I believe you mean to use the word “attribute,” and I would say that answer would be something around 0%, approximately. But see, there’s your problem right there - you’re actually asking gay people what they think about themselves, and you’ve consistently asserted that you know better, Rook.
Do you believe a persons childhood development can play a large part in an adults sexual preference?
Why is it hard for gay people to talk about the origins of their sexuality? Especially here where no faces are seen, and it seems the majority of responses I’ve been getting are from gay people.
There are many homosexuals whose same sex parental figures were so weak or punitive and hostile to make identification with that gender impossible or unacceptable to that individual. And/or a parent of the opposite sex so demeaning or emotionally unstable that the child feels he/or she can’t trust the opposite sex (on the same grounds as a rape victims choosing lesbianism but later on in life). Or a parent who constantly undermines or rejects a child’s gender could play an extremely large factor in sexual development.
That may also be the reason why homosexuality exists in the animal kingdom
So how’s the view from the empty space inside your head?
So having bad parents is a qualification for being gay? Damn… half the world must be closeted!
There is no correlation between the way someone is raised and their sexual orientation. I personally come from a two parent middle class Christian family wherein I was raised by two marveolous people and never abused, belittled, or what have you… do you have any idea how many people, gay or straight, have inadequate parents?
Gay people are the product of distant fathers and domineering mothers? Bullshit. For every gay person that might have this situation, there are dozens more straight people who also did… and many people, straight and gay, who were raised in a non-abusive, “normal” household.
70 odd posts, and they’re all in this thread? You do have diarhhea of the keyboard, don’t you?
Rook asked:
"Everyone
Why is it hard for gay people to talk about the origins of their sexuality? Especially here where no faces are seen, and it seems the majority of responses I’ve been getting are from gay people."
Because this discussion is touching on some sensitive areas.
A very cursory dip into the internet will reveal that people are into all sorts of things sexually - bondage, piercings, torture, rubber, diapers, excrement, humiliation, danger, cross-dressing etc. etc. These people are often regarded as weird and disgusting. Collectively they are known as deviants, a highly negative label.
If we lived in the sort of enlightened, tolerant society where everyone minded their own damned business, this wouldn’t matter. Unfortunately, we live in the sort of society where unmarried mothers were institutionalised comparatively recently and you can find people who regard oral sex and masturbation as disgusting and wrong. (Aren’t they illegal in some states?)
The specifics of genetics, environment or “naturalness” aside, homosexuals don’t want to have homosexuality equated with, say, rubber fetishism or S/M. They don’t want to be regarded as deviants. Your arguments seem to imply that they are an aberration against nature or the result of an unhealthy environment, which is why you’ve been encountering so much hostility.
My own take is different - I don’t give a damn. I don’t care if homosexuals choose to be homosexual because they get to go to better parties. I don’t care if they’re weird or unnatural. I don’t care if it’s totally genetic. I don’t care if homosexuality has played a totally valid part in the survival, propagation and evolution of all species since life began. It doesn’t matter. We’re humans! We’re allowed to cook our food, light our world, send people to the Moon, watch golf. Flexible behaviour is what we’re famous for!
If we could get rid of the intolerance, you might find some homosexuals who felt they did choose their orientation, although from what Esprix has posted over in GD I doubt it. You might find some homosexuals who would even consider themselves an aberration, if being an aberration were allowed. But right now, not a chance.
matt: “Watch golf”? Ewww.
I agree completely with your post. It doesn’t matter why people are gay. It doesn’t impact on anyone but themselves and their partners. The fact that I live in a predominately gay neighborhood does nothing to me personally, except get me accustomed to seeing men holding hands.
One of my closest friends and his brother are gay. Does that mean they share some special gene? or that they were raised a certain way? Who cares? They’re gay. The “why” doesn’t change what is.
The sooner we learn to accept each other the way we are, the better off we’ll be.
What part of “nature and nurture” don’t you understand? There are, as the best minds on the subject have theorized, both genetic and environmental factors that could contribute to a person’s sexual orientation, all of which occur so early in development that they’ll never be able to pin it down.
See above.
I have no problems talking about the origins of my sexuality. More to the point - why the hell do you care? And I’d wager the majority of responses you’ve gotten haven’t been from gay folk, but rather that you’re making the assumption that they are.
Finally - we’ve found your problem! Immediately stop reading that 1950 psychology textbook - now. Go to http://www.amazon.com and order something a bit more up-to-date, and you’ll find that the past 50 years of research in sexuality have come up with entirely whole new set of theories and conclusions. (And, in case you’re missing the sarcasm, your paragraph as quoted has repeatedly been proven to be erroneous. Period.)
Oh, yes - those domineering lionesses and weak-willed male porcupines are corrupting the youth of the animal kingdom. Won’t somebody please think of the children?!?! :rolleyes:
Esprix
If you constantly had people asking you about the origins of your sexuality you might not want to talk about it anymore either. It’s boring. It’s especially boring when the person doing the asking is a moron.
You should give those 1950’s psychology textbooks back to the antique book collection.
and then…
Right, there are gay animals because they had bad parents. :rolleyes:
Whoops, sorry for the simulpost there Esprix…GMTA!
He doesn’t understand the nature part. I’m totally certain that’s the part he’s unclear on.
[stage whisper so everyone but Rook can hear]
After 6 pages, all he’s managed to do is rephrase the fucking first post he started with. It’s gone from “Is there a gay gene?” to “Homosexuality …duh…it’s caused by upbringing, right?” Isn’t that a bit ridiculous?
[/stage whisper so everyone but Rook can hear]
Rook Not that my opionion matters, since I’m just a gay person, but I didn’t have a domineering mother, my father conformed to proper gender role expectations and took us fishing and camping and bought a basketball hoop, etc, but yet I still thought it would be much more interesting to kiss the boys in first grade instead of chasing the girls as my next door neighbor did. If there was some incident that caused this to happen so early in my life, I can’t tell you what it is, because I don’t remember it. Me, I’d take that to mean it didn’t happen, but you go on hallucinating whatever you want. Why listen to me? You clearly know far more about homosexuals than I ever will.
That’s just another popular misconception, Rook.
A lot of studies have been done trying to determine if there’s a link between dysfunctional parenting and homosexuality, and no strong link has been found. Think about it for a minute. If dysfunctional families automatically resulted in homosexual children, then 100% of the children of certain families would be homosexual, and other types of families would never produce a single homosexual. But that’s not the case. Homosexuals come randomly and evenly from all types of backgrounds, all types of families, all social classes, and all cultures.
The theory that you’re quoting originally comes from Sigmund Freud, back 70 or 80 years ago. He was trying to speculate on the nature of homosexuality, and he came up with his theory only as a hypothesis. It was only based on observation of a small sub-class of homosexuals–those who were mentally ill and in therapy at the turn of the last century.
Modern research does not support Freud’s theory as applied to the entire homosexual community, and it is largely discounted today by the scientific community. The only place theories like that retain any currency is in those religion-based websites and publications which don’t mind pushing outdated and skewed research in order to promote an anti-gay agenda.
According to everything I’ve heard and read, homosexuals appear with roughly the same frequency in healthy families, and in dysfunctional families, and in all families in between. Even children raised by two lesbians or two gay men demonstrate the same frequency of homosexuality as children raised by straight parents. From all the evidence at hand, the quality or type of parenting seems to have little or no influence on the occurrence of homosexuality.
According to one recent study, there does seem to be a link between lesbianism and a strong, intellectual, independent same-sex parent (which is the exact opposite of the theory you quoted, by the way). But that same study doesn’t find any link at all between gay men and the quality of parenting. And other studies have found substantial evidence for genetic causation.
In short, there isn’t any justification for pointing the finger at the quality of parenting. At best, parenting is only one of many influences on a child’s sexual identity.
Why would Freud’s theory apply to homosexuality in the animal kingdom? That doesn’t even make sense. Bad parenting by animals?
Ooops! I only just noticed this passage from Rook. It refers indirectly to a popular myth about lesbians–that some or even most of them become lesbians because they have been sexually abused. This may be true once in a blue moon. But a 1990 study shows that the sexual abuse history of lesbians and heterosexual women is roughly the same. Here’s a passage from a site concerning popular myths about homosexuality:
"A 1990 study of lesbian and female students found that there was no significant difference in their traumatic heterosexual experiences. Both lesbians and heterosexual women reported the same number of traumatic experiences (incest, molestation, rape, physical abuse) (Brannock & Chapman, 1990). Most women said they began to question their sexual orientation because they felt strong emotional and/or sexual bonds with women and NOT because they felt an aversion towards men."
Here’s the link: http://www.capitalgay.com/information/myths.htm
JTR- actually this was from 1995
http://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/homo12.htm
“Gadpaille (1989, p. 1089; cf. also 1995, pp. 1324-25) gives the following summary: “Clearly, there is no one pathogenic family constellation in the backgrounds of all homosexuals. There are, however common denominators in the various family patterns: parenting figures of the same sex who are so weak or punitive and hostile as to make identification impossible or unacceptable, parent figures of the opposite sex who are so seductive or so demeaning and hostile or so emotionally disorganized that the child cannot learn to trust those of the opposite sex, and parents who successfully undermine and reject a child’s biological sex and the sex-specific behaviours and attitudes typical of it”. The homosexuality resulting from a difficult psychosexual development has the character of a “compromise” or defence mechanism; the homosexual person does not achieve heterosexual maturity in the psychosexual aspect of his development.”
But it does say this….
“There remains a partially unanswered question: whether the same genesis can be attributed to all homosexuals, given that the majority of them have never been studied with psychoanalytic methods.”
Though I believe that question would arise with any study of a large group of people
I can’t find it right now, but I also read that isolated groups of the same gender are 4 times more likely to engage in homosexual activity then people who constantly interact with the opposite sex. It seems to me, the environment has a lot more to do with it then you explain.
Rook, I’m intrigued by your information source. Do not hear this as a putdown, just as a critical comment.
Many people who write material, especially on a controversial subject such as this, tend to slant their content towards a particular viewpoint. The “Family Research Council” from Colorado Springs is one good example; they are a subsidiary of the “Focus on the Family” ministry which believes homosexuality to be the work of Satan and rightly condemned by all good Christians (and everybody else too). On the other hand, I would not trust a report on what Jerry Falwell had to say from most of the gay press – they are so convinced of his hatred that they would miss any context and place his remarks in a “he hates us” setting that would completely misconstrue him. A good example is the “Tinky Winky” tempest-in-a-teapot where you will find page after page in the gay press announcing with a snicker that “Jerry Falwell says Tinky Winky is gay.” In point of fact, a staffer helping put together his newsletter put in his own suspicions that the Teletubbies people were using Tinky Winky’s mannerisms to promote the acceptance of homosexuality. The first Jerry Falwell knew about it was when a reporter called him to find out about what had “led him to put this accusation in his newsletter.” Poor management on Falwell’s part, but poor reportage on the gay press’s too.
In this case, what we have is the opinions of a person affiliated with the Pontifical Gregorian University, an institution in Rome of the Roman Catholic Church, as reported by the Eternal Word Television Network, which is a Roman Catholic-oriented religious cable-TV network. Draw a deep breath; the Roman Catholic Church does have a firm stance on homosexuality – and, contrary to most modern sociology, teaches that the predominant purpose of sex is for reproduction. (We’ve been through that already.) On the other hand, they also have a firm commitment to intelligent scholarly inquiry. But I suspect they are not working with the full range of modern expertise on the subject, owing to the institutional stance of the Catholic Church. Further than that and I’ll be slamming an institution I respect, but you do certainly need to take the standards and attitudes of your source into account.
This is not to say you or they are wrong in mounting this argument – but it’s suspect from its source.
That’s kind of questionable. You’ve provided a link to a Vatican paper on homosexuality. It, in turn, is citing two lines from a chapter written by Warren Gadpaille within a psychology textbook. From the sounds of it, Gadpaille wrote the chapter but didn’t do the research himself–he based his writings on the research performed by others 20 and 30 years ago. Furthermore, the Vatican paper itself admits that Gadpaille’s conclusions are “strongly challenged” by mainstream psychology. (The reference to “those who defend homosexuality as normal” would seem to be a snide reference to the American Psychological Association.)
I won’t trash Gadpaille’s work, since I’m not familiar with it. But something more up-to-date and less “challenged” would be preferable, for starters. I strongly suspect that Gadpaille’s conclusions do not represent mainstream thinking any more.
I would appreciate it if you could find supporting references from other psychologists, and I would particularly appreciate it if you could find those references in non-religious material. I’m not anti-religion, but with some religious sites you kind of have to take literature about gays with a grain of salt.
As my own references that I already mentioned in my previous posts:
Here’s a link to an abstract on that study I already referenced in my previous post on gays and parenting.
http://www.apa.org/pi/l&gbib.html
Notice that it’s located on an American Psychological Association site (i.e., mainstream and impartial). Click on the link and scroll down to “Newcomb, M.D. (1985)”
In addition, here’s a link to an article on lesbian health issues.
http://www.ohanlan.com/lhr.htm#psychologic
Look for the section entitled “Psychologic Theories” and start reading about halfway down the second paragraph, where you find the number “39.” The Newcomb abstract is mentioned there (I picked up my description of the Newcomb study from this site), as are a number of other studies coming to similar conclusions.
Seriously, Rook, I’ll be happy to check out any material you want to reference. But I’m going to have a problem with links to religious sites. It’s just a fact of life–some churches simply aren’t honest about this stuff and are willing to display and sponsor a lot of junk research.
That’s kind of questionable. You’ve provided a link to a Vatican paper on homosexuality. It, in turn, is citing two lines from a chapter written by Warren Gadpaille within a psychology textbook. From the sounds of it, Gadpaille wrote the chapter but didn’t do the research himself–he based his writings on the research performed by others 20 and 30 years ago. Furthermore, the Vatican paper itself admits that Gadpaille’s conclusions are “strongly challenged” by mainstream psychology. (The reference to “those who defend homosexuality as normal” would seem to be a snide reference to the American Psychological Association.)
I won’t trash Gadpaille’s work, since I’m not familiar with it. But something more up-to-date and less “challenged” would be preferable, for starters. I strongly suspect that Gadpaille’s conclusions do not represent mainstream thinking any more.
I would appreciate it if you could find supporting references from other psychologists, and I would particularly appreciate it if you could find those references in non-religious material. I’m not anti-religion, but with some religious sites you kind of have to take literature about gays with a grain of salt.
As my own references that I already mentioned in my previous posts:
Here’s a link to an abstract on that study I already referenced in my previous post on gays and parenting.
http://www.apa.org/pi/l&gbib.html
Notice that it’s located on an American Psychological Association site (i.e., mainstream and impartial). Click on the link and scroll down to “Newcomb, M.D.”
In addition, here’s a link to an article on lesbian health issues.
http://www.ohanlan.com/lhr.htm#psychologic
Look for the section entitled “Psychologic Theories” and start reading about halfway down the second paragraph, where you find the number “39.” If you check the numbered references using the bibliography at the end of the article, the Newcomb abstract is mentioned there (I picked up my description of the Newcomb study from this site), along with a number of other studies on related subjects that arrive at similar conclusions.
Seriously, Rook, I’ll be happy to check out any material you want to reference. But I’m going to have a problem with links to religious sites. It’s just a fact of life–some churches simply aren’t honest about this stuff and are willing to display and sponsor a lot of junk research.
Ooops, sorry about the double post. I would appreciate it if a mod could delete the first one. (The second one was edited a bit more.)
And my remark “That’s kind of questionable” refers back to Rook’s post, not Polycarp’s.
It’s been a long day…
I believe that bias can occur on both sides of the debate……
“Some of those involved in the research are motivated not only by scientific but also by personal concerns. Many of the scientists who have been studying homosexuality are gay, as am I.”
The rest of the site does support homosexuality, which isn’t all that surprising
Do you believe there is a natural sense of morality that all humans have? Such as, it’s wrong to kill, or do you feel all morality is society based?