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Gayness, Ecclesial and Secular

A Three Part Series

PART ONE – THE WHAT AND WHY QUESTIONS

How is gayness defined and distinguished?

For purposes of this three part article, I intend to limit my main discussion to male homosexuality.

A gay male is one who, as an adult, evidences an unambiguous and persistent predisposition to prefer and engage in male-male sexual and romantic attachments, as opposed to the male-female variety. Situational male homosexual behavior – as occurs in male prison populations for example – is distinguished, as are the cases of adolescent experimentation.

The term “gay” applies, interestingly enough, only to male homosexuals, not to lesbians. Stereotypical gays are more lighthearted than stereotypical lesbians. Because the state of actual research is crippled by political correctness, identity politics and fundamentalist dogma, we won’t know for some time whether and to what extent some of the obvious stereotypes actually correlate to statistical patterns. But I am willing to bet that some of the major stereotypes will be validated at least as an approximation.

What is the percentage of gay males in the general population?

It is well known than gay males tend to migrate to gay-friendly social environments and that certain cities and neighborhoods have an atypically high percentage of gay inhabitants (thinking of the Castro District in San Francisco, for example) and that gay hostile environments have an atypically small “admitted” gay population (as a knowledgeable acquaintance put it recently, “there are NO gays in Nigeria). Having read the literature, I am personally persuaded that the core, non-reproducing, strongly gay subpopulation is not more than 2% of the overall world population.

As the current Wikipedia article puts it, “The exact proportion of the population that is homosexual is difficult to estimate reliably, but most recent studies place it at 2–7%.”

Among the studies cited were these:

ACSF Investigators (1992). AIDS and sexual behaviour in France. Nature, 360, 407–409.
Billy, J. O. G., Tanfer, K., Grady, W. R., & Klepinger, D. H. (1993). The sexual behavior of men in the United States. Family Planning Perspectives, 25, 52–60.
Binson, D., Michaels, S., Stall, R., Coates, T. J., Gagnon, & Catania, J. A. (1995). Prevalence and social distribution of men who have sex with men: United States and its urban centers. Journal of Sex Research, 32, 245–254.
Bogaert, A. F. (2004). The prevalence of male homosexuality: The effect of fraternal birth order and variation in family size. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 230, 33–37.
Fay, R. E., Turner, C. F., Klassen, A. D., & Gagnon, J. H. (1989). Prevalence and patterns of same-gender sexual contact among men. Science, 243, 338–348.
Johnson, A. M., Wadsworth, J., Wellings, K., Bradshaw, S., & Field, J. (1992). Sexual lifestyles and HIV risk. Nature, 360, 410–412.
Laumann, E. O., Gagnon, J. H., Michael, R. T., & Michaels, S. (1994). The social organization of sexuality: Sexual practices in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sell, R. L., Wells, J. A., & Wypij, D. (1995). The prevalence of homosexual behavior in the United States, the United Kingdom and France: Results of national population-based samples. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 24, 235–248.
Wellings, K., Field, J., Johnson, A., & Wadsworth, J. (1994). Sexual behavior in Britain: The national survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles. London, UK: Penguin Books.

Is gayness the result of a genetic predisposition?

I am a left handed heterosexual male. My first grade teacher tried mightily to “turn” me into a right handed male. Like many southpaws, I’m a more ambidextrous than most right-handers. Conceivably, Miss Nix might have succeeded in converting me to a right handed male -- assuming I came equipped with a weaker resistance to authority. But I am certain that no mere grade school teacher could ever have made me REJECT the sexual favors of girls in favor of boys! Similarly, there are a number of strongly right handed males for whom “crossing over” to the left handed world would take nothing less than amputation. My own life experience as both child and parent confirms that we inherit a number of predispositions, some of which are more “hard wired” than others.

Many biologists tend to assert strongly that human behavioral patterns are not inherited. That is far too simplistic. Left handedness, musical aptitude and any number of temperamental characteristics manifest well in advance of socialization. Clearly, while our specific behaviors are not genetically predetermined, many of our behavioral tendencies are the result of our “wiring” (metaphorically specking).

A tendency not to affiliate reproductively with members of the opposite gender – when consistently carried out – amounts to genetic suicide. Moreover, male homosexuality runs against the prevalent social grain. Manifestly, biology is at work.

We therefore have a prima facie case for a set of inherited biochemical features that can trigger or predispose some males to manifest a gay orientation at some point in their adolescent development. Yes, whether this orientation results in specific sexual behaviors is a separate question, just as whether predispositions to temper outbursts, irritability or amiability result in specific social behaviors.

One’s inner predispositions are now much harder to conceal from scientific testing. Polygraphs and brain activity scan monitors can detect sexual arousal even when the subject is trying hard to hide it. The accumulating evidence makes it very likely that there is a biological predisposition to gay behavior.

For example, brain scan studies of gay males confirm a different neurological attraction response to other males than measured for non-gay males. Even the pheromone responses appear to be different.

We can grant that biological differences can be acquired or triggered by environmental conditions, but almost impossible to escape the inference that there exists a set of inheritable traits that make some males much more likely to develop a strong same-gender attraction. We don’t have to agree with the genetic determinist point of view to agree that inherited abilities and tendencies can strongly affect childhood development and later behaviors.

If a “gay” tendency is inherited, why isn’t gayness a birth defect?

The argument here is straightforward. Those males who were born biologically incapable of fathering children are considered to have a birth defect, indeed one that is necessarily rare. Unless the genetic anomaly producing functional sterility amounted to an individual mutation, it would necessarily be preserved only by a reproducing relative in whom it was an unexpressed recessive trait. If biological sterility is a birth defect, then in male homosexuality, we are faced with a form of psychological sterility, as that term can be applied metaphorically to practicing gay males.

So how could any robust gay genetic predisposition even have been preserved in the gene pool? The gay population percentage remains much too high and much too stable to be a birth defect. The presence of gay males in the larger population - correcting for social pressures that drive gays into the closet – has remained a small but statistically significant number.

This strongly suggests to me that there is – or at least once was – a net positive contribution to human survival from a small but consistent subpopulation of gay males that somehow is carried within the reproducing population and selectively expressed.

How could this be? What would be the “gay human survival contribution”?

Stay tuned.

Part Two will be posted Wednesday. And Part Three on Friday.