Er, yeah – what Homebrew said.
This isn’t intended as a hijack.
I’m a devout people-watcher.
(Before anyone asks: No, it’s not the same as being a peeping Tom).
There are a couple of unscientific observations I’ve made over the years with regards to the physical attributes of gay men, both pertain to the area of the neck/throat.
Compared to Heterosexual men:
Gay men are much less likely to have a visable Adam’s Apple
and
The overwhelming majority of Gay men have a very fat / swollen waddle area (the area under the jawline, between the chin and the throat). Even guys with as close to 0% body fat as possible usually look like they’re in desperate need of a platysmaplasty.
My own personal observations about left handedness & the shorter index:ring finger ratio tend to confirm the existing theories. Being that I’ve never personally seen anyone’s anterior hypothalamus, suprachiasmatic nucleus or anterior commissure, I can’t vouch for any of those.
You must not know many gay men.
Again, you must not know many gay men.
Now to the OP.
No clue really. I assume whatever makes straight people straight makes me gay. Not that it is important really.
I’m gay because I was born that way.
Nothing else to say. The end.
No offense, but expecting me to understand the genetic, environmental and/or chemical processes that went into making me gay is like expecting me to understand the nature of consciousness because I’m conscious.
I’m not a geneticist, a psychologist, a fertility researcher, or a nutritional anthropologist. I’m just a computer geek, and I knew I was gay when I was twelve. I was gay long before that. I really don’t know why.
Well, it seems like thoughts on the subjects are as varied as the individuals who posted. Thank you very much to all of you.
To those who answered that they didn’t know and/or didn’t care:
Thank you very much to you as well. It’s good to keep in mind that it doesn’t matter why. I, myself, am very self-analytical. I think about why I do what I do and like what I like fairly often. I expected that others would possibly be like me in that regard, and just wondered what they’d come up with. But it’s nice to be reminded sometimes that we are all, first and foremost, only ourselves.
This has been really interesting so far. See, you folks are different from me in that way. (Although we probably have more in common than not, overall.) I am always curious about people who have different experiences from myself. I probably ask too many questions. The answers are how I learn, and I love to learn. I don’t know any gay people IRL, aside from a few “friend of a friends” and long-lost classmates. That’s why I asked here. It was nice of everyone to be patient with me. 
Since we gay electrons are assembled here, any other questions you’re curious about?
Just chiming in that… I don’t know. I wanted to answer “an attraction to the opposite sex,” but that’s been said already.
IIRC, Freud conceived of two types of homosexuality:
- An overbearing mother whose dominance leads the son to take in her femininity, thus turning him away from heterosexuality.
- A boy shows that he is uncomfortable with the way the Oedipal complex is working out by protesting and refusing his mother’s love and instead choosing to be loved by his father.
The first one he considered to be fake (the man isn’t really gay, he just thinks he is). The second one is the true homosexual.
Freud’s theory isn’t much subscribed to anymore. He also had a complex theory about the nose as a symbolic substitute for the genitals.
From what I’ve heard (apologies to anyone who’s mentioned it before) is that if women get the 2 copies of the male ‘gay’ gene, it makes them extra horny (for lack of being able to think of a better word) This more than offsets the chances of a man being gay.
Also the more brothers a man has, the more likely his is to be gay. This doesn’t work with sisters nor lesbians for some reason. This was in New Scientist a while ago.
Non expert again, read somewhere that recently the experts realized Freud had it backward. A boy is born gay, his parents start to realize this when he is about three (could be nine if his parents are dense), his father starts to feel angry and pull away from him, his mother starts to get overprotective of him.
I want to echo another poster with sense: Anybody has the right to love whomever they damn please.
And will, regardless of whether the right is recognized.
I also want to mention that bisexuality exists. Gay isn’t an on-off switch for everybody, and if there are genetic reasons for it, then there must be as many genes working together as there are for human height, or for horse coat color.
Anyone out there feel him or herself purely gay, 100%, no possibility otherwise? (as many straights seem to feel themselves purely straight) Anyone feel him or herself a purely equal 50-50? How big is your Adam’s apple? Are you left handed?
Freud was also constipated most of his life. Says it all really…
I don’t know what this means. No “male ‘gay’ gene” has been identified.
Nitpick: even if it had, it wouldn’t really be a “male” gene if it were expressed in a female, and “2 copies” means that mother would transmit a copy as well, again calling the term “male” into question.
I’ve never seen this in the literature. Are you thinking of something like Turner’s syndrome? Klinefelter’s? I.e., a problem in the number of X and Y chromosomes? IIRC there was a small-scale study of girls with one of these syndromes who were considered “hypermasculinized” and a disproportionate number were lesbian. However, don’t get me started on the methodological problems with this study, not least of which is that (as in the Nova Sex: Unknown idiocy) the parents knew that there was a difference between the chromosomes and the secondary sex characteristics.
Can you rephrase this? I don’t understand how this follows on the statements before it. Thanks.
“Anyone feel him or herself a purely equal 50-50?”
To the extent that I’ve analyzed it, I’m pretty close to 50-50. I’ve been in emotionally and physically satsifying relationships with both men and women. About 4 years ago I started a relationship with the woman is who is now my wife. She knows about my sexuality and doesn’t care in the slightest.
My late brother was gay. I have two other brothers that are heterosexual. As we were all raised in the same household, by the same parents, and in roughly the same manner (of course there were some differences, but none of us was singled out for any particular attention, treatment,etc.), I’m given to the belief that there is a biologic reason for each of us turning out the way we did. What that biologic reason is, I have no idea.
"Even guys with as close to 0% body fat as possible usually look like they’re in desperate need of a platysmaplasty. " Bob Paris, former Mr. Universe, isn’t in desparate need of anything except directions to my house.
Plnnr- with a sizeable Adam’s apple and ambidextrous (hey, maybe there’s something to this after all).
That’s the point. I suspect it’s mostly biological in my case - but the biology is juust really, really complex. Probably quite a few genes, and I believe there ARE studies suggesting a link to the uterine environment. Plus there’s the way genes interact with the environment - the gene may not make me gay per se, but it may somehow predispose me to a type of behavior that results in me getting socialized ‘funny’, and that’s the cause of my queerness.
Of course, I second the notion that it doesn’t REALLY matter. But it’s still interesting to think about. Of course no matter what your physical sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity may be, it doesn’t matter because it’s not something you should have to justify with biology.
Still interesting though.
Wow, that’s in depth . . . I couldn’t really agree or disagree with that - cuz I haven’t observed that carefully. But personally, I’ve always suspected that something in the physiognomy that could clue me in. Some of the time. If there is a genetic component, why couldn’t it effect ones physical features as well? No doubt people end up queer for different reasons, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some physical characteristic that a lot of gay guys share. After all, every once in a while, I see someone in a magazine and can tell immediately that they’re gay. Sure, maybe it’s self-delusion, but I’ve always wondered if there’s something to gaydar at the physical level, rather than something you can tell in someone’s mannerism.
Oy, the perils of written communication. I’d like to note that I was talking about alleles of the same gene in my example, and that multiple genes would be a different thing. But the concept still holds.
I can’t think of any right now, Shoshana, but thank you for asking.
Oh…wait. I guess I do have one.
What term is best used to descibe your sexuality? “Gay” seems to be the most widespread, but do some people prefer “homosexual?” Do lesbians prefer “lesbian” to the more general “gay?” I’ve heard lots of people (on TV and such) refer to themselves as “queer” but that seems more like the “n word” in that it’s accepted amongst the group but not okay if used by outsiders. (Not that I see why anyone wants to say the “n word” at all, but that’s another topic altogether.) I know that “fag” and “dyke” are not okay. They sound mean, anyhow.
I’m trying hard not to offend in this thread, as well as everyday life, so it would be good to know the best way of describing things.
crosses fingers and toes, hoping this isn’t an offensive question
hyperjes: Fag and dyke are like nigger, perfectly acceptable if the relevant person is saying the word. Or if you are of the same type (F, D, N). Or if you are an honourary FDN talking to your FDN friends. It’s all a matter of politics: do you hide from the word because of its bad connotations or do you steal the word from your oppressors and make it your own? Fag comes from faggot, referring to the bundle of sticks used in the fire when burning men who lie with men as with women. Nigger comes from negre meaning “black (skinned)”. Don’t know where dyke comes from (maybe The Netherlands?). Point is, all these words are being converted from oppressive to liberating. Gay is on the other track, having been unoffensive, adjusted to mean homosexual and is now being used pejoratively (although I think that’s about straight people becoming more comfortable with multiple sexualities through exposure than outright homophobia).
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JohnBckWLD: No survey of gay people is as accurate as a survey of a random sample of the general population because many people don’t know they’re gay or are too scared to say they are. No matter how accurately defined your subject group is, it won’t include every “type” of gay man, skewing your results. Heck, even the best gaydar isn’t 100% accurate (and generally it’s never tested scientifically).
sultana of slash: Meanwhile, remember that all pan-human statistics fall on the bell curve. Sometimes it’s tall and thin, sometimes it’s short and fat, sometimes it’s on a lean, but it’s always a bell. So: some are 100% gay, some are 100% straight, the rest are somewhere in between (though there’s no observable difference between 100% and 99%).
Ambidextrous gay geek with adam’s apple and is 99% gaydar-proof.
I’m assuming I was born gay, the same way I was born transsexual.