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Could someone explain to me the likely causes of homosexuality? What do we know about what makes someone gay? Which theories do you trust?
John Derbyshire wrote up a list of possible causes back in 2005, I’m not aware of a better write up since.
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/HumanSciences/metaphysicssciencehomosex.html
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We have very little clue. About on par with how little we know about most things that are somewhere on the hazy nature/nurture spectrum. As a bellwether, consider the APA's brief in Obergefell. This was an opportunity for them to lay out the best science to ground their theory of the cause of homosexuality and properly argue that it's innate or whatever it is that they wanted to be able to say for political purposes.
You know what evidence they brought? An opinion poll and a report from their "LGBT Concerns Office" which said that basically all the research into conversion therapy was methodologically unsound. Seriously. We know pretty much garbage.
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It seems very likely to me that 100% of (definitionally) homosexual behavior revolves around the [existence, presence, and availability] of [attractive people] of [the same sex]; it's just that those three things have asterisks to them. Another complicating factor is that love and sex could quite possibly have something to do with each other.
Anyway, I think the first part was pretty clearly covered by the sibling comments about situational/loveless sexuality, but the second and third didn't have much emphasis. So...
For the second, it's all about finding people of the same sex to whom you happen to be sufficiently attracted. There's a common meme around this about "are traps gay?", meaning "is it gay if you don't know they're a guy, or what degree of knowing makes it gay?". Now, while most men are quite a bit uglier than superstimulus-abusing merchandise machinery, it's still somewhat applicable to you if your pattern of attraction should happen to match one (usually happens to the denizens of 4chan with Asians; their physiology tends to pattern match to "female" for a non-negligible fraction of men, and one country in particular is in?famous for its crossdressers).
Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of academic papers waiting to definitively prove that liking Felix Argyle is gay, but not Astolfo or Bridget.
Somewhat but not entirely related is the third part. What's "the same sex" even mean, especially when you start branching into the gender non-conforming spaces like tomboys, tomgirls, every gay man with the lisp, and the harder transgender (as in, they actually emulate the opposite end of the binary the way you'd expect them to)? Can wanting a woman who has more in common with a man in terms of general attitude or approach towards life be the primary feature of sexual desire, and if so, is that gay? How about the reverse?
I dunno. I think our models of relationships are popularly both as loaded and as accurate as the term "gender studies"; can fish notice water?
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I think it’s a male child accidentally socializing as a female identity, due to sheer accident or the way the women in their life treat them, or a repugnance to their father figure. This explains why homosexuals take on so much of female behavior and interests while still retaining the typical male kernel of hyper-sexuality and aggression. To study this you would need to look at the prevalence of homosexuality among single father households and all male schools.
There are other forms of homosexuality, one of which is when culture heavily discourages promiscuous sex with women, and then you have men fucking men’s bottoms just because they’re super horny and can’t access women. You see this in prisons. This then can become a fetish itself, maybe what we saw in Sparta and maybe with some aspects of Afghani grooming culture. This is not “identity” homosexuality though, and typically these men do not have the behaviors you find in Western homosexuals. The ancient prohibitions on homosexuality likely assume that all men fell into this category and were engaging in homosexual sex just because they were super horny and approximating a woman (same with beastiality).
To re-use my example from a few days ago, aphyr (nsfw) - where's the female identity here? Or just look at hot guys in your area - nothing here screams 'female identity'. At least in the case of trans-women, even if the concept of 'identifying as female' is meaningless, there's a sense in which they're trying to be female - but for gay men, it's a mix of masculine and feminine traits in a way that doesn't seem to have 'a female identity'.
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I'd caution against lamppost effect, here. Effeminate gay guys are more visible to the straights, but bara dudes, including bara dudes who want to bottom for other bara dudes, is absolutely a genre, and not a small one. A few of this demographic is bi-identifying, but a large and maybe larger number are either incapable or strongly opposed to sex with or even near women (and sometimes even effeminate men).
I'd also separately caution against conflating cause and effect. A lot of the bara dudes into bara dudes in the 1980s and 1990s spent a lot of their youth socialized with women of the same age group; there's a plausible story where the same effect that drives straight guys into 'girls have cooties' mode pushes gay guys into being less comfortable is a lot of typical male-male straight socialization contexts.
(Was absolutely the case for me.)
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Do you think the authors of the ancient prohibitions would be more accommodating of current year 'identity' homosexuals?
I do think it’s possible. I doubt they would care about men pair-bonding. The issues would arise because of disease risk, and the effect on families which require an heir to have children.
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We don't even have a really good theory of what homosexuality is let alone what causes it. Defining what we mean when we say homosexuality alone is maddeningly difficult, enthusiasts of history and anthropology can easily point to evidence that the past was incredibly gay and homosexual behavior is normal (and impliedly normative) or to evidence that homosexuality is an unusual deviation from normal human cultural standards.
From a class I took a decade ago*: A Greek poet tells us "Men who are enslaved to women are no better than beasts, but we who are endowed with reason have invented homosexuality." Or is that a mistranslation, because the term homosexuality (or other translations that are commonly inserted such as "gay love" "butt sex" "man love" "male intimacy" etc.) are freighted with associations for modern Americans that aren't in the original Greek. One probably can't read that poem and get the original meaning without being thoroughly drenched in Greek culture contemporary to the author to get the original associations. The best a non-specialist can do is read an annotated translation which tries to give multiple interpretations, but that doesn't seem like an answer at all.
Competing definitions of Homosexuality in our culture alone:
-- Act vs Identity. Is homosexuality a thing you do (He has sex with men) or is it a thing you are (She is a lesbian)?
-- Obligate vs preferential. Is one a homosexual if one merely prefers having sex with the same sex, or only if one must have sex with the same sex? If one is capable of sex with a woman under duress but not by preference? In turn:
-- One drop rule. Is one homosexual if one would ever have sex with a man, even once, or only if one only has sex with men? Does a single act or desire across the aisle require that one be qualified as bisexual? Generally, the view of this varies on whether one is trying to claim a high social status (lesbians shooing away bisexual women) or trying to avoid a low social status (teenage boys circa 2005 accusing one another of being fags).
-- Bisexuality. We have no idea what to do with these. Especially what might be called "market bisexuality;" the observed tendency of bisexuals to end up taking the path of least resistance (typically sleeping with men) in any situation.
So that's a lot of different behaviors under the same umbrella. Are they all caused by the same gene/hormone/behavioral history? Different ones?
*From memory so I could be very wrong on the exact wording, and I've lost the author.
I had always figured the "bi guys are actually just gay, bi girls are actually just straight" idea was due to same sex experimentation being considered more normal for women (i.e "college lesbians" being more of a thing than "college gays"), and that could certainly also be a factor, but the "market explanation" makes a lot of sense to me and is somehow one I've not heard before.
I think the proper equivalent to a college LUG (Lesbian Until Graduation) at a female heavy school is prison gay. Both are responding to market forces (more available same sex partners) to act on a desire that is probably quite mild under normal circumstances. But it still seems silly to say there is nothing there, that all straight men or women would respond similarly under similar circumstances. Generally explanations that are contingent on anything other than deep personal identities are disfavored, as they leave open the possibility of punishment to "straighten" people out.
That equivalency makes sense, but to be clear the LUGs I have met were all at colleges with roughly equal gender distributions (though I've also known "Catholic school lesbians" that were closer to the prison situation).
To clarify, I mostly meant the idea of "bisexual man = basically gay and bisexual woman = basically straight" could stem from both:
One seeing bisexual-identifying women often having a lower Kinsey # than bisexual-identifying men due to same-sex physical intimacy and sexual experimentation being more acceptable for women
Even people who are true 3's on the Kinsey scale are likely to have their partners weighted towards men due to it being easier to hook up with men
And that I hadn't considered 2. before, only 1.
Although 1. might be changing with Gen Z based on the fact that the increase in % LGBT of Gen Z seems to be primarily from an increase in the "B".
(using Kinsey scale for ease of discussion rather than as an endorsement of its accuracy)
There's... also a representation thing. It's a lot easier to be closeted or just not visible if you're a bi dude in a relationship with a monogamous woman.
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Very little. Even attempting to study this can be a career-ending choice. This is because causal models often translate into curative models. For example, it is widely agreed that there is no "gay gene," but if there were a "gay gene," then we could use embryo selection to prevent gay children from being born. Likewise I have read some hypotheses that hormones in utero play a major role in sexuality, but twin studies show that twins often don't have the same sexuality (though they do have the same sexuality at higher rates than random chance). So there appear to be biological factors involved in homosexuality, but these factors do not appear to be determinate.
Back when it was permissible to study such things, there were some studies that associated homosexuality with being the victim of sexual abuse. But this tends to paint homosexuality as a negative consequence of a blameworthy action, which is not good PR, so this line of thinking is often very vocally shouted down. Furthermore, the percentages vary a lot--in the one I linked, about a third of homosexual men reported having been the victims of child abuse. So even if that explains every single case to which it applies (which would be surprising), it doesn't explain the other 65% at all.
It seems to me, given the evidence I've seen over the years, that sexuality is just super complex--sufficiently complex that even calling someone "homosexual" or "heterosexual" is often a gross oversimplification. Even stuff like the Kinsey scale barely scratches the surface. Because the human sex drive is so deeply biologically wired while simultaneously being inescapably socially situated, I have very little doubt that it is essentially a complex emergent property with countless biological and environmental inputs. There is no clear causal model for a single individual, much less one that will generalize to multiple humans. There do seem to be some identifiable contributing factors, but even factors with impacts large enough to be measurable fail to be clearly identifiable as overwhelming causes. You may as well ask what makes someone a biologist or a sailor: surely there are causes that explain each case, maybe even some obvious contributing factors, and yet being a biologist or a sailor just isn't the kind of thing that could ever have a single, clearly-identifiable cause.
Who/what are you thinking of when you say this?
A large scale GWAS was published in Science a few years ago which is about as far from career-ending as you can get. Another from 2017. Here's a brain imaging/PGS paper from 2021. Evo psychobabble about the hypothetical evolutionary fitness of homosexuality. Here's a paper investigating associations between same-sex attraction and 'psychological distress (anxiety and depressive symptoms), and risky sexual behavior.' A search for 'same-sex attraction psychology' yields a hundred forty odd results in the last five years and is by no means exhaustive. Here's a review from 2020 that discusses genetics, birth order, in utero hormones and environment, abuse as a child, sexual orientation of the parents, etc which covers most of the ideas I've come across (not that I'm particularly knowledgeable about this field).
@Pasha depending on what exactly you're looking for, you most likely won't find a satisfying answer to your question. Our current answer for virtually all of these complex traits is the same: genetic and environmental factors play a role, GWAS can identify a large number of low-impact, difficult to understand variants that explain ~5-40% of the heritability and correlation with a number of environmental factors. Maybe some brain-imaging studies showing a 5 +/- 2% increase in activity in some corner of the brain in same-sex attracted individuals. Grand psychological theories like refrigerator mothers have mostly gone out of style.
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