Homosexuality

[Headless Rat]

I don't know if this is an entirely ignorant question or not but I'll ask it anyway as I'm curious. Is someone who is gay actually born that way, or, to an extent, is it a lifestyle choice?It would be interesting to hear from people who are gay....

[saintjohnny]

How do you "choose" your sexuality? Do you "choose" your eye colour? There have always been homosexuals in the population, it's just that up until recently, people were too frightened to declare it openly. Homosexuality occurs throughout the animal kingdom; it is nature's "safety valve" to avoid over population of species (or so I've read).

[newtron]

So this is interesting. I have brothers who are identical twins. So they are nearly identical genetically, but one of them is gay and the other one is straight. I have also been told that this is not that uncommon. I am no biologist, but to me this is strong evidence against a "gay " gene. My brother's story is the same as most other homosexuals' in that he knew he was gay for as long as he could remember. To me, this suggests that sexual orientation may be determined based on environment in the very early years of ones life. Again, I am no expert. If anyone knows any more about these types of studies, I would be very interested in hearing about it.

[originalspa]

I'm gay and Indian and I've always known I was 'different' from as long as I can recall!

I believe you're born gay as already said you don't choose to be gay and face all the discriminations that go with it!

Also my brother-in-law is also gay and I was the only one who suspected it but wasn't out at that stage so I couldn't say anything as I had no proof. To cut a long story short, after being married for 14 years and 2 kids later he's now living with his partner! He also confessed to my sister that he always knew he was gay but was too scared to say anything and went ahead with the marriage anyway which I totally disagreed with!

Unfortunately that's still pretty common even now which is a shame!

[suffragette]

Excuse me newtron, but wouldn't your brothers have experienced exactly the same environment when growing up or did you lock one of them in the larder for days on end?

[newtron]

Good point suffragette. I was thinking about that, and I do have a hypothesis.
Their environments were almost identical, but identical twins do develop different personalities very early in life. Just because they grow up in the same environment doesn�t mean that they develop in an identical manner. I think that the psychological development of a person may depend on specific experiences and how the person responds to those experiences. So it appears that extremely small differences in environment can lead to large differences in psychological development. This seems reasonable to me. If you hold a pen vertically, resting on its point and then release it, which way will the pen fall? Very small differences in the initial conditions can lead to very different results.

I do want to point out that if sexual orientation is not genetic, that does not necessarily mean that there has to be a conscious decision to be gay. Were you conscious of how your personality was developing when you very young? So I come to the conclusion that that homosexuals don�t make a conscious decision to be gay, but I am not convinced that it is completely genetic either.

Again, I am not a psychologist or a biologist. So I may not know what I am talking about, and I apologize if I have used incorrect terminology. I am interested in doing more research on the subject. It would be nice to hear the view of an ABer who is knowledgeable about the current research on this subject.