Geez, I explain that whole story of mine about how I convinced a hot lezzie to switch teams, for krissakes and not ONE little pat on the back? Not ONE word of encouragement or “Bravo” for making the world just a wee bit brighter for straight, testosterone-fueled males everywhere? Not one cuing of that song “Real American Hero” from the Budweiser commercials . . . ??
(Sulks away, head low, tearing up). 
[quote]jlesk68 wrote:
Can’t be genetic, they can’t reproduce among themselves and pass the “gay gene” on.[/quote]
Can’t tell if you’re joking or not. They can reproduce if they choose to, obviously. Also, if genetics was really as simple as you propose, most childhood cancers wouldn’t exist.
Homosexuality is like all other behaviors. It is a combination of both nature and nurture that determines it.
Certainly some genetic factors predispose one to being gay, but I do believe certain environmental factors come into play.
To say gay people are “sick” or “immoral” is just fucking retarded. It could very easily be genetic. Plenty of genes that usually don’t allow one to reproduce get passed along just fine recessively for generations.
Plus, how many gay men do you think lead perfectly normal, male/female with kid lives?
Tom Cruise anyone?
[quote]jlesk68 wrote:
Can’t be genetic, they can’t reproduce among themselves and pass the “gay gene” on.[/quote]
lots of animals present with gay tendencies, e.g. bonobo’s our closest relative like to give and take for fun!
I summarized this once before in a previous thread - it’s an excerpt from an article by John Derbyshire:
[i]
What causes homosexuality?
In the first place, the main point I was making was not about homosexuality, but about current attitudes, and the metaphysics that underlies them. Whether homosexuals are indeed “born that way” is one question; whether it is “taken for granted” in modern society that they are is a separate and independent question. Either could be true without the other’s being true. That the second is true seems to me too obvious to be worth arguing. Even the Roman Catholic Church, while condemning homosexual acts as sinful, concedes that the predilection to such acts may be inborn, in which case homosexuals “are called to chastity.” (Article 2359 of the current Catechism.)
Leaving that aside, what are the causes of homosexuality �?? the predilection, not the acts (which I assume to be caused by free will prompted by the predilection)? I can list a baker’s dozen of theories that I have heard or seen written up at one time or another. In very approximate order of scientific respectability, as best I can judge it, the theories are:
u Satan.[/u] Homosexuality may be a manifestation of Satan’s work. While the least scientific of current theories, this one is probably the most widely believed, taking the world at large. Most devout Muslims, for example, believe it, and so do many Christians.
u Social Construction.[/u] There is no such thing as homosexuality. There are only heterosexual and homosexual acts, which different cultures regard differently. The notion of “homosexuality” as a personality attribute is a 19th-century invention.
u Brain damage.[/u] Some insult to the tissues of the brain, perhaps at birth or in infancy, causes homosexuality.
u Choice.[/u] People choose to prefer their own sex over the other.
u Family influences in childhood.[/u] The Freudian belief is that having a weak father and/or dominant mother can form the child’s personality in the direction of homosexuality.
u Social stress.[/u] Rats kept in overpopulated environments, even when sufficient food and access to females are available, will become aggressively homosexual after the stress in the environment rises above a certain level.
u Imprinting.[/u] The individual’s early sexual history can “imprint” certain tendencies on animals and humans. Many homosexuals report having been same-sexually molested in childhood or youth.
u Socialization theories.[/u] The high levels of homosexual bonding in some ancient and primitive societies suggests that the common mores of a culture have some power to socialize large numbers of people into homosexuality.
u Genetics, direct.[/u] Homosexuality is the expression of some gene, or some combination of genes.
u Womb environment - too much of a good thing.[/u] The presence of certain hormone imbalances during critical periods of gestation can have the effect of hyper-masculinizing the brain of a male infant. Paradoxically - there are plausible biological arguments - this might lead to the infant becoming homosexual.
u Infection.[/u] Homosexuality may be caused by an infectious agent - a germ or a virus. This is the Cochran/Ewald theory, which made a cover story for the February 1999 Atlantic Monthly.
u Genetics, indirect.[/u] Homosexuality may be an undesirable (from the evolutionary point of view) side effect of some genetic defense against a disease �?? analogous to the sickle-cell anemia mutation, a by-product of genetic defenses against malaria, negative to the organism but nothing like as negative, net-net, as susceptibility to malaria.
u Womb environment - too much of the wrong thing.[/u] Here the effect of the rogue hormones is to feminize the brain of a male infant. (I assume that there are theories corresponding to 10 and 13 for female infants, though I have never seen them documented.)
Note that theories number 9, 10, 12, 13, and conditionally (depending on the age at injury or infection) 3 and 11, could all be taken as saying that homosexuality is “inborn,” while only two of these six theories have anything to do with genetics. The confusion between “genetic” and “inborn” is epidemic among the general public, however, to the despair of science writers. To readers suffering from that confusion - an actual majority of those who wrote to me suffer from it - I recommend the purchase of a good dictionary.
Which is it?
Which of these theories is true? In the current state of our understanding, I don’t believe that anyone can say for sure. From what I have seen of the scientific literature, I should say that numbers 12 and 13 currently hold the strongest positions, with much, though I think declining, interest and research in 9 and 10, modest but growing interest in 11, and some lingering residual attachment to 6, 7, and 8. The other theories are not taken seriously by anyone doing genuine science, so far as I know. If anyone has information to the contrary, I should be interested to look at it �?? though I should only be interested in research written up in a respectable peer-reviewed journal of the human sciences.
My own favorite is the infection theory, number 11. I favor it because it seems to me to be the most parsimonious �?? always a good reason for favoring a scientific theory. Until an actual agent of infection can be identified, however, the infection theory must remain speculative and the evidence circumstantial.
The theories involving genetics all suffer from mathematical problems. Homosexuality imposes such a huge “negative Darwinian load” on the affected organism that it is hard to see how genes inclining to homosexuality could persist for long in any population. Various ingenious theories have been cooked up in attempts to finesse the issue, but nobody has been able to make the evolutionary math work. Which is baffling, because there are persistent nagging hints, in identical-twin studies for instance, that homosexuality does have some genetic component. Science is full of conundrums like this, to the delight of unscientific cranks, who leap on them as evidence of supernatural intervention. History shows that these puzzles always get resolved sooner or later in a natural way, however, sending the “God of the Gaps” traipsing off to find a new place where he can hang his starry cloak for a while.
The “socialization” theories, while not scientifically contemptible, do not hold up well under rigorous examination. It is indeed true that large numbers of men and women, deprived of the companionship of the opposite sex by confinement or social custom, will form erotic bonds with their own sex. As soon as the constraints are removed, however, the great majority revert to heterosexuality. Graduates of English boys’ boarding schools marry and raise families; the convict who spent his sentence bullying weaker inmates into giving him sexual gratification will, upon his release, immediately seek out old girlfriends. Lab studies �?? measuring sexual arousal caused by various kinds of images, for instance �?? confirm that the great majority of people everywhere are, in their inner lives, heterosexual, however they may express themselves under the constraints of their immediate environment.
The “choice” theory, which most of my correspondents seem to cleave to, has as its main supporting evidence the fact that some people have been “converted” from a homosexual lifestyle to a heterosexual one, usually by counseling, often by religious conversion. I don’t myself find this very impressive. The numbers involved are small, and these conversions seem to fall into the category of fringe phenomena you are bound to get when investigating something as complex and variable as the human personality. [/i]
[quote]ephrem wrote:
MMG wrote:
Before i start this is not meant to offend anyone.
Yesterday a programe in the UK called ‘make me a muslim’ came on, and on there an islamic preist talking to a homosexual said that he believes that a person makes a conscious choice to be gay, while the homosexual said that it is something you are born with and can not choose.
This got me thinking, and was wondering what other people thought on the topic as to whether you make a conscious choice or are born gay?
I personally dont know and cant get my head round this topic.
…assuming you are heterosexual: at which point in your life did you decide to become heterosexual?
[/quote]
good point, i dont ever remember choosing not to like dick! i do agree that homosexuality is a bit of nature and nurture, but more nuture.
[quote]Beowolf wrote:
…
Plus, how many gay men do you think lead perfectly normal, male/female with kid lives?
Tom Cruise anyone?[/quote]
When did Tom Cruise start acting normal?
[quote]tedro wrote:
CrewPierce wrote:
They just had a news article last week where scientist could turn fruit flies gay and then straight again by altering their genetic code. So if this theory holds true for humans it would certainly prove that people are born gay.
I know that my best friend for many years now was born gay. Haha the first CD he ever bought was Madonna so yea that sums it up there.
As far as people born with the lisp and saying fabulous that would come from the culture they associate with. Gangsters aren�??t born talking “ghetto” with their asses hanging out of their pants, but they take on their stereotypes.
Let’s face it, there are stereotypes because they are true lol.
You left out one very important part. They turned the flies gay with a combination of genetic mutation AND drugs.
I have serious doubts that they will ever find a specific gene that controls whether or not one is gay. I believe hormonal in balances throughout the gestation period and adolescence is the most plausible cause.
[/quote]
i do remember an experiment were they turned a gene in mice off (think it had to do with smelling pheromones) and then they would try and mate with both males and females. it looked like they couldnt tell the difference between the two.
thinking about it from this point, maybe gay people have a defect in this gene and cant tell the difference (i.e. not that they dont know what a male is, but more to do with the body not being able to comprehend whether to be with a man or women in evolutionary terms, if that makes any sense). Then bring nurture into it, e.g. as mentioned earlier the man/women finds it easier to get a relationship with the same sex and hey presto homosexualtiy.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
And God, if he exists, does not care about it.[/quote]
How do you figure? Every channel of communication humans had with Him points to the contrary.
[quote]lixy wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
And God, if he exists, does not care about it.
How do you figure? Every channel of communication humans had with Him points to the contrary.[/quote]
He told me. I trust my communications with God more than others. The others all appear to have an agenda.
Oh yeah…another thing…if this thead waa about 2 women lickin’ each others kitty the thread wouldn’t have been moved to THIS forum, it would have been placed under SAMA.
Dang, you guys “suck” the fun outta everythang!! lol
[quote]CrewPierce wrote:
tedro wrote:
CrewPierce wrote:
They just had a news article last week where scientist could turn fruit flies gay and then straight again by altering their genetic code. So if this theory holds true for humans it would certainly prove that people are born gay.
I know that my best friend for many years now was born gay. Haha the first CD he ever bought was Madonna so yea that sums it up there.
As far as people born with the lisp and saying fabulous that would come from the culture they associate with. Gangsters aren�??t born talking “ghetto” with their asses hanging out of their pants, but they take on their stereotypes.
Let’s face it, there are stereotypes because they are true lol.
You left out one very important part. They turned the flies gay with a combination of genetic mutation AND drugs.
I have serious doubts that they will ever find a specific gene that controls whether or not one is gay. I believe hormonal in balances throughout the gestation period and adolescence is the most plausible cause.
Lol oops my bad…I didn’t read the article too closely since it already went with what I believed.
By the way I know two brothers that are about the same age. One turned out to be gay while the other straight. This would suggest that since they were both raised in the same situation, that at least part of it is genetic.
[/quote]
There are also stories of identical twins where one is gay and the other is not. Based on this one could easily claim it is purely choice.
[quote]Beowolf wrote:
Homosexuality is like all other behaviors. It is a combination of both nature and nurture that determines it.
Certainly some genetic factors predispose one to being gay, but I do believe certain environmental factors come into play.
To say gay people are “sick” or “immoral” is just fucking retarded. It could very easily be genetic. Plenty of genes that usually don’t allow one to reproduce get passed along just fine recessively for generations.
[/quote]
One could also argue that sexual predators are also the victims of genetic factors and/or hormonal imbalances, yet I think we would all agree that they are sick and immoral. Genetics are not an excuse to act immorally. We all have the ability to make choices on whether or not we should act on these genetic impulses. Lixy pointed out earlier that polygamy is likely genetic, yet few will claim that it is moral.
[quote]BodyBldgBabe wrote:
I worked with a girl who was gay & became best friends with her. After getting to know her (in an un-gay way - ha!) she was actually bi but usually dated women because it was easier for her to attract a lesbian than it was a man.
She was a former college athlete, scholarships for swimming & basketball & still holds school records. Shes 5’10", slender/athletic body, holds a Masters in Exercise Physiology and one of the most intellegant women I’ve ever met.
It was sad men didn’t “notice” her because she had so much to offer. She was a total jock, short hair, no makeup, and only wore a dress one time the entire 8yrs I knew her.
In her case I always thought she was “gay” because it was easier to find love & affection from a women than it was a man.
I’ve also met guys that would fool around with other guys when they weren’t getting anything from their wives or girlfriends. So again their homosexuality behavior was acted out because of the lack of heterosexual physical contact.
So, maybe if men weren’t so picky and actually paid attention to those of us who do not rate high on the hottie scale; and if wives and girlfiends would have sex on a regular basis with their men, maybe just maybe there would be an end to homosexuality!! lol
I however am a fan of the weener, so what the heck do I know???
B-3[/quote]
What an excellent post!!
If men can’t hook up with any women, they become gay to attain intimacy, and the same holds true for women. This implies that some individuals are designed to attract members of the opposite sex while others do not have such qualities. They are pre-determined to not be attractive to opposites, then choose to find others similar to themselves.
The exceptions here would be the woman who is stunningly beautiful yet is gay, or the Brad Pitt look-a-like who is a flamer.
Very thought provoking post!!!
[quote]Defekt wrote:
There are plenty of disorders where people are born with all sorts of things wrong with their brain and I don’t see why someone couldn’t be born gay. (I only call it a disorder because speaking from an evolutionary standpoint, it isn’t very beneficial to be gay) Personally I think that most gay people are born gay, and like lizard king said, a small amount just pretend.
That being said, I really hate the stereotypical gay man, and I’ve sadly found that a lot of homosexuals fit this stereotype. You are NOT born talking with an exaggerated lisp and saying fabulous. Frankly these people get on my nerves. I have nothing wrong if you have sex with men, fall in love with me, or are generally attracted to men. Although I do hate if you fit the definition of a sterotypical gay person.[/quote]
I’ve said this before on here and was roundly attacked. I DON’T LIKE flaunters anywhere around me. If an anti-man wants to wear lace doillies and eye liner in public, I WILL tell him to get the fuck away from me. A man should at least dress like a man when out in public, not like some deranged moron from Cabaret.
[quote]BodyBldgBabe wrote:
Oh come on you guys…lets keep it fun and not bring religion into it and start making me feel guilty! Lets just continue to post lots of pictures of really hot guys getting all sweaty while expressing their man love to each other. Someone can post videos or just audios of them gagging on each others money shot. Don’t forget to send pictures of the explosion ooozing out of the side of male “a”'s mouth, while male “b” licks it up clean.
Now…if this thread was about two girls gettin’ it on Jesus wouldn’t be mentioned at all.
So give me a thread with pictures, videos, and lots of man love so I can scream “hit it” and “give it to him in the pooper!!!”
ROFLMAO!!!
ROFLMAO!!!
ROFLMAO!!!
Damn, I crack myself up sometimes!!![/quote]
Okay.
Looks have nothing to do with one’s sexual orientation. There are plenty of INCREDIBLY hot lesbians (my “ex” was one of them) and plenty of very good looking, model-esque gay guys. Ask any straight woman – they’ll often joke about how “all the best looking guys are gay.”
Looks aren’t relevant to the equation.
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
BodyBldgBabe wrote:
I worked with a girl who was gay & became best friends with her. After getting to know her (in an un-gay way - ha!) she was actually bi but usually dated women because it was easier for her to attract a lesbian than it was a man.
She was a former college athlete, scholarships for swimming & basketball & still holds school records. Shes 5’10", slender/athletic body, holds a Masters in Exercise Physiology and one of the most intellegant women I’ve ever met.
It was sad men didn’t “notice” her because she had so much to offer. She was a total jock, short hair, no makeup, and only wore a dress one time the entire 8yrs I knew her.
In her case I always thought she was “gay” because it was easier to find love & affection from a women than it was a man.
I’ve also met guys that would fool around with other guys when they weren’t getting anything from their wives or girlfriends. So again their homosexuality behavior was acted out because of the lack of heterosexual physical contact.
So, maybe if men weren’t so picky and actually paid attention to those of us who do not rate high on the hottie scale; and if wives and girlfiends would have sex on a regular basis with their men, maybe just maybe there would be an end to homosexuality!! lol
I however am a fan of the weener, so what the heck do I know???
B-3
What an excellent post!!
If men can’t hook up with any women, they become gay to attain intimacy, and the same holds true for women. This implies that some individuals are designed to attract members of the opposite sex while others do not have such qualities. They are pre-determined to not be attractive to opposites, then choose to find others similar to themselves.
The exceptions here would be the woman who is stunningly beautiful yet is gay, or the Brad Pitt look-a-like who is a flamer.
Very thought provoking post!!!
[/quote]
My problem with gay people is the fact that they like to rub it in your face (being gay, and their penises). When I go out in public I dont want to see you and your life partner all over each other, straight or gay. Quit making it your life goal to inform me that you like penises. And quit wearing pink shirts.
P.S. Does anyone else get shitty when your driving and you see a VW beatle and start thinking “oh this bitch is gonna be hot” only to pull up next to it and see a Ryan Seacrest look-alike? Bullshit.
[quote]dk44 wrote:
My problem with gay people is the fact that they like to rub it in your face (being gay, and their penises). When I go out in public I dont want to see you and your life partner all over each other, straight or gay. Quit making it your life goal to inform me that you like penises. And quit wearing pink shirts.
P.S. Does anyone else get shitty when your driving and you see a VW beatle and start thinking “oh this bitch is gonna be hot” only to pull up next to it and see a Ryan Seacrest look-alike? Bullshit.[/quote]
As my flatmate just pointed out
“being gay is fashionable nowadays”
[quote]Curodd wrote:
MOST homosexuals ive come across are act very feminine(i also live officially one of the top 5 gayest cities in the world, sweeeeeeeet) So ive though that perhaps it has to do with an elevated ratio of estrogen to test. [/quote]
Ha! Go to Gold’s Gym in San Francisco and you will see some of the buffest, macho men lifting heavy weights and kissing each other. [Sorry BBBabe, I dont have any boy-on-boy pics of this for you]. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, my observation is that there are as many macho gay guys as there are effete ones. I have to admit though that it seems there are more “butch” lesbians than “femmes”. I may be wrong about that though.
But I understand what you mean about using binary logic with this question. BBBabe, brings up a good point ,too. If a man has on occasion put a dick in his mouth or a women licked the kee-kat, does that make them gay? How about the prison population?
It is an interesting thing to discuss, but my position is
I dont know if it’s environmental or genetic. Is my preference for certain type of women environmental or genetic? I sure as hell dont want to suffer the violence of psychoanalysis or chemical intervention to try and change my preference and I dont see why gay people should have to do so either. The only problem with gays qua gays is the discrimination they have to put up with.
If it is genetic, do we really want to purge the gene pool of gays? And if so, which group is next and who gets to make this decision? Will the human race be reduced to just two or three types?
