Why Are There Gay Men? | Male Homosexualy | Live Science

Contents:

• ORIG OF SWAG: "SECRETLY WE ARE GAY"
• ‘I AM GAY – BUT I WASN’T BORN THIS WAY’
• HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE GAY
• AM I GAY?
• HOW DO I KNOW IF I AM GAY? SIGNS YOU ARE GAY
• WHY ARE PEOPLE GAY? GAY BY CHOICE OR IS BEG GAY GEIC?
• WHY ARE THERE GAY MEN?
• WHAT SCIENCE KNOWS ABOUT WHY PEOPLE ARE GAY
• "THAT'S SO GAY" IS JT SO WRONG
• THERE IS NO ‘GAY GENE.’ THERE IS NO ‘STRAIGHT GENE.’ SEXUALY IS JT PLEX, STUDY NFIRMS

ORIG OF SWAG: "SECRETLY WE ARE GAY"

You so obvly nnot be gay, was her implitn, bee this is good was 2006, a full five years before Lady Gaga would set the Born This Way argument atop s unassailable cultural perch, but even then the popular unrstandg of orientatn was that was somethg you were born wh, somethg you uldn’t change.

But what feels most accurate to say is that I’m gay – but I wasn’t born this people may fd their sir changg directn - and n't jt be explaed as experimentatn (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)In 1977, jt over 10% of Amerins thought gayns was somethg you were born wh, acrdg to Gallup.

‘I AM GAY – BUT I WASN’T BORN THIS WAY’

Throughout the same perd, the number of Amerins who believe homosexualy is “due to someone’s upbrgg/environment” fell om jt unr 60% to ias reached cril mass pop culture, first wh Lady Gaga’s 2011 Born This Way and one year later wh Macklemore’s Same Love, the chos of which has a gay person sgg “I n’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to. ” Around the same time, the Human Rights Campaign clared unequivolly that “Beg gay is not a choice, ” and to claim that is “giv unwarranted crence to roundly disproven practic such as nversn or reparative therapy. ”People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often st as homophobic, and their thkg is nsired backwardAs Jane Ward not Not Gay: Sex Between Straight Whe Men, what’s tertg about many of the claims is how transparent their speakers are wh their polil motivatns.

“Such statements, ” she wr, “fe blogil acunts wh an obligatory and nearly ercive force, suggtg that anyone who scrib homosexual sire as a choice or social nstctn is playg to the hands of the enemy. ” People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often st as homophobic, and their thkg is nsired backward – even if they are themselv, for example, Cynthia Nixon of Sex and The Cy fame. ”Gay rights do not have to hge on a geic explanatn for sexualy (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)For Aravosis, and many gay activists like him, the public will only accept and affirm gay people if they thk they were born gay.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE GAY

Patrick Grzanka, Assistant Profsor of Psychology at Universy of Tennsee, for stance, has shown that some people who believe that homosexualy is nate still hold negative views of gays.

In fact, the homophobic and non-homophobic rponnts he studied shared siar levels of belief a Born This Way Samantha Allen not at The Daily Beast, the growg public support for gays and lbians has grown out of proportn wh the rise the number of people who believe homosexualy is fixed at birth; would be unlikely that this small change opn uld expla the spike support for gay marriage, for stance. “It don’t seem to matter as much whether or not people believe that gay people are born that way as do that they simply know someone who is currently gay, ” Allen spe of the studi, those who ph agast Born This Way narrativ have been heavily cricised by gay activists. Siarly, Ward has received her own hatemail for phg agast the lg LGB narrativ, wh some gays tellg her she’s “worse than Ann Coulter, ” the ntroversial US thor of books like If Democrats Had Any Bras, They’d Be Republins.

And when I published my say on choosg to be gay, an irate Amerin lbian activist wrote me that had “jt been nfirmed” to her that my wrg was “directly rponsible for four gay aths Rsia. There is a unanimo opn that gay “nversn therapy” should be rejectedLet’s first be clear that whatever the origs of our sexual orientatn, there is a unanimo opn that gay “nversn therapy” should be rejected.

AM I GAY?

The efforts are potentially harmful, acrdg to the APA, “bee they prent the view that the sexual orientatn of lbian, gay and bisexual youth is a mental illns of disorr, and they often ame the abily to change one’s sexual orientatn as a personal and moral failure. The APA, for example, while notg that most people experience ltle to no choice over their orientatns, says this of homosexualy’s origs:“Although much rearch has examed the possible geic, hormonal, velopmental, social and cultural fluenc on sexual orientatn, no fdgs have emerged that perm scientists to nclu that sexual orientatn is termed by any particular factor or factors. ”Siarly, the Amerin Psychiatric Associatn wr a 2013 statement that while the of heterosexualy and homosexualy are currently unknown, they are likely “multifactorial cludg blogil and behavral roots which may vary between different dividuals and may even vary over time.

” Acrdg to LeVay’s rearch, a specific part of the bra, the third terstial nucls of the anterr hypothalam (INAH-3), is smaller homosexual men than is heterosexual as they might, scientists have stggled to inty any particular gen that nsistently predict the directns of our love and sire (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)Read moreYou n spot the problem wh this study a e away: were the gay bras LeVay studied born that way, or did they bee that way? Bis the dividual criqu leveled agast each new study announcg some gay gene disvery, there are major methodologil cricisms to make about the entire enterprise general, as Grzanka pots out: “If we look at the raveno pursu, particularly among Amerin scientists, to fd a gay gene, what we see is that the ncln has already been arrived at. ”The other problem wh Born This Way science is summed up nicely by Simon Copland: “Scientists are askg whether homosexualy is natural when we n’t even agree exactly what homosexualy is.

” Our sir may exprs themselv many different ways that do not all nform to existg notns of ‘gay’, ‘straight’ or ‘bisexual’ is one of the bt takeaways of Ward’s Not Gay, a peratg analysis of sex between straight whe men.

HOW DO I KNOW IF I AM GAY? SIGNS YOU ARE GAY

”Gay or not, our sir are oriented and re-oriented throughout our liv (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)In fact, the straight-intified men Ward studied for her book sometim found themselv suatns that sparked the sire for homosexual sex: aterni, ployments, public rtrooms, etc. I’m claimg that at some pot durg llege, my sexual and romantic sir beme reoriented toward menThkg back to my llege romanc wh women and men, I n beg to unrstand how my own experienc might have helped me to ‘cultivate’ my sire for homosexualy.

I want to be very clear: I’m not claimg I simply began to ‘grow to’ my homosexualy, or that as I beme more fortable wh beg gay, I allowed myself the eedom to exprs what had always been latent wh me.

WHY ARE PEOPLE GAY? GAY BY CHOICE OR IS BEG GAY GEIC?

“Limg our unrstandg of any plex human experience is always gog to be worse than allowg to be plited, ” he gay rights activists pared sexualy to relign - a ccial part of our life that we should be ee to practise however we like (Cred: Ignac Lehamann)So what are we to do wh the Born This Way rhetoric? “That’s a very narrow unrstandg of what jtice looks like, ” says about the ncern that homophob will want to ‘enurage’ gay people to be straight if there’s no blogil basis for sexualy? It don’t take too much creativy to image a scenar which homophobic parents, upon beg rmed their fet has ‘the gay gene’, choose what to them may seem the lser of two evils: abortn.

WHY ARE THERE GAY MEN?

”Acrdg to surveys, ls than half of Generatn Z intify as "100% heterosexual", suggtg more and more people have embraced their sexual fluidy (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)Perhaps is time to look to the begng of the gay rights movement. “Then there was a shift, and the lears of the movement chose to jump on board wh a ls nuanced argument that people already unrstood: jt like race, people are born wh their homosexualy.

WHAT SCIENCE KNOWS ABOUT WHY PEOPLE ARE GAY

More than a third chose a number between one and rponse to the poll, one of my Facebook iends quipped about how natural selectn mt be workg overtime, what wh makg all of gay! I’m thankful for a new generatn that is pable of imagg sexualy a way that transcends the gay/straight bary, that uldn’t re ls about what happened to their bodi and mds to make them who they are today. The term “homosexualy, ” while sometim nsired anachronistic the current era, is the most applible and easily translatable term to e when askg this qutn across societi and languag and has been ed other cross-natnal studi, cludg the World Valu Survey.

Dpe major chang laws and norms surroundg the issue of same-sex marriage and the rights of LGBT people around the world, public opn on the acceptance of homosexualy society remas sharply divid by untry, regn and enomic velopment. For example, some untri, those who are affiliated wh a relig group tend to be ls acceptg of homosexualy than those who are unaffiliated (a group sometim referred to as relig “non”).

"THAT'S SO GAY" IS JT SO WRONG

For example, Swen, the Netherlands and Germany, all of which have a per-pa gross domtic product over $50, 000, acceptance of homosexualy is among the hight measured across the 34 untri surveyed. The study is a follow-up to a 2013 report that found many of the same patterns as seen today, although there has been an crease acceptance of homosexualy across many of the untri surveyed both years.

But sub-Saharan Ai, the Middle East, Rsia and Ukrae, few say that society should accept homosexualy; only South Ai (54%) and Israel (47%) do more than a quarter hold this view. However, while took nearly 15 years for acceptance to rise 13 pots om 2000 to jt before the feral legalizatn of gay marriage June 2015, there was a near equal rise acceptance jt the four years sce legalizatn.

This staggerg 56-pot difference exceeds the next largt difference Japan by 20 pots, where 92% and 56% of those ag 18 to 29 and 50 and olr, rpectively, say homosexualy should be accepted by society. In South Korea, for example, those who classify themselv on the iologil left are more than twice as likely to say homosexualy is acceptable than those on the iologil right (a 39-percentage-pot difference).

THERE IS NO ‘GAY GENE.’ THERE IS NO ‘STRAIGHT GENE.’ SEXUALY IS JT PLEX, STUDY NFIRMS

In a siar ve, those who support right-wg populist parti Europe, many of which are seen by LGBT groups as a threat to their rights, are ls supportive of homosexualy society. In Spa, people wh a favorable opn of the Vox party, which recently has begun to oppose some gay rights, are much ls likely to say that homosexualy is acceptable than those who do not support the party.

And Poland, supporters of the erng PiS (Law and Jtice), which has explicly targeted gay rights as anathema to tradnal Polish valu, are 23 percentage pots ls likely to say that homosexualy should be accepted by society than those who do not support the erng party. But even untri like France and Germany where acceptance of homosexualy is high, there are differenc between supporters and non-supporters of key right-wg populist parti such as Natnal Rally France and Alternative for Germany (AfD). Relign, both as relat to relative importance people’s liv and actual relig affiliatn, also plays a large role perceptns of the acceptabily of homosexualy many societi across the globe.