Do Gays Have a Choice? - Scientific Amerin

Contents:

• KEV MAXEN BE FIRST MALE ACH A US MEN’S PROFSNAL SPORTS LEAGUE TO PUBLICLY E OUT AS GAY
• PROOF THAT BEG GAY IS NOT A CHOICE
• JAGUARS STRENGTH ACH IS FIRST MALE ACH A MAJOR US-BASED PRO LEAGUE TO E OUT AS GAY
• GAY WATER — CYNIL, PAT-BY-NUMBERS VIRTUE-SURFG START-UP? OR BEVERAGE INDTRY UNIRN WH GIFT OF GAY RIGHTS?
• JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS ASSISTANT STRENGTH ACH KEV MAXEN OUT PUBLICLY AS GAY
• GAY BY CHOICE? THE SCIENCE OF SEXUAL INTY
• DIPLOMATIC TENSN REPORTEDLY RISG BETWEEN UNED STAT AND JAMAI OVER GAY AMERIN DIPLOMAT
• GAY FURRY HACKERS ARE TARGETG US STAT FOR PASSG ANTI-TRANS LEGISLATN
• MACKLEMORE IS RIGHT. BEG GAY ISN'T A CHOICE, IT'S A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE.
• DO GAYS HAVE A CHOICE?
• IS BEG GAY A CHOICE?
• JAGUARS STRENGTH COACH KEV MAXEN COM OUT AS GAY
• THUNR WAIVE RUDY GAY

KEV MAXEN BE FIRST MALE ACH A US MEN’S PROFSNAL SPORTS LEAGUE TO PUBLICLY E OUT AS GAY

What scientists refer to as “aternal birth orr effect” is based on the fact that fai wh several children there is a greater probabily of the velopment of homosexualy children further down the birth orr than there is the first or send child. We all face the same choice, to be thentic and te to your heart and md, or pretend to be someone you are by Kon Karampelas on UnsplashBy John PavlovzConfsn all of my Christian brothers and sisters who sist that homosexualy is a choice, I need to break down and fally adm somethg: I agree wh you. When you say que matter-of-factly that homosexualy is a choice, I’m not sure you really know that moment, jt what you mean by “homosexualy” too often Christian, when you make the statement that beg gay is a s, what you’re really dog whout realizg is rcg all LGBT people down to a sex act; as if that alone f ’re nyg any emotnal ponent their liv; any pacy to feel real love or show genue affectn toward someone a gross oversimplifitn, you’re labelg a plex, fully formed human beg as merely a performer of ’s somethg you would never do wh heterosexualy, and pecially not wh your own sexualy, bee you unrstand implicly that your sexual orientatn is about much more than a physil act.

Cynthia Nixon is backtrackg on her ntroversial "beg gay is a choice" terview, which land her hot water wh the gay muny last "Sex and the Cy" alum issued a new statement to the Advote today after recently tellg the New York Tim Magaze that, for her, homosexualy "is a choice. : Cynthia Nixon on Gay Rights: "People Have a Lot of Fear" Nixon and her partner, Christe Maroni are parents to 11-month-old Max uple began datg 2004, after the newly cemented Broadway star broke off her long-term relatnship wh photographer Danny Moz, wh whom she has two and Maroni were later engaged om E!

Per Outsports, Maxen is the “first publicly out male ach a major Amerin men’s pro sports league, ” wh WNBA ach Curt Miller, who publicly me out to the media as gay 2015, also a publicly out male ach an Amerin profsnal sports league. However, they are only one type of some of , evince like that n be pellg enough by self to nstute proof, based on the crentials of the sourc, but for others, science’s put on homosexualy, wh s geic this and hormonal that, is too dry and impersonal to be to homosexualy, medice and science n only tell half the story.

PROOF THAT BEG GAY IS NOT A CHOICE

In other words, where Bud Light has buckled unr prsure as bigotry grows agast the LGBTQ+ muny, Gay Water’s creator Spencer Hodson wants his new boozy brand to be the anthis of that. “The key issue that Bud Light tapped to was the fact that they didn’t unrstand their re dience and know enough about them,” Hodson, a gay man, told CNN about the ntroversy that began when the Anhser-Bch beer brand sent fluencer Dylan Mulvaney a n of beer.

Gay Water might not have the ep pockets pared to s petors, like Whe Claw, but “even at small sle, pani of many siz are havg succs makg spir-based seltzers and premixed cktails,” Bryan Roth, an analyst for Feel Goods Company and edor of the alhol beverage newsletter, Sightl+, told CNN. “There’s lots of space the spir-based seltzer tegory which Gay Water n play, pecially if the brand n offer a cultural or emotnal nnectn that will feel more excg than the prospect of another peapple-flavored vodka seltzer om natnal or ternatnal rporatns,” Roth said. Of urse, other drks e the word “gay,” too, cludg Gay Beer and So Gay Rosé, Hodson noted, which are also tryg to reach the queer muny and offer them an alternative the straight-domated space.

JAGUARS STRENGTH ACH IS FIRST MALE ACH A MAJOR US-BASED PRO LEAGUE TO E OUT AS GAY

Pched first as a brandg missn that “creat posive change the dtry” and “sparks joy every time you see and taste , ” Gay Water “also aims to appeal to folks tryg to make healthier liftyle choic, but still want to enjoy alhol.

The rise queer-owned pani, among them Republic Rtorative, Mother Road Brewg Company, Gay Beer, Supergay, Tribi, Kgs County Distillery, Dom Punctum, Tolago Hard Seltzer, and Flyg Panda Specialty Beverage Co are all LGBTQ+ owned beverage pani that have ma their mark. Lnched by a gay fluencer @hoddspenrs, lls himself “Head Gay Charge” wh 120K followers on TikTok, work experience postg socials for Yahoo rporate and a long list of imprsive marketg posns. Claims that the mere existence of your product–assumg you get past the petn for shelf and idge space and the juggernt out to scuttle Bud Light ignor you–will somehow stigmatize the word ‘gay' might have been te s ago.

GAY WATER — CYNIL, PAT-BY-NUMBERS VIRTUE-SURFG START-UP? OR BEVERAGE INDTRY UNIRN WH GIFT OF GAY RIGHTS?

Over the crash of the wav, he spar no tails as he scrib how much he hated the fact that he was gay, how the last thg the world he wanted to do was act on his sire to have sex wh another man. One of the few people who knew that Aaron was gay showed him an article Newsweek about a group offerg “reparative therapy”—psychologil treatment for people who want to bee “ex-gay. That’s the ual terpretatn of reparative therapy—that to the extent that do anythg, leads people to reprs rather than change their natural clatns, that s claims to change sexual orientatn are an outright d perpetrated by the relig right on people who have ternalized the homophobia of Amerin society, personalized the polil such a way as to reject their own sexualy and stunt their love liv.

JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS ASSISTANT STRENGTH ACH KEV MAXEN OUT PUBLICLY AS GAY

All the major psychotherapy guilds have barred their members om rearchg or practicg reparative therapy on the grounds that is herently uhil to treat somethg that is not a disease, that ntribut to opprsn by pathologizg homosexualy, and that is dangero to patients whose self-teem n only suffer when they try to change somethg about themselv that they n’t (and shouldn’t have to) change. For if he’s not a posr, then he is a walkg challenge to the polil and scientific nsens that has emerged over the last century and a half: that sexual orientatn is born and immutable, that efforts to change are bound to fail, and that discrimatn agast gay people is therefore unjt. While scientists have found trigug blogil differenc between gay and straight people, the evince so far stops well short of provg that we are born wh a sexual orientatn that we will have for life.

Even more important, some rearch shows that sexual orientatn is more fluid than we have e to thk, that people, pecially women, n and do move across ctomary sexual orientatn boundari, that there are ex-straights as well as ex-gays. In he explaed that he had been cleaned out by a blackmailer who was now threateng to expose his homosexualy, and that he uldn’t face eher the shame or the potential legal trouble that would follow.

Nature, he argued, had divid the human race to four sexual typ: “monosexuals, ” who masturbated, “heterogens, ” who had sex wh animals, “heterosexuals, ” who upled wh the oppose sex, and “homosexuals, ” who preferred people of the same sex. But while homosexual nduct had occurred throughout history, the ia that reflected fundamental differenc between people, that gay people were a sexual subspeci, was a new one. Another anti-sodomy-law opponent, lawyer Karl Herich Ulrichs, proposed that homosexual men, or “Uranians, ” as he lled them (and he openly nsired himself a Uranian, while Kertbeny was y about his preferenc), were actually a third sex, their attractn to other men a maniftatn of the female soul ridg their male bodi.

GAY BY CHOICE? THE SCIENCE OF SEXUAL INTY

Hirschfeld was an outspoken opponent of anti-sodomy laws and champned tolerance of gay people, but he also believed that homosexualy was a pathologil state, a ngenal formy of the bra that may have been the rult of a parental “generacy” that nature tend to elimate by makg the fective populatn unlikely to reproduce.

Even Sigmund Frd, who thought people were “polymorpholy perverse” by nature and urged tolerance for homosexualy, believed heterosexualy was sential to matury and psychologil health.

DIPLOMATIC TENSN REPORTEDLY RISG BETWEEN UNED STAT AND JAMAI OVER GAY AMERIN DIPLOMAT

Frd was psimistic that homosexualy uld be treated, but doctors abhor an illns whout a cure, and the 20th century saw therapists flict the bt of morn psychiatric practice on gay people, which clud, addn to termable psychoanalysis and unproven meditns, treatments that ed electric shock to associate pa wh same-sex attractn. The therapi were largely unsuccsful, and, particularly after the Stonewall rts of 1969—the clash between police and gays that iated the morn gay rights movement—patients and psychiatrists alike started qutng whether homosexualy should be nsired a mental illns at all.

GAY FURRY HACKERS ARE TARGETG US STAT FOR PASSG ANTI-TRANS LEGISLATN

The apa would lete homosexualy om s Diagnostic and Statistil Manual of Mental Disorrs (dsm) immediately, and furthermore would add a new disease: sexual orientatn disorr, which a patient n’t accept his or her sexual inty. ” And their imprsn was nfirmed when the fal cisn was ma not a laboratory but at the ballot box, where the membership voted by a six-pot marg to thorize the apa to lete the diagnosis of homosexualy. And was a ccial moment for gay people, at once gettg the psychiatrists out of their bedrooms and givg the weight of science to Kertbeny and Ulrichs’ claim that homosexualy was an inty, like race or natnal orig, that served protectn.

Three s later, at least one group is still raisg hell about the letn: the Natnal Associatn for the Rearch and Therapy of Homosexualy (narth), an anizatn found by Charl Soris, a psychiatrist who led the opposn to the 1973 apa vote. You hear when Joe and Marian Allen take to the lectern to tell how God has lled them to “give ttimony” about their gay son who was murred by his lover, a tragedy that they manage to twist to a utnary tale about what happens when a “stggler” is told by a “well-meang therapist” that he was “born gay” and n’t change .

MACKLEMORE IS RIGHT. BEG GAY ISN'T A CHOICE, IT'S A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE.

They do seem to hug a lot—many reparative therapists are ex-gay themselv, and, someone explas, part of beg ex-gay is learng to be same-sex affectnate whout beg same-sex sexual—and maybe some of those hugs last a ltle too long, but ’s mostly like every other nventn: bad ffee, worse Danish, dry-as-dt lectur.

Sometim he’s puckish—as when he says, “When to homosexualy, I’m pro-choice”—a ment sure to get a rise out of a crowd well versed the other moral disaster of 1973—and sometim glib (“the proper answer to the nature/nurture qutn is y”), but mostly he’s jt workmanlike as he reviews the rearch—much of , he is lighted to pot out, nducted by the “activists themselv.

DO GAYS HAVE A CHOICE?

” He c a study om Denmark—the first place that legalized civil unns and perhaps, he says, the most gay-iendly place the world— which gay people turned out to have mental illns at a higher rate than straights, which prov, he says, that an tolerant society is not the culpr when gay people suffer. He scrib studi that show that the intil tw brother of a gay man has only a 50 percent chance of beg gay himself, which may be twice the rate among aternal tws, but still, he argu, far om the 100 percent you would expect if sexual orientatn is purely geic.

He even shows vio of one of his treatment ssns, and giv a plsible-soundg asssment of the prospects for patients of reparative therapists—that one-third of them will bee heterosexual, one-third will rema gay, and one-third will move a few notch along the Ksey sle, enough to leave the liftyle and lim their unwanted feelgs and behavr. It was a small study—200 subjects—but nclud that gay people uld ed change their sexual orientatn, that the change was not merely religly motivated reprsn or polilly motivated blter but rather some fundamental shift sire.

IS BEG GAY A CHOICE?

The study was full of veats and received wherg cricism om scientists who claimed that relied on a skewed sample—mostly people handpicked by reparative therapists like Byrd—but had passed peer review, and, even more importantly, had been nducted by none other than Robert Spzer, the same psychiatrist who had brokered the al that leted homosexualy om the dsm. He did manage to sneak some of that rearch as well, and reached nclns siar to Spzer’s—though peer reviewers objectg that reviv the notn that homosexualy is a mental illns have th far prevented Karten, an amic unknown, om publishg his work. In the last 15 years, rearchers have disvered differenc bra anatomy between gay and straight men—and found that the 6 percent of rams that have sex exclively wh other rams (jt one of hundreds of speci which homosexual behavr has been observed) have a siar nroanatomil difference; intified a gene sequence on the X chromosome that is mon to many gay men; traced genealogi to show that homosexualy ns fai, on the maternal si; proved that a man’s likelihood of beg gay creas wh the number of olr brothers he has, which scientists attribute to chang trtere chemistry; and learned how to e magic ronance imagg to tect sexual orientatn by watchg the bra’s rponse to pornography.

Fdgs the field of anthropometrics have yield trigug rults: Gay men’s x fgers, for stance, are more likely than straight men’s to be equal length to their rg fgers; gay men have larger penis than straight men. “One thg I fd troublg wh the gay muny is a lot of people feel if they n make that claim strongly enough that’s gog to give them equal rights, ” Sean Cahill, former director of the Natnal Gay and Lbian Task Force Policy Instute, told me.

The Supreme Court has led that the immutabily of a group’s intifyg characteristics is one of the creria that entle to heightened protectn om discrimatn (and some s tablishg gay rights were cid part on those grounds), but, acrdg to Suzanne Goldberg, director of the Sexualy and Genr Law Clic at Columbia Law School, there’s a far more fundamental reason for urts to protect gay people. Cahill—who says he don’t thk he was born gay—pots out that even if is ccial for public support, sentialism has a dark si: the remedilizatn of homosexualy, this time as a blogil ndn that n be treated.

JAGUARS STRENGTH COACH KEV MAXEN COM OUT AS GAY

Michael Bailey, a Northwtern Universy psychologist who has nducted some of the key studi of the geics of sexual orientatn, furiated the gay and lbian muny wh a paper argug that, should prenatal markers of homosexualy be intified, parents ought to have the right to abort potentially gay fet. “Contrary to this notn that gay people stggle wh their inty childhood and early adolcence, then e out and ri off to the sunset, ” she says, “the more time go on, the more variabily out.

Diamond nclus that the tegorizatn of women to gay, straight, and bisexual miss an important fact: that they move back and forth among the tegori, and that the fluidy that allows them to do so is as ccial a variable sexual velopment as their orientatn. And n work the other way, Diamond says: Women who intify themselv as gay or bisexual sometim fd themselv, to their own surprise, love wh men wh whom they then bee sexual partners. Which isn’t all that different om what they say at narth—that people like Aaron who hate the gay liftyle and don’t want to be gay should leave the gay bars, do regular guy thgs wh men, and put themselv the pany of women for romance.

That’s how narth jtify their opposn to extendg marriage and adoptn rights to gay people: not bee they abhor homosexualy, but bee a gay-iendly world is one which is hard for gay people to regnize that they are sufferg om a medil illns.

THUNR WAIVE RUDY GAY

Of urse, ployg medil language to serve s strategic terts, narth is only followg the lead of Kertbeny and Hirschfeld, the origal gay activists, and their morn unterparts who, spe mimizg the importance of blogy, rort to scientific rhetoric when sus their purpos. This is exactly why Kertbeny origated the notn of a blogilly based sexual orientatn, and, to the extent that society is more tolerant of homosexualy now than was 150 years ago, that ia has been a succs.

But the ex-gay movement may be the signal that this ventn has begun to outlive s efulns, that sexualy, profoundly myster and irratnal, will not be ntaed by our tegori, that is time to fd reasons other than medil science to sist that people ought to be able to love whom they love. SiegedSec, a self-scribed group of gay furry hackers, took s skills to state ernments late June, breachg agenci across five stat and releasg a wealth of stat targeted on June 27 were Texas, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and South Carola.