Lars Eighner's Adult Homepage
Lars Eighner's Adult Homepage Text Section

Gay Cosmos

Becoming Gay

By the late Nineteenth century biologists and students of human behavior recognized that the facts of human sexuality differed greatly from the facts of animal sexualness. One of the most puzzling aspects of human sexuality was, and is, the lack of an apparent biological basis for the development of sexual preference.

The question of how human sexual preference develops should have occurred to anyone with a better than rudimentary knowledge of the facts of human sexual biology. But then, perhaps the subject of gravity should have occurred to the first person who witnessed an object falling. Most people were heterosexual. Human heterosexuality served the purpose of human procreation well enough. The surface similarities of human sexuality and animal sexualness were obvious, while the profound differences were below the surface. Most of the potential investigators were heterosexual, and anyone comfortable in his or her sexuality is likely to feel that it is natural and innate and inevitable. Although early investigators often went far wrong in trying to formulate their explanations, the realization that there was anything to explain about human sexuality can be counted as a remarkable achievement.

Animal mechanisms, such as pheromones and mating behaviors, direct individuals into sexual acts that are likely to produce offspring. Not only do these mechanisms rule out homosexual couplings, they also prevent cross-species sex acts, sex acts involving individuals of nonfertile ages, and so forth. When it is recognized that the animal mechanisms are missing or disabled in human beings, the most reasonable prediction that could be made upon the facts of human sexual biology is that human beings would be sexual in the most general possible way.

The facts are in good agreement with that prediction: The range of human sexuality is enormous. Human beings seem to be capable of being aroused by persons of either sex, by persons of all ages, by animals, by literature, by music, by inanimate objects, and so forth. And if this is appalling to some people, it is also what anyone who knew the facts of human biology should expect.

The trouble of relating the facts to the prediction is not a matter of the range of human sexuality taken as a whole, but that few or no individuals exhibit the whole range. What needs explaining is not that the range of human sexuality is so great, but that most individuals exhibit only a small portion of the range. Humanity as whole is pansexual, that is more generally sexual than even the term bisexual suggests. But most human beings are far narrower in their sexual abilities, and usually are narrower yet in their actual sexual activities.

Although in the recent past heterosexuality has often been taken for granted and the burden of explaining itself has been placed on homosexuality, at least some early investigators realized that the origins of human heterosexuality are just as obscure. Those early investigators were not especially wise or unbiased. They focused their inquiries on human heterosexuality because they realized it wanted explanation and because they considered it the predominantly important aspect of human sexuality. They thought homosexuality was rare and insignificant, and if they sought to explain human homosexuality at all, they cast the explanation in terms of some failure in heterosexual development. Almost all of them turned their attention to male sexuality because they thought women were passive and because they could not perceive an act as sexual unless it involved at least one penis. But at least they did realize that it was not enough to say that heterosexuality was natural and to leave it that, and they did remove the discussion of sexuality from the shadow of superstition and religion.

Perhaps the flower of the early inquiries concerning human sexuality is Freud's Oedipal theory.

To oversimplify a great deal, Freud pictured the male infant as a pleasure-seeking creature whose principal source of gratification was his mother. The pleasure the infant sought and the gratification he received was hardly recognizable as sexual. The infant depended upon his mother for nutrition, for comfort, for warmth, for virtually every necessity of life. The infant would naturally expect his wants to be satisfied by the mother and would demand satisfaction of her simply because she had always been the source of everything the infant wanted and got. The mother's affection was not merely something nice to have, but was the stuff that the infant had always relied upon for every pleasurable thing and for survival itself.

At first the infant can hardly perceive anything but his own wants and that those wants are satisfied by the mother. But eventually the infant learns that there is on the scene a bigger and stronger rival for the mother's affections and attention, namely the father. This realization, so Freud supposed, is bound to have a profound effect on the infant. The infant subconscious is supposed to be a rather monstrous thing that wants all good things all to itself, and in particular wants the source of all good things, namely the mother, all to itself. Subconsciously the infant is confronted with a conflict between his desire to have his mother all to himself and his fear of his father, who the infant knows is bigger and stronger and who, the infant believes, likewise wants the mother all to himself.

At some point the infant is supposed to realize, again subconsciously, that he has a penis and that little girls do not have penes. The conclusion here is that little girls once had penes too, but that something has happened to theirs. The infant's subconscious analysis is supposed to suggest that in the war for his mother's affections, he might lose his penis. The father might cut it off. At any rate, the father is a dangerous rival.

The resolution was supposed to be that the infant decided to ally himself with his father and to deny an interest in his mother. The infant would try to make himself as much like as father as possible in the attempt to buddy up, would begin to put distance between himself and his mother and to deny any interest in her, and would be set on a lifelong course of seeking a female to replace his mother. This would seem to explain the boy's acquiring manly attributes, his eventual freedom from dependence on his mother, and his attraction to the opposite sex.

Even when properly understood, Freud's theory does not present a flattering picture of heterosexual development. The picture was even less attractive to the many viewers who failed to appreciate the nice distinctions between the infant's generalized pleasure-seeking and an adult's sexual desire and between conscious and subconscious thought processes.

Unsurprisingly, people who did not much care for Freud's explanation of heterosexual development were nonetheless happy to use the theory to explain what they thought went wrong to produce homosexuality. Thus the mythology of the distant father and the domineering mother, whom we still hear much about, came into being.

In this version, the father is too remote a character to be viewed as a threat. By far the most dangerous person on the scene is the mother. While she still is the source of all goodness, she also the only perceivable source of punishment. She is big enough and strong enough to inflict harm, but she can also punish simply by withholding the good things. The infant never frees himself from her domination. Because of the mother's power he grows to fear and mistrust women, even as he may become effeminate through the attempt to identify himself with the power he perceives females to have.

That account might well explain some male homosexuality if the infant were truly passive and wholly at the mercy of a familial constellation over which he had no control. But another explanation, just as coherent, follows if one supposes that some infants have some disposition to homosexual attraction.

A male infant who did have some presexual attraction to his father might work out the Oedipal equation differently. In his case, he might perceive his mother as the bigger and stronger rival for his father's affections. Then he might seek to identify with his mother and deny an interest in his father. Such an infant would create the distance between himself and his father, just as heterosexually inclined infants create distance between themselves and their mothers. What is taken as the mother's domination of the infant might be the effect of the infant's attempt to become like the mother, and that might go so far as to include the infant's development of effeminate characteristics.

Even if the distant father and the domineering mother were common in the histories of homosexual men—which is far from certain—that might be the cause or it might be the effect of homosexual development. Whatever power the Oedipal theory may have in describing the development of heterosexuality in males who do become heterosexual, it does not follow from Freud's theory that homosexuality is a failure of some aspect of the Oedipal process.

Statements about phenomena come in two types: those which say How, and those which say Why. Freud's theory may truly explain or describe nothing, or it may describe the How and explain the Why of heterosexual development, or it might describe the How of heterosexual development without explaining Why a particular infant begins to develop heterosexually while another develops homosexually. Some men who seem to have had domineering mothers and distant fathers do seem to have developed homosexually, but many of similar backgrounds have developed differently. Moreover, adults with similar sexualities are found to have differing backgrounds.

Contradictions such as these encouraged those who thought that Freud had not had the last word on the development of sexuality. Perhaps, after all, some previously unrecognized, subtle biological factor, a factor that varied from individual to individual, accounted for the variations of human sexual preference.

Just as a number of present-day heterosexuals view their sexuality as normal and natural and as the only possible course of their own development, a number of homosexual writers of the late Nineteenth century felt that their homosexuality was so strong, so inevitable, and so innate that it must have a biological basis. This resulted in the theory of intermediate types: that gay men were in fact partly female, and that lesbians were in some biological way partly male.

Modern methods allow an individual's chromosomes to be removed from shed cells, such as those of the lining of the cheeks, and stained. The image of the chromosomes can be enlarged and photographed, and the resulting photograph can be cut up so that the chromosomes can be matched in pairs. The much enlarged photographs of the stained chromosomes arranged in pairs is called a karyotype. A karyotype reveals clearly the chromosomal sex of an individual. The sex chromosomes are usually the last pair depicted on a karyotype. An individual with two X chromosomes is female, and an individual with one X and one Y chromosome is male. The names of the chromosomes are not entirely arbitrary, for an X chromosome does look a bit like a long-limbed X and a Y chromosome does look like a Y with an abbreviated tail.

Very rarely abnormalities are found in the sex chromosomes, often involving the incorporation of one or more extra X chromosomes. Some abnormalities may result in the individual's being sterile, but in general if there is at least one Y chromosome the individual develops male genitalia, otherwise the individual will appear female. These rare conditions aside, there is no genetic basis for the belief in an intermediate sex.

In the Nineteenth century karyotypes were unavailable. The belief in intermediate sexes was based on superficial appearances, folklore, and the beliefs of individuals concerning their own sex and sexuality. The folklore of the world is rather full of characters with the attributes of both sexes. Many cultures see the hermaphrodite—that is the being that is part male and part female—as a complete or perfect being. Moreover, some cultures, especially those of North American aboriginal peoples, have social roles that are intermediate between those of men and women. At the time of the intermediate type theory, some European thinkers had come to believe that preindustrial peoples—the so-called noble savages—existed in a particularly harmonious relationship with the natural universe. That some such people believed in intermediate roles would recommend the idea of intermediate types to any trendy thinker.

The physical attributes of the sexes largely overlap: some women are taller and more muscular than many men and some men are smaller and more delicate than many women. Secondary sexual characteristics do not overlap as much, perhaps, but many women have dark hair on their upper lips and many men have some degree of breast development. All of this of course had always been true. Assignment of status, work, and social roles on the basis of sex is very arbitrary. Yet in the Western mind the ideals of male and female had taken hold to such a degree that the reality had been left behind. So it became possible for the intermediate type theorists to discover—really to rediscover—that most men are not so very different from most women. Then as now, some delicate men were completely heterosexual and some rugged, masculine types were homosexual. But in those days, the persons most likely to be identified as homosexual would be those who were the most obvious: the nellyest men and butchest women. Much of the evidence for intermediate types was superficial. Anyone who cross-dressed might be thought an intermediate type without reference to his or her physique, and any woman who engaged in what were considered to be masculine pursuits would certainly be likely to be more muscular than her sedentary sisters.

True hermaphrodism—the development of the genitalia of both sexes in one individual—is extremely rare, but it must have seemed somewhat less rare at one time. Today the few cases of true hermaphrodism that do occur are often surgically assigned to one sex or the other shortly after birth, but in the Nineteenth century this expedient was not available and the cases that did occur were documented, photographed, and much celebrated in the medical literature. Occasionally an infant with a very large clitoris would be mistaken for male and an infant with a very small penis might be mistaken for female. Such an error might not be recognized until puberty, if at all, at which time the social assignment of gender might be irreversible. Of course the male with a small penis is not partly female and the female with a large clitoris is not partly male. Yet many human attributes, such as height or skin color, do tend to occur so that in a large population any value between the extremes can be found. Nineteenth century investigators, having found cases of hermaphrodism which were more or less midway between the extremes of male and female, might expect to find individuals representing virtually any degree of compromise between male and female. Expecting to find such cases, they did so, although their expectations were in error.

Moreover, while the existence of homosexuality was not well known, some homosexual individuals attributed their sexual preferences to their somehow belonging, at least partially, to the opposite sex. If it is given that only women are attracted to men, yet I as a man am attracted to men, then it must be the case that I am a woman, at least in some degree. So long as one does not know homosexuality exists, this line of thought seems perfectly reasonable, and this line of thought occurred even in the Fifties and Sixties of this century [Ed note: that is, the 20th century] to young gay people who did not know that some people are attracted to the same sex.

For these reasons, the theory of intermediate types seemed plausible to its Nineteenth century exponents such as Edward Carpenter. Of course, the theory of intermediate types has no basis in fact. About the best thing that can be said for the theory of intermediate types was that most of its theorists acknowledged the existence of lesbians and found lesbianism a phenomenon worthy of discussion. This was light-years ahead of the thinking of most heterosexual investigators.

Before long, the theory of intermediate types—albeit in different forms—occurred to heterosexual investigators. Hormone imbalance theories of various kinds persist even to the present day. The theories are always cast in terms of an "imbalance." It is never proposed that homosexuals have the proper balance of hormones for homosexuals, but it is always thought that homosexuals have the improperly balanced hormones of heterosexuals.

Researchers produced some findings that homosexual males had lower levels of testosterone than heterosexual males. The validity of even these starting observations is questionable. The original view of hormones was that they were the prime movers of the whole sexual system: you have lots of testosterone and because of that you become horny. Now we know it is not so simple.

We know, for example, that the testosterone levels of sailors rise as the sailors' ship approaches port. This seems to suggest that the sailors anticipate their shore leave, become horny, and this causes their testosterone levels to rise. Testosterone levels vary widely according to time of day and level of physical activity, and even the knowledge that one will be tested for testosterone level can affect the outcome of the tests. Almost all of the tests in which lower levels of testosterone were found in homosexual men were done on prison inmates who clearly were not representative of the gay male population.

In any event, in the attempt to produce what they thought of as a cure for homosexuality, researchers injected homosexual men with testosterone. As might be expected, the subjects became more aggressive and sought sexual outlets more frequently. But the sexual outlets they sought were with men. In other words, raising the testosterone levels of homosexual men only made them more homosexual.

In the thinking of heterosexual researchers, it was better to make subjects asexual than to allow them remain homosexual. If homosexual men could not be made heterosexual, the next best thing was to suppress their homosexual desires. Castration was tried. This too did not work. The victims did in some cases become slightly less sexually active. But in human males, castration after puberty does not remove sexual ability or desire. Many of the victims had been sexually receptive to begin with, and so were not even minimally impaired by the mutilation.

A later incarnation of the hormone imbalance theory is the theory of intrauterine hormone imbalance. Supposedly if mother gets stressed out at a critical stage of her pregnancy this is reflected in her hormones and this causes sonny-boy, developing in her uterus, to be gay. This does not explain how heterosexual men come to be born in stressful times. Much of this work was pioneered by East German scientists while parts of Germany were a separate country under the domination of the Soviet Union. Most of the subjects were born between 1940 and 1955 in Germany, and of course any German mother who gave birth during that period could recall some stressful situation if asked to do so.

This work, and other sloppy attempts to explain homosexuality, relied on retrospective methods. Gay men were identified and then their mothers were asked to recall events of their pregnancies. Naturally such a study is biased by the tendency of mothers of gay men to have engaged on their own in considerable introspection.

Retrospective studies are a very common flaw in research into the origins of homosexual preference. What little evidence there is to support the distant-father-dominating-mother theory of homosexual development is almost entirely derived of retrospective studies: gay men are identified and are then asked to give an account of their childhood relations with their parents. To see what is wrong with this process one needs only to entertain the mother's-high-heels theory of homosexual development. Select at random a group of adult homosexual men and adult heterosexual men. Administer a questionnaire about playing dress-up in their mother's high heels to each group. More of the gay men will remember dressing-up in their mother's high heels and they will report having done so more often than men in the straight group.

But of course, dressing-up in mother's high heels does not cause homosexuality. All little boys put on their mother's high heels at one time or the other. Straight men, however, will have attached no significance to this event and will more often have forgotten it; some will have repressed the memory of the event because of the severe social sanctions against men dressing in women's clothing; and almost any straight man who remembers ever putting on his mothers shoes will underestimate the number of times such behavior had occurred. Gay men, on the other, are likely to consider such behavior as highly significant, as an early indication of their developing sexuality. They will not have taken the taboo against opposite sex attire as seriously as the straight men did. They may even exaggerate the frequency of this behavior, because it would tend to confirm their belief in the inevitability of their sexual development.

A theory that X causes Y cannot be proved by looking for cases of Y and then seeing if each has a history of X. The only way of demonstrating that X causes Y is too identify cases of X and see whether Y then results, and even then it is still necessary to show that in cases of non-X the results are non-Y.

In an even more recent study, certain brain structures were examined on autopsy. The study examined the brains of 19 gay males, 16 straight males, and 6 straight women. All of the subjects were, of course, dead, and none had been interviewed while living. How gay or straight the subjects were was merely a matter of repute. Many of the supposedly gay subjects had died of AIDS, a disease that is known to affect brain tissue. The interstitial nuclei of the subjects' brains were measured and the ranges were found to be as follows:

• the gay males: .01 to .19 cubic mm;
• the straight males: .02 to .21 cubic mm;
• the straight females: .02 to .15 mm.

The dissection of this particular part of the brain is difficult and in some degree subjective, yet double-blind methods were not employed. In other words, this study was flawed in virtually every way it could be flawed. Yet these findings were heralded in the news media as proof that homosexuality had a biological basis.

Other studies of about the same time in the early 1990s sought to demonstrate a genetic basis of homosexuality.

One study proceeded by advertising for gay male subjects with at least one male twin or adopted brother. The findings:

• of identical twins—52% of the cases both were gay;
• of fraternal twins—22% of the cases both were gay;
• of adopted brothers—11% of the cases both were gay.

This supposedly shows that the more genetic material the subjects had in common with their brothers, the more likely it would be that both brothers were gay. However, both the purpose and the method of the study were spelled out in the advertisements for subjects and it seems very likely that those who knew their brothers were gay were more likely to respond. Moreover, if there is a genetic component to homosexual preference, the remarkable thing is that 48% of the identical twins were not both gay. This seems to suggest that even if there is a genetic predisposition to homosexuality, it can be and is defeated about half the time.

The other study examined DNA sequences on the X chromosomes of 40 pairs of gay brothers. In 33 cases the brothers had matching sequences on the site studied. But in about 20% of the cases the brothers did not have the same sequences at the site studied. The study proves nothing because it is a classic example of a lack of experimental control. The researchers did not look at the nongay brothers of their subjects. Brothers are very likely to have matching sequences of DNA at any site being studied. Comparing the DNA of gay brothers to gay brothers proves nothing at all about what the DNA may represent. Only the comparison of the DNA of gay brothers to nongay brothers can show whether the site has any significance in regard to sexuality.

These studies do not disprove a genetic origin of homosexuality either, but merely prove nothing at all. Again, both of these studies were touted in the press as significant new evidence of a biological basis for homosexuality. For reasons that will be discussed later, several of the more recent studies have been welcomed by some gay spokespersons and organizations. Whether welcome or not, research on the origins of homosexuality tends to be reported uncritically in the media and to be accepted—at least until the next result is announced—without question by the public. So frequently does this occur that one may safely assume that any widely-reported result is erroneous.

So many attempts to explain homosexuality have been so ludicrous that one is tempted to point out, in the words of Anna Russell, "I'm not making this up, you know." Unfortunately, silly scientists with harebrained theories have sometimes been vested with authority of the state to devise and carry out atrocious experiments, experiments unlike anything else that has existed outside of Hitler's Europe. Among the worse offenders were the behaviorists.

One behaviorist theory was that homosexual men tended to be those who matured either exceptionally early or exceptionally late. Boys who matured early were supposed to have been ready to be sexually active long before the girls they access to were ready. Boys who matured late would be far behind the girls of their age, and would seem awkward and sexually inept. In either case, the boys' first sexual experiences would be more likely to be homosexual. Behaviorists were willing to admit that homosexual experiences were enjoyable, and so boys had one enjoyable homosexual experience were very likely to have another and another.

Behaviorists believed that homosexuality, whether it occurred through the above mechanism or another, was a learned behavior. They did not believe there was such a thing as a homosexual, but that the more times an individual had gratifying homosexual experiences, the more likely the individual would be to engage in such behaviors in the future. That people are likely to persist in behaviors that they have found pleasurable in the past is, of course, a very plausible and sensible theory, and if behaviorists had left it at that, no one would ever have been likely to criticize them. Unfortunately, behaviorism was at the time much in question and homosexuality seem to present the perfect test case. Behaviorists seemed to believe that if they could succeed in suppressing homosexual behavior—and there is precious little evidence that any of them ever questioned whether homosexual behavior ought to be suppress—behaviorist theory would be proved for all time.

If homosexuality were nothing more than homosexual behavior, and if homosexual behavior was learned, then homosexual behaviors might be unlearned and the suppression of homosexual behavior could be claimed to be a cure for homosexuality. Behaviorist theory admits of two ways of altering or unlearning behaviors.

One way was to gradually reshape the undesired behavior into a desired behavior, providing positive reinforcement—or in our terms, enjoyment—for each of the small changes in behavior. The desired behavior, once it is obtained is then further reinforced—or rewarded. In sum, the desired behavior takes the place of the undesired behavior because the desired behavior comes to be perceived by the subject as more enjoyable. Thus, in theory, one might replace the homosexual behaviors of an individual with heterosexual behaviors by gradually introducing the individual to heterosexual contacts and eventually to heterosexual activities and by reinforcing such contacts and activities. Unfortunately almost all of the behaviorists' attempts to alter homosexual behaviors were based on the other strategy suggested by behaviorist theory.

Behaviorist theory held that undesired behaviors could be suppressed by associating the undesired behaviors with negative reinforcements, or in other words punishment. This was the tack behaviorists took in their attempts to suppress homosexual behaviors. Many of the techniques resembled or even surpassed the methods depicted in the fictional motion picture A Clockwork Orange. Typically male subjects would be shown photographs of attractive nude men and while exposed to these photographs the subjects would receive an electric shock or would be injected with a drug that would induce vomiting. Some subjects were given drugs that caused respiratory paralysis. Subjects were supposed to believe they were dying, as in fact they were, before the antidote was administered. Many experiments were hardly anything more or less than elaborately designed torture, and of course some subjects died as a result of such experiments. In spite of such drastic measures, behaviorists never achieved any significant success rate in permanently altering their victims' sexual preferences.

The theory of early sexual experience shaping later sexual behaviors was wrong. Even the most casual inquiry would have shown it to be wrong. We all know of gay men whose first sexual experiences were heterosexual and of boys who grew into heterosexual men after participating exclusively in homosexual activities in their youth. So far as can be seen at present, the general course of an individual's sexuality seems to be set at an early age, perhaps earlier than four years of age. Subsequent experiences, whether compatible or not with the individual's sexuality, do not appear to alter the underlying sexuality. In particular, seduction and rape, although deplorable on many grounds, do not seem to affect the victim's sexuality.

To summarize: Psychoanalytic theories offer plausible explanations of how sexuality develops in individuals, but there is little evidence that psychoanalytic theory is in any way capable of explaining why the sexualities of individuals differ. Although there is some scanty evidence that individuals of differing sexualities are physically different in subtle ways, the evidence is questionable, and in any event there is doubt as to whether the physical differences are the causes or the effects of differences in sexualities. We will shortly consider the plausibility of a genetic component in an individual's development of sexuality, but evidence that such a genetic component actually exists has never been and may never be produced. In failing to demonstrate permanent and significant alterations in sexuality despite the use of extreme measures, behaviorists have provided good evidence that sexuality is not learned. No definite answer to the question of why a particular individual is gay or straight can be given. The ultimate answer may be that there is nothing to explain.

Consider a pinball machine of the type popular in Japan. The game area consists of a triangular array of pins. Balls fall from above onto the array of pins. At the first pin, the ball must bounce to the right or to the left, and if the machine is fair, the chance of the ball falling to the left is equal to the chance of the ball's going to the right.

The second row of pins consists of two pins that divide the playing area into three parts: a leftmost path, a rightmost path, and a middle path. The ball that went to the right at the first pin, may go to the right again at the second row of pins, and thus end up in the rightmost path, or it may bounce left this time and enter the middle path. The ball that went to the left at the first pin, may go to the left again at the second row of pins, and thus end up in the leftmost path, or it may bounce right this time and enter the middle path. There are two ways the ball may end in the middle path: it may have bounced right and then left, or it may have bounced left and then right. But there is only one way the ball could reach the rightmost path; to have done so it must have bounced to the right both at the first pin and when it encounter the second row of pins. The chances of the ball being in the middle path after it passes the second row of pins are thus two out of four (or 50%). The chances of the ball being in the rightmost path are one out of four (25%) which is equal to the chances of the ball's reaching the leftmost path.

Three pins divide the third level into four parts, four pins divide the fourth level into five parts, and so on to the sixth level which is divided into seven parts by six pins. The chances of the ball dropping out in the middlemost of the seven paths are about thirty-one out of a hundred. The chances of the ball dropping out in the rightmost path are a little less than two in a hundred.

Now suppose we drop a ball into the machine and it drops out of the machine in the rightmost path of the sixth level. Why did it do that?

Clearly it is pointless and meaningless to ask why the ball did as it did. We know that if we drop a thousand balls into the machine we may expect about 162 of them to drop out in the rightmost path. Sometimes more balls will drop out in the rightmost path, sometimes less. But the average will be 162 or 163 out of a thousand. This is useful information if we are to use the machine for gambling, but is says nothing about why any particular ball ends up in the rightmost path.

We could say the ball ended up in the rightmost path because it bounced right at the first pin, bounced right at the second row of pins, and bounced right at each of the subsequent rows of pins. Such a statement tells us how the ball reached the rightmost path at the bottom, but it does not answer the question "Why?"

Some events, in other words, admit of description, but defy explanation. And the development of human sexual orientations may be such events. This may be the meaning of the statement that homosexuality is within the normal range of variation of human sexuality. Attempts to explain variations within the normal range are virtually pointless and may be ultimately fruitless. In particular, that homosexuality is within the normal range of variation of human sexuality, which is the present position of the American Psychiatric Association, implies that homosexuality cannot be fixed because nothing is broken.

While open to some legitimate criticisms and subject to much more unfounded criticism, the Kinsey statistics on the incidence of male homosexuality remain the best information on the subject that we have. In presenting his data Kinsey devised a six-part scale of homosexuality. On this scale a 6 represented exclusive homosexuality, a 0 represented exclusive heterosexuality, and the numbers in between represented differing degrees of homosexuality. A man who reported having experienced some degree of homosexual arousal, but no overt homosexual experience was a 1 on the scale and so forth. Some of Kinsey's results and the results of a fair pinball machine are displayed in an accompanying table.

Distribution of Male Homosexuality in Seven Kinsey Categories versus Pascal distribution.

Slots/Kinsey category	6	5	4	3	2	1	0
Pinball machine (Pascal distribution)	1.6%	9.4%	23.4%	31.2%	23.4%	9.4%	1.6%
		------------87.5%----------
Kinsey's Lifetime Incidence of Homosexuality in Males	4%	------------35%-----------				13%	50%
Kinsey's greatest degree of homosexuality maintained for at least three years	6.2%	1.8%	2.4%	3.3%	5.9%	3.3%	75.6%
		------------13.4%----------

The lifetime incidence of homosexuality is based on the following Kinsey findings: 4% of males were exclusively homosexual throughout their lives, 50% were exclusively heterosexual throughout their lives, 13% experienced some degree of homosexual arousal but no overt homosexual activity. The remaining 33% had some greater degree of homosexual experience. The three-year statistics represent the greatest degree of homosexuality that the individuals maintained for at least three years of their adult lives.

Kinsey's statistics do not much resemble those of a fair pinball machine and there is little reason to expect that they would. In a fair pinball machine, the paths are spaced equally. We do not know that Kinsey's scale represents equal degrees of homosexuality, or in other words, it would be difficult to claim that a Kinsey 6 was precisely twice as homosexual as a Kinsey 3. Moreover, a homosexual-heterosexual axis is inadequate for expressing the range of human sexuality. A necrophiliac for example might consider himself heterosexual if he only had sex with female corpses, although not many heterosexuals would be willing to accept that necrophilia is a form of heterosexuality. Again, pedophiles who are sexually attracted to very young children are often more or less indifferent to the sex of their victims, yet it would clearly be inaccurate to call them bisexual, just as it would be inaccurate to call a pedophile heterosexual if he restricted himself to little girls or homosexual if he molested only little boys. Necrophilia, pedophilia, bestiality, and many fetishes cannot properly be represented by any point on a heterosexual-homosexual scale, yet persons who were not in any degree homosexual ended up lumped with the heterosexuals at 0 on Kinsey's scale. When Kinsey did his work, considerably more social pressure than exists today was exerted on individuals to be or to appear to be exclusively heterosexual. One of the social forces at work in promoting heterosexuality was simply ignorance. One had to be highly motivated to discover homosexual opportunities in the 1940s.

If we were to suppose that Kinsey's scale really was fair, then we might say that the big 50% lump at the heterosexual extreme of Kinsey's findings came at the expense of the middle. In fact, Kinsey found more exclusive homosexuals than a fair pinball machine model would suggest. Persons with modest homosexual tendencies might find it easier in adverse social circumstances to suppress their homosexual impulses than to deal with the social consequences of expressing them, and in a climate of ignorance, those who might have otherwise experimented with homosexuality might not have been curious enough to learn that homosexual relations were possible and available. At the other extreme, those who were inclined to be strongly but not exclusively homosexual might have found it easier to adopt the identity of an exclusive homosexual than to contend with heterosexual society to the extent necessary to have an occasional or incidental heterosexual relationship. We might think that Kinsey's machine was fair, but that society had tilted it.

In societies in which some homosexual activity is expected of every male, estimates of the proportion of male who do participate in homosexual activities are usually 95% or very near it. This would suggest that the percentage of absolute heterosexuals, 5%, is not very different from the percentage of absolute homosexuals Kinsey found, 4%. In such societies, the period of exclusive homosexuality lasts more than three years, so a chart of greatest degree of homosexuality maintained for a least three years in one of these societies might look rather like the mirror image of Kinsey's findings for the lifetime incidence of homosexuality---that is the big lump would at 6 on the scale. The cross-cultural data suggest that many men are capable of some degree of bisexuality, and how they fall out in a distribution like Kinsey's is open to social and situational influence.

For the record, although the figure is often attributed to him, Kinsey never found that 10% of the population was gay or anything of the sort. The 10% figure is based upon statistical manipulation of Kinsey's findings. If 4% of males are exclusively homosexual all of their lives and 6% are exclusively homosexual for at least three years and so forth, then perhaps 10% of the population is exclusively homosexual at any one time. This is a dubious sort of statistical projection. The figure may be comforting to those who feel the need of numbers to validate their sexualities. Some gay activists tout the 10% number, evidently believing that the larger the gay minority appears, the more politicians will find it unwise to annoy gay people. Unfortunately, many of the same gay activists have defined "gay" in terms of sexual preference. The Kinsey statistics, and thus all figures derived from them, address sexual behavior, not sexual preference. No data exist to support the belief that 10% of the population is preferentially homosexual, and certainly not that 10% identify themselves as gay. A more principled line for gay activists to take is that mistreatment of gay people, whatever their number, is wrong and that small minorities may vote in disproportionately high numbers and may block-vote when the minority's vital interests are at stake. Individuals should be persuaded that the validity of their sexuality is to be found from within and not from the weight of the number of those who share it.

Moreover, trying to make the gay minority appear larger than it is in fact may make it appear more influential and threatening. For example, the city council of the capital city of a large Southwestern state adopted a domestic partnership policy that allowed the domestic partners of city employees to be covered by city-paid health insurance in the same way that spouses of married employees were covered. This was portrayed as a gay-rights policy by advocates of the religious right who managed to repeal the policy with a referendum that passed by a two-to-one majority. Ironically, many more heterosexual couples than homosexual couples had registered for domestic partnership benefits, and the repeal of this so-called gay rights policy hurt more straight people than gay people. The referendum campaign was possible only because the religious right could portray the gay minority as larger and more powerful than it was.

It is easy to make too much of the pinball machine model, Kinsey's methods were flawed to begin with, and his findings are now almost two generations out of date. The point being illustrated here is that sexual behaviors on the homosexual-heterosexual axis may have a statistical distribution, although we cannot say precisely what that distribution is. The pinball machine distribution is clearly not the same as the distribution of sexualities, and recognizing this we could then consider whether another model of the distribution should be considered, or whether we could explain the differences so that we could say the pinball machine distribution really did underlie the distribution of sexualities that has been observed. We might introduce another model.

We might, for example, suggest a model in which we pour all the balls into the rightmost side of plain box, a box without pins. In such a case most of the balls would pile up on the right side. Yet some would scatter off the left as the mound on the right side of the box built up. The trouble with this model is that it does not build up the small peak on the left which seems very pronounced in Kinsey's three-year statistics. In a similar way we might consider other possible models for the distribution and explanations for deviations from those distributions, and so forth.

But people do not like to think of themselves as pinballs. People do not like to have the results of elections predicted before the polls close. People like to believe that there are causes and reasons for human behavior. And at least some people like to believe that they are free, not merely free as a pinball is free to bounce one way or another at random, but free to exercise deliberate control over their own lives.

By historical quirks which will be discussed later, the gay liberation movement, so called, has come to forward the position that gay people are not in fact free. I mentioned that gay spokespersons and organizations have been quick to endorse recent dubious studies which tended to suggest that homosexuality was predestined through one mechanism or another. Nowadays it very rare to hear of any gay person who asserts that sexuality is a matter of choice, but at every turn there is someone to repeat the slogan: "No one chooses to be homosexual." This is, as Jean Paul Sartre has been kind enough to point out, bad faith.

Elections results are now routinely predicted with great accuracy before the polls close. Yet the accuracy of such predictions is not achieved by following voters into the polling place with a loaded gun. Do voters really choose freely or not? In a way yes, and in a way no. At any rate, that voters ought to be free to choose if they can is seldom questioned. The model of homosexuality as being within the normal range of human sexuality says nothing to the philosophical deep question of free will. A statistical model of a pinball machine, of an election, of the distribution of human sexualities, of anything, has predictive powers only when applied to large numbers. The behavior of individuals is wholly unpredictable no matter whether the individuals control their own fates or are victimized by uncontrollable random forces.

It is my purpose to replace the new slogan: "We cannot help being gay" with an older one. I mean to assert—not only as slogan, not merely as a feel-good pep-rally chant, but as a defensible, meaningful proposition—that not only for ourselves alone, but also for all of humanity: "Gay is good."

---

Skip to: Top or page information.

---