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Origin of Sexuality by Sharon White

Society's attitude to the sexual problems has been changing radically over time. The attitude to and views on non traditional behaviour are getting more tolerant and indulgent, for example attitude to sex before marriage, pregnancy of unmarried women, late marriages, and also individual peculiarities of sexuality of a person. The notions of women's and men's characteristics have changed as well. It used to be forbidden and wrong to even talk or discuss sex and sexual relations; that is why the notion of human sexuality has never been really studied until recently.
The origin of the human sexuality has never been fully understood. The question of why people are homosexual or heterosexual cannot be fully answered with the facts we know today. It is interesting to note that the term homosexual was only coined in the 1860's, and only from that point onwards were people who conducted in homosexual acts considered different.3 There are three major competing positions on the question of why people are homosexual. The first is that homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle, just like vegetarianism. The second is that homosexuality is a disease, like schizophrenia. The final position is that homosexuality is a biological condition, like left-handedness, i.e. people are born gay.
All three of these have had major research done on them over the past thirty years; arguments have been put forward that agrees with one and disbelieves the others. And yet the question is still yet to be fully answered.
Before I start to look at the three different positions it should be pointed out that most of the statistics and research findings below only apply to gay men. This was not my main intent when starting this essay but due to the lack of research performed on homosexual women it was the only course available to me. It cannot, unfortunately, be presumed that the statistics and results for male homosexuals will be the same for female homosexuals. This is due to a number of facts; mainly that whilst the population gender division is roughly equal, the number of male and female homosexuals that identify as such are vastly different.
The first position that of choice is perhaps the most widely accepted of the three. The choice, of course, is a subconscious one. A person does not wake up one morning deciding to be homosexual. It is the idea of socialisation, that people due to the way they are treated and the environment they grow up in, subconsciously turn out to be homosexual. The concept of choice has always been one of the most popular positions to take, a survey in 1993 showed that 40% of Americans support this stance.
Perhaps the most famous reasoning for socialisation is the argument of a dominant mother and an absent father. For years people presumed that this was the way homosexuals were 'created'. This argument has been disproved countless times in countless studies. A study by Kinsley in 1951 looked at the family backgrounds of forty-two homosexual men. Out of these forty-two only three could have been classed as having absent fathers, one of these also had what could be classed as a very dominant mother. A further four had a dominant mother but no absent father.5 This gives very good leeway to the argument that absent fathers and dominant mothers play no part what so ever in someone sexuality.
When considering if sexuality is socialised, we need to look at the way it would be. The idea of socialisation is that a persons attitudes, views and lifestyle is moulded by others and society. Primary socialisation is that which comes from our family and takes place during infancy and early childhood. It provides the base upon which all-future learning will take place.
Secondary socialisation begins later in childhood when outside interaction is taking place, i.e. with people their own age outside the household and teachers etc. As the person gets older the less socialisation effect their parents have on them, and by the time a person reaches adolescence their peer group becomes the main area of socialisation.
Due to quite a lot of homosexuals realising that they are different at a young age, the socialisation agent, if it exists, must mainly take place during early childhood and therefore come from their parents. For a child to be socialised into been a homosexual then he would have to come from a certain life style. Firstly, his parents or other main bodies of socialisation must not be critical or hateful towards homosexuals; even thought the choice is subconscious why would a child choose to be something his parents ridicule and hate?
If the socialisation of the homosexual didn't take place until later in life, post-childhood adolescence, then the peer group of the person would have to not express anger and hatred towards homosexuals.
Both of these are flawed. Homosexuals can, and do, come from families where outright hatred and persecution is commonplace. Homosexuals are found in all cultures and societies, including those where hatred for gay people is high, for example Middle Eastern countries where homosexuals are executed for been the way they are. If socialisation were primarily responsible people would not choose to have these desires if they knew it would be a danger to them. The same can be said about secondary socialisation in adolescence, where in a large number of cases derogatory views on homosexuals will be held by a persons peer group, sometimes even including violence against homosexuals or suspected homosexuals.
To put it plainly if it were down primarily to socialisation, then homosexuals could not come from societies where they are told it is wrong to be gay.
Another argument against the socialisation stance is that the children of gay parents do not turn out to be gay themselves. Research conducted in 1995 on 74 children of gay couples found that only 12% of them had homosexual feelings or conducted in homosexual relationships.5 Whilst this is slightly higher than average, suggesting that socialisation may play a part, if socialisation was the primary reason for homosexuality then you would expect a significantly higher level of it amongst a group living in an environment of full acceptance.
Contrary to all those, Kinsley's research in the 1950's goes some way to aid the socialisation argument. He stated that the vast majority of people are somewhat bi-sexual.2 For this to happen socialisation would have to play a large part in the decision of someone's sexuality, as the concept of a gay gene would not account for this bisexualism.
It is clear that socialisation must play some part in the sexuality of a person, however that part does not seem as big as it was once thought.
The second stance on this issue has in recent years taken a major downturn in its support. The notion that homosexuality is a pathological disease is now widely ignored by most researchers, and the only groups that takes it seriously are religious ones, out to seek a valid justification for the biblical ban on gay sex, and anti-gay groups.
However, even though the majority of people now accept that homosexuality is not a mental problem, it was still classed as a mental disorder by the American Health Council until 1970, and by the British Medical Authority until 1992.
One of the main points that lay waste to the pathological theory is the fact that the sexuality scale is so diverse. In the 1950's, Kinsley conducted research on sexuality and in his findings he stated that a persons sexuality can be placed on a scale ranging from one to six, the Kinsley Scale, one been 100% heterosexual with no homosexual thoughts; and six been 100% homosexual with no heterosexual thoughts.
He also found that practically no one was either one or six, the vast majority of people ranging from two to five, especially around adolescence. Therefore for homosexuality to be a mental disorder the majority of people would have to have that disorder to account for the diversity in society; making it no longer a mental problem but the 'norm'. In this case it would be the small number of people who were one or six that were actually suffering from a pathological problem. In this day and age the mental disorder position can be largely disregarded.
The third proposition is the one that has received the most research out of the three. It is also, perhaps, the most controversial; even more so than that of a mental disorder which has all but been discredited in recent years. People look upon this position in two ways; People who support gay rights state that if sexuality is indeed genetically linked then it gives them more arguments for full acceptance. However on the other end of the scale anti-gay protesters look upon it as a way to make gay people 'normal' by aborting the homosexual gene. It should be noted that for a genetic trait to be considered 'normal' by science it has to be contained within at least 1% of the population, placing homosexuality within the normal bracket if in fact it is biological.
There are two major findings that have given leverage to the biological argument, the uncertainty of genes and the family clustering of homosexuals. Many genes in the human makeup have no known function. Many of them although fully active, baffle scientists trying to understand the role they play. In a much-discussed study in 1993, the National Institutes of Health in America found a part of the X chromosome that they believe contains a gay gene. The NIH team is now in the process of trying to pinpoint the gene itself, although they are having major problems in associating it with homosexuality, which has already been registered by the name GAY-1.
Another two studies were conducted in 1993. The first was by the Hamer at the National Cancer Research Centre in Washington DC. He studied thirty-two sets of gay brothers, none of whom were related. In his research he showed that two thirds of the sets, twenty-two, had similar genetic makeup on a part of the X chromosome known as Xq28. Although it should be stated that this is not a complete gene, the researchers are hopeful that one can be located. Similar studies done at the same time on female homosexual siblings could not find any of these genetic tags. This study has been criticised by a number of people, stating that if the researchers had included the straight brothers of the homosexuals they would have found the same similarities on their X chromosome.
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Origin of Sexuality by Sharon White

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