Korean Job Discussion Forums

[nautilus]

[yawarakaijin]

[Adventurer]

[daskalos]

Okay, I'll play. But not before just saying that on a visceral level (not a scientific one) I find the question of why people are or aren't gay to be creepy. In itself, it's a value-neutral question, but I find it most often to be asked with more than a whiff of an assumption that it's a problem we need to figure out. You know, if we could figure it out, we could maybe help stop it.

That said. I think the whole human race is born with the capacity to be, to greater and lesser degrees, bisexual. I'm a hard core, before-I-got-my-first-pubic-hair homo, but there have been some unique occasions when I felt a stirring in my loins for this or that woman. It passed. Maybe four or fives times, in 35 years, and it's never had much to do with what they looked liked. Still and all, yes, I chose not to act on those occasions, largely because I didn't need the complication to how I had chosen to define my sexual identity.

Someone on this thread made mention of dysfunctional development and the pressures of certain family dynamics as a cause. I'll assume s/he wasn't talking about these situations as THE cause, but then s/he was the one who said that gays invariably claim to be bisexual, so anything is possible. (Invariably? You've never met one homosexual who didn't claim to be bisexual? Well, let me introduce myself: I'm daskalos, hard-core homo. And sure, if we must take my admission of widely scattered stirring loins as some sort of admission to bisexuality, then we must also decide that any man who's ever diddled with another man is bisexual, and this is something a man who occasionally gets a bj from a guy invariably never does claim.)

Genetic? I have to admit, it seems implausible, even when you do take into account the many men in days gone by and, to a lesser extent, today, who sublimate their sexual desires and join the straight club (a choice that has no bearing on their actual sexuality on the level of psyche). If the cause were genetic, with fewer gay men choosing to breed in heterosexual relationships (presumably) since the 70s, we would see fewer gays in the generations born since then, and I don't think the numbers bear this out.

I consider the idea of some congenital cause to be very interesting and likely. Second sons are more likely to be gay. Third sons more likely still. Every son a woman bears has a higher chance of being gay than the one that came before him. Even sons born to non-dysfunctional families.

There's also that the percentage of left-handers among gay men is greater than among straight men, and if there's anything as baffling as the incidence of homosexuality, it's the incidence of left-handedness. (There was also a study done some years ago linking the size of the corpus collosum [sp?] to handedness and sexuality. Seems there's more such connective tissue in women than in men, more in gay men than in straight men, and more in left-handers than in right-handers.)

Anyway, this brain study is interesting, and hopefully the next step will be to determine whether the brain makes the wo/man or the wo/man makes the brain.

Really, though, I don't care why people are gay. I don't care why I am. I'm not going to put my fingers in my ears if they ever do figure it out, and I'm not going to spout a line of agenda-approved twaddle about why I think the direction of this or that scientific study is wrong and that one right. (Though I will cast an eye over who/what organization is conducting the study.)

I really would, though, like some assurances that the reason y'all are so interested in the question isn't so that you can find a cure or prevention, because whatever the actual chemical/genetic/nature/nurture cause of homosexuality is, a survey of the natural world shows that it is a naturally occuring variant, while a survey of the sociological landscape shows that societal aversion to it is in large part the result of three particularly virulent strains of religion born in the searing desert of an angry sky god of bedouins. To put it more plainly, being gay is as natural as not being gay, but hating gays is purely a social construct.

Of course it's not as simple as all that. Because we live in a society that slid out of the birth canal of those religions, we have found it very necessary to apply definitions. As Andrew Dice Clay once so eloquently put it, either you suck dick or you do not suck dick. Our society doesn't like grey areas, so young boys like the one I was, who lean very heavily toward men, end up defining ourselves out of whatever slight interest we may have had in women, and young boys like the ones most of you were end up defining yourselves out of whatever slight interest you had in men. Even if you're not anti-gay or against gay sex per se, it becomes a matter of settling into the roles you're most suited for, because shades of grey are confusing in a society that still has a lot of bad stuff to say about stepping out of the norm.

Things are changing, though. In my day, bisexuals were hooted out of the room or condescended to as just not having the temerity to make a choice. "Oh sure you are, Sugar. We'll talk again next year, okay?" Today, young people are far less likely to allow old paradigms to pigeonhole them. I can only speak anecdotally, but there are lots more young people today perfectly comfortable in their own, bisexual skins, without feeling the need to decide, to choose fur pie or velvet spike, one or the other but never both. Pulleeze!

So I apologize for casting aspersions on your credibility, nautilus. I'll just have to assume that the only "gay" people you know are younger than 30.

[yawarakaijin]

[Kuros]

[daskalos]

[bacasper]