Was I born gay?

What is gender nonconformity?
Some boys exhibit behavior called childhood gender nonconformity, or CGN. This doesn't describe a boy who has played with a doll at some point or tried on his sister's dress once, but rather one who consistently exhibits a host of strongly feminine traits and interests while avoiding typical "boy behavior" like rough-and-tumble play. There's been considerable research into this phenomenon, particularly in males, including a study that followed boys from an early age into early adulthood. The data suggest there is a very good chance such boys will grow up to be homosexual. Not all homosexual men show this extremely feminine behavior as young boys. But the research indicates that, of the boys who do exhibit CGN, about 75 percent of them - perhaps more - turn out to be gay or bisexual.

Can identical twins be so different?
The case of identical twins Patrick and Thomas is fascinating because it calls into question both of the dominant theories in the long-running debate over what makes people gay: nature or nurture, genes or learned behavior. As identical twins, Patrick and Thomas began as genetic clones. From the moment they came out of their mother's womb, their environment was about as close to identical as possible - being fed, changed, and entertained the same way, having similar relationships with the same nurturing father and mother. Yet before either boy could talk, one showed highly feminine traits while the other appeared to be "all boy".

What could have happened between their identical genetic starting point at conception and their births? They spent nine months in their mother's womb. In the hunt for what causes a person to be gay or straight, that's now the most interesting and potentially rewarding frontier.

What if we are born gay?
Many gay rights advocates argue that if we could prove that people are born gay it would provide wider social acceptance and a much higher degree of protection against discrimination. Such a biological" argument has gained considerable support over the past decade. Poll after poll worldwide has shown that people are now more tolerant of gays and lesbians - a trend especially true of young adults. This greatly concerns much of the "religious right" who are strongly opposed to homosexuality. One of these groups is the Family Research Council - a conservative Christian think tank based in Washington, D.C. In their book, Getting It Straight, the concern is expressed that if findings eventually show that people are born straight or gay, this "would advance the idea that sexual orientation is an innate characteristic, like race; that homosexuals, like African-Americans, should be legally protected against 'discrimination;' and that disapproval of homosexuality should be as socially stigmatized as racism." They go on to say, "However it [the biological argument] is not true." In my opinion a more appropriate title for this book would be "Getting It All Wrong".

For much of the past century, the main theories linked homosexuality to environment. Freud, for example, postulated that overprotective mothers and weak fathers helped to make boys gay. A dramatic step forward occurred in 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association removed "homosexuality" from its list of mental disorders.

Is the biological theory making gains?
In 1991 a boost was given to the biological theory of homosexuality by a neuroscientist named Simon LeVay based in San Diego. He reported that he had found a key difference between the brains of the homosexual and heterosexual men he studied. LeVay showed that a tiny clump of neurons of the anterior hypothalamus - which is believed to control sexual behavior - was, on average, more than twice the size in heterosexual men as in homosexual men. This was not conclusive since the lumps could have changed in size due to homosexual behavior, however unlikely that would be. Still this finding unleashed a considerable effort to prove a biological basis for homosexuality.

Later that same year, Boston University psychiatrist Richard Pillard and Northwestern University psychologist J. Michael Bailey announced that, in a study of identical twins, if one twin was gay, the other had about a 50 percent chance of also being gay. For fraternal twins, the rate was about 20 percent. Because identical twins share their entire genetic makeup while fraternal twins share about half, genes were believed to explain the difference.

In 1993, Dean Hamer's discovery of what the press called the "gay gene" took the world by surprise. In fact, Hamer, a Harvard-trained researcher at the National Cancer Institute, hadn't described it that boldly or imprecisely. He found that gay brothers shared a specific region of the X chromosome, called Xq28, at a higher rate than gay men shared with their straight brothers. Hamer and others suggested this finding would eventually transform our understanding of sexual orientation. Today in 2006, this hasn't happened - yet.

What is the current view on sexuality?
Still the current research into sexual orientation is clearly focused on biological causes. And the old theories of homosexuality have not yielded any new insights. In fact what Freud may have been seeing in "weak fathers and domineering mothers" may have been a result rather than a cause. Indeed, a father faced with a very feminine son might well become more distant or hostile, leading the boy's mother to become more protective.

In recent years, researchers who suspect that homosexuality is inborn - due to genetics or events happening in the womb - have looked everywhere for clues: Prenatal hormones. Birth order. Finger length. Fingerprints. Stress. Sweat. Eye blinks. Spatial relations. Hearing. Handedness. Much of this research makes it pretty clear there is biological processes significantly influencing sexual orientation. But it's also frustrating that to date nothing is really crystal clear.

In May of 2005, Swedish researchers reported finding important differences in how the brains of straight men and gay men responded to two compounds suspected of being pheromones - those scent-related chemicals that are key to sexual arousal in animals. One of these compounds came from women's urine, the other from male sweat. An examination of brain scans showed that when straight men smelled the female urine compound, their hypothalamus lit up. That didn't happen with gay men. Instead, their hypothalamus lit up when they smelled the male-sweat compound, which was the same way straight women had responded.

Then in June of the same year, scientists in Vienna announced that they had isolated a master genetic switch for sexual orientation in the fruit fly. Once they turned on the switch, the genetically altered female flies rebuffed overtures from males and instead attempted to mate with other females. They even adopted the elaborate courting dance and mating songs that males use.

Currently a five-year genetic study of gay brothers is underway in North America. A surprisingly large $2.5 million grant was received from the National Institutes of Health. Surprising because government funders with a conservative president in power tend to bypass sexual orientation research since such grants tend to be most unpopular with right wing conservative groups. Relying on a sample of 1,000 gay-brother pairs and the latest advancements in genetic screening, this study promises to bring some clarity to the murky area of what role genes may play in homosexuality.

If, or perhaps when, this link of homosexuality to biological causes is proven, the conservative religious leaders will have to come up with a new song book or be ignored as utterly irrelevant.