What makes us Gay?

I guess every gay person will have his/her take on what "causes" him/her to be gay?

My personal situation mirrors one school of thought - protective mother vs distant father. But I have yet to figure out how that makes me one.

Call me a late bloomer or a dimwit, if you like. It took quite a long while before I fully come to terms with my identity as a gay man. The process started with the mind (I rationalised about being gay, the pros and cons), then the body, followed lastly by the heart (thanks to darby, who opened up this side of me).

There are a number of theories on what makes one a gay (see the article below which was first published in Trevvy). To my mind, all scientific theories don't explain the affairs of the heart. The defining moment for me as a gay man was when I found the man I love, and who gave me his love in return.

Mcdull

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"If in fact it is true - and I’ve asked doctors this - that you are genetically born a homosexual, because that’s the nature of the genetic random transmission of genes, you can’t help it. So why should we criminalize it?"

These recent remarks by Minister Mentor Lee must have brought a guarded smile to the faces of even the most politically jaded gay Singaporean. After years of either ignoring the homosexual issue or considering it to be a deviant and unhealthy lifestyle choice, the establishment – or at least the man who created it – has finally realised what we as gay people have known since we first found ourselves attracted to the same sex – you can’t help it.

Remember the first time you felt attracted to another person of the same sex and thought it might be a phase that will go away but never did? Most gay men know from (often painful) personal experience that their homosexual inclination was never a deliberate choice. Yet opponents of gay rights choose to disregard our personal experiences and continue to portray homosexuality as a sinful choice that should be criminalised.

Cue the scramble from conservatives to disprove the notion that homosexuality is decided from birth. Why the brouhaha? If the government does decide that homosexuality is innate – like race and sex – then there can be no justification for discrimination, not just in the form of laws criminalising gay sex, but extending beyond that into other social issues such as marriage and laws protecting homosexuals from bigotry.

This is not to say that Singapore is on its way to become the Netherlands of Southeast Asia – ‘Asian’ values and traditions are far too entrenched, and we must never forget who our neighbours are – but there is definitely reason for gay men and women to feel at least slightly optimistic, even as social conservatives embark on a public relations offensive to convince the local population that homosexuality is not an inborn condition.

Much as we might all prefer to be creative writers and dancers, knowledge of the hard science serves to elucidate the difficulties faced by homosexual men and women alike. It becomes more important that gay men can tell their genes apart from jeans when homophobes try to use biology to deny us our rights.

For much of the 20th century, the dominant thinking among scientists connected homosexuality to upbringing. Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud speculated that overprotective mothers and distant fathers helped make boys gay. It was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed "homosexuality" from its manual of mental disorders.

Then, in 1991, gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay announced to the world he had found a key difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men he studied. LeVay showed that a tiny clump of neurons of the anterior hypothalamus - which is believed to control sexual behavior - was, on average, a portion of the anterior hypothalamus that is believed to control sexual behaviour was almost twice as large in heterosexual as in homosexual men. Theoretically, the clumps could have changed size because of homosexual behaviour. Nevertheless the study jump-started the effort to prove a biological basis for homosexuality.

The controlled male twins study of Bailey and Pillard (1991) showed a 52% concordance of homosexuality in monozygotic twins, 22% for dizygotic twins, and 11% for adoptive brothers of homosexual men. This research seems to suggest that “gay gene” has a 50% penetrance factor, a measure of the likelihood of gene expression.

Then, the big news. In 1993, Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute in the USA discovered that 33 out of 40 pairs of homosexual brothers had the same genetic markers in the Xq28 region of their X chromosome. This finding, though non-conclusive, helps to crystallise the theory of a "gay gene".

Critics of the X chromosome theory point out inadequacies of the study. The only research team to confirm the original 1993 results was the same team of scientists. Hamer’s team has failed to locate similar gene correspondencies in lesbian X chromosomes.

The focus of sexual-orientation research has since shifted to biological causes, and there hasn’t been much science produced to support the old theories tying homosexuality to upbringing. Freud may have been seeing the effect rather than the cause when he posits that homosexuality is a result of overprotective mothers and distant fathers. In recent years, researchers who suspect that homosexuality is inborn - whether because of genetics or events happening in the womb - have looked everywhere for clues: prenatal hormones, birth order, finger length, fingerprints, stress, sweat, eye blinks, spatial relations, hearing, handedness, and even "gay" sheep!

Take finger length for instance. Men in general have shorter index fingers in relation to their ring fingers. In women, the lengths are generally about the same. Researchers have found that lesbians generally have ratios closer to males.Other studies have shown masculinized results for lesbians in inner-ear functions and eye-blink reactions to sudden loud noises, and feminized patterns for gay men on certain cognitive tasks like spatial perception and remembering the placement of objects.

Willliam Reiner, psychiatrist and urologist with the University of Oklahoma, has evaluated hundreds of cases regarding medical conditions where boys born with severely inadequate penises were castrated and have his parents raise him as a girl. At the end of the study Reiner found that nurture, even when surgery is done soon after birth, cannot trump nature. This means that of all the boys who were raise as girls, not one of them were found to be sexually attracted to males. They all remain sexually attracted to females.

More recently, Brain Scan studies done in 2005 by Swedish researchers found that while straight men’s brain were sexually aroused by female urine compounds, gay men’s brain were aroused by male sweat compounds. Perhaps this explains why we are so attracted to hot perspiring men. This study yet again connecting the hypothalamus to sexual orientation comes right after the studies with sheep. It seems that about 8% of domestic rams are exclusively attracted to other rams. Further investigation revealed that a region of the brains similar to the one LeVay identified in human brains was also larger in straight rams than gay ones.

In June 2005, scientists in Vienna announced that they had isolated a master genetic switch for sexual orientation in the fruit fly. Once the switch was flicked, the genetically altered female flies rebuffed overtures from males and instead attempted to mate with other females, adopting the elaborate courting dance and mating songs that males use.

And now in a highly unsual move, the National Insitutes of Health in America is sponsoring a $2.5 million large-scale, five-year genetic study of gay brothers. Relying on a robust sample of 1,000 gay-brother pairs and the latest advancements in genetic screening, this study promises to bring some clarity to the murky area of what role genes may play in homosexuality.

Canadian researchers have consistently documented a "big-brother effect," finding that the chances of a boy being gay increase with each additional older brother he has. For some reason birth order does not appear to play a role with lesbians. So accordingly a male with three older brothers is three times more likely to be gay than one with no older brothers, though there’s still a better than 90 percent chance he will be straight. They argue that this results from a complex interaction involving hormones, antigens, and the mother’s immune system.

But nobody’s sure what’s causing it.

Regardless of what the science says – and they do suggest a correlation though not causation between sexual orientation and innate biological events – opponents of gay rights would never be satisfied. Just look at the recent debate on climate change.

While proving sexual orientation is inborn would make it easier to frame the debate as simply a matter of civil rights. We should note that other rights such as freedom of religion in most places around the world enjoyed protection long before inborn traits like race and sex.

For something we all know deep down inside that is innate to us, it seems to be a grave injustice that we have to justify our existence is not some freak of nature.