at it from a gene's point of view. Remember that evolution acts on the settings of individual genes. Each setting is selected for (or against) according to its average fitness. Therefore, if a certain setting for a gene gives many of its carriers an advantige and a few carriers a disadvantage, it still produces an advantage on average, so natural selection will prefer it. Now, suppose sexual orientation is controlled by a combination of genetic settings. Suppose that certain settings, considered seperately, produce a selective advantage for its carrier in most cases of settings -- but in a few specific combinations, those settings produce homosexuals, who don't reproduce with their same-sex partners. Under these conditions, the selective disadvantage to the homosexuals created by the few combinations would be outweighed by the selective advantage to all the other combinations.

Or, to state it more generally: You are right, material girl, to suspect that evolution will always select against "genetic settings for homosexuality", other things being equal. However, other things need not be equal. As a result, the reproductively optimal gene pool may systematically create a few individuals who fail to reproduce. The gay share of the population may be a special case of such individuals.

A sterile woman can't reproduce. So she must be unnatural, right?

Again? Aw. Bullwinkle that trick never works. In other words this question has an answer that will never satisfy everybody since everybody has already formed their own opinion.


I was born gay. No question about it. I was leering, lusting and ogling men from the earliest days of my life. There is no way anyone is going to convince me that it was some weird moment in my first hours which "turned me queer". Sorry to have to break this news to all of you but I was there long before then.

I fought it like a mad man as well as I could and for as long as I could. No, I never strayed into the area of marriage; I did however attempt relationships with women, dating 5 different ones over a 6 year time frame. alas the effort was all for naught as I finally realized that I was a homosexual. Believe me, this is not a choice that I would have made, however it is who I am and what my sexuality is. Further I do not believe God has any objection to my sexuality even though the college I went to undoubtedly does and would have if I had been out of the closet back then. Needless to say they would have extracted me from their school as quickly as they could have (it was a Methodist school). God, in my view is more concerned with how I live my life and conduct myself than with who my love interest is. Provided of course that my love interest is not somebody who is involved with another, since clearly that would be wrong behavior on my part.

As to how gay people reproduce it is a long story and there are many methods. Clearly a gay woman can have sexual relations with a man and become pregnant and even a gay man can have sexual relations with a woman and impregnate her. There is also the ever popular in-vitro fertilization method. So, if Jane is a gay woman and Fred is a gay man and they both want to have a child they can visit a fertility specialist or some other doctor involved in these matters and behold, through modern science, a child. Maybe even two or three or four or more (hope Jane really wants those stretch marks).

All sorts of creatures in nature eat their young. What's your point? That people should behave like animals?