Do you think people are born gay?

I think so. I was interested in boys when I was 9 years old. I had a boy friend when I was ten and he was nine. We fooled around with each other when my parents were out of the house. We played sex games, but being young and naïve, we didn't know too much about gay sex. We just performed oral intercourse on each other, and played at anal intercourse(doggy style) with no penetration. I played with Bobby for 2 years and then he moved away. I was very sorry he left.

I don't know about being born gay, but, I was "seduced" at the age of 10 by another boy, aged 9, who, while we were having a sleepover, started playing with me in bed. Next day, when my parents were at work, he started showing me some naked games to play, (I don't even know where he got them from), and from there on, I was only interested in boys, and later on in life, gay guys. So maybe, there was latent homosexuality in my brain that brought out my sexual desires.

maison wrote:I don't believe is genetic. Genetics can only dictate physical elements of yourself and not emotional elements. Since sexual orientation is an emotiaonal element of one's self it can not be caused by ones genes, but I also disagree about enviromental factors. Point in case, you are gay due to enviromental factor, this would indicate that everyone or most of the people in the same enviroment would most likely result to be gay.

In my opinion, I believe that sexual orientation is developed by your believes and ideas when you are growing up, which in turn defines who you are as a person. I believe this is the reason why many people can be from the same genetic pool as well as be from the same enviroment and the result will still be people with different sexual orientaions, as no one person haves the same ideas and believes as someone else.

Complete and utter bullshit. Have a nice article with evidence for the influence of genetics on male sexuality.

Lucas wrote:It is not definitively one or the other. Some people might feel they were born gay, others may have discovered through life experiences where their attractions lie.

You've said it all.
Sexual orientation is not necessarily genetic.

Mortivarus wrote:Complete and utter bullshit. Have a nice article with evidence for the influence of genetics on male sexuality.

I mean, you can throw science and decades of evidence at people all you want. There's still gonna be people who are going to totally ignore it for bizarre reasons.

Does it really matter if it's genetic or not?

I know that i' m atracted to men since i was remember my shelf.. i tried to have relationships with girls when i was teenager because i thought that the gay thing is just something like a bad dream..but the you hidde are always come to surface...so i do believe that i was born homosexual..But its your choice to live as a free gay man or to get maried and live an heterosexoual life..

In my honest opinion I think people are born gay. I don't think anyone wakes up one day and says I think I am going to start to be attracted to men or women and that we are all born this way. Of course that is just my opinion and I recently saw somewhere that someone posted how they think that is not true and that its the environment but I don't agree at all.

JasonTG wrote:In my honest opinion I think people are born gay. I don't think anyone wakes up one day and says I think I am going to start to be attracted to men or women and that we are all born this way. Of course that is just my opinion and I recently saw somewhere that someone posted how they think that is not true and that its the environment but I don't agree at all.

Nobody* is purporting that people change their sexuality on a whim or that it happens from one day to the next. That isn't the argument here.
While if changes occur and how large they are later in life is up for debate, this discussion is a lot more about how much of your sexual preference is predetermined(genetically or otherwise) and how much is influenced by your environment. It's now about the degree of influence rather than a pure yes/no question because we have pretty conclusive evidence that it isn't entirely either, some of which has been linked or mentioned in this thread.
Keep in mind you're posting in the intellectual discussion subforum, while you don't need to provide proof for every tiny little statement(this isn't a back-and-forth in a scientific journal or anything), it is helpful to base your posts on some form of evidence or chain of logic that you present/explain. As long as something is just "your opinion" it isn't helpful for the discussion - the same goes for discarding somebody else's opinion without presenting any reasoning.

*excepting some religious nutjobs that aren't part of this forum

You know I been wondering about this topic...because I have spoken to some people who have done drugs in that past, specially meth. And they claim while they were on meth, they would think about having sex with the same gender...and these were people who consider themselves completely straight and never taught about before until they got into meth.

So I wonder if there is some evolutionary gene deep down in us that can makes us gay or bi-curious under the right circumstances. But because society has preference towards striaghtness, this gene is suppressed unless the person has no values and doesn't care like when they are on meth.

I did come across research that shortly after the HIV epidemic the number of people considered gay in a family decreased. So they taught the HIV scare caused "the gay" gene to be suppressed. So basically what I see is an interplay of genes and environment.

Some have super strong gay genes and would be gay no matter what. Some are inbetween, in fact that is probably why more people are becoming gay now since society is "more accepting" of it. And some have a very weak gene that would only be express if they became if meth-head or some situation like that.

People are born the way they are.

You are "gay" or "straight" as much as you are blond, brunette, green eyed, blue eyed, dark skinned or light skinned.

Aside from what a lot of the ignorant "breeders" think, you cannot teach someone to be "gay". You are either attracted to the same sex or you are not. There are no factors from external sources, unless you are physically brainwashed, to make someone "gay" or "straight".

lar9149 wrote:You know I been wondering about this topic...because I have spoken to some people who have done drugs in that past, specially meth. And they claim while they were on meth, they would think about having sex with the same gender...and these were people who consider themselves completely straight and never taught about before until they got into meth.

So I wonder if there is some evolutionary gene deep down in us that can makes us gay or bi-curious under the right circumstances. But because society has preference towards striaghtness, this gene is suppressed unless the person has no values and doesn't care like when they are on meth.

I did come across research that shortly after the HIV epidemic the number of people considered gay in a family decreased. So they taught the HIV scare caused "the gay" gene to be suppressed. So basically what I see is an interplay of genes and environment.

Some have super strong gay genes and would be gay no matter what. Some are inbetween, in fact that is probably why more people are becoming gay now since society is "more accepting" of it. And some have a very weak gene that would only be express if they became if meth-head or some situation like that.

You're on to something there, but it's not just about "not caring" while on drugs like methamphetamine (which, incidentally, is also used occasionally in medicine in the management of conditions such as ADHD and severe obesity).

At very high dosages (far higher than those used medicinally), amphetamine-type stimulants (releasing agents of monoamine neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine) including methamphetamine tend to cause a gigantic increase in libido by disrupting the neural systems responsible for regulating it, which typically manifests in a constant state of sexual arousal and excitement about sexual activity (or, at least, situational arousability) and a wide expansion of the range of sexual interests, due to the threshold needed in order for the user to be aroused by anything in particular being reduced dramatically.

In my personal experience (not with methamphetamine but with legal compounds with the same mechanism of action), this has led to a massive increase in the number of different fetishes I've found myself turned on by while under the influence, but I've never ever been turned on by a female, even on very high doses of such stimulants. I obviously don't have a heterosexual bone in my body.

You're probably right in that there needs to be some element of the possibility of being sexually attracted to the unusual sex present in the individual, and it wouldn't apply to everyone.

Interestingly, I have recently learned that my dad has an absolutely tiny minute little propensity towards bisexuality, which he has never acted on or even mentioned to anyone before. I expect that applies to a lot of nominally straight people, and it is not surprising that significant levels of interest in gay sex can be elicited in such people when exposed to drugs like methamphetamine which massively increase one's sex drive.

(Sidenote: please don't use amphetamine-type stimulants for non-medical reasons — it's generally a very bad idea. )

poolerboy0077 wrote:

René wrote:

lar9149 wrote:You know I been wondering about this topic...because I have spoken to some people who have done drugs in that past, specially meth. And they claim while they were on meth, they would think about having sex with the same gender...and these were people who consider themselves completely straight and never taught about before until they got into meth.

So I wonder if there is some evolutionary gene deep down in us that can makes us gay or bi-curious under the right circumstances. But because society has preference towards striaghtness, this gene is suppressed unless the person has no values and doesn't care like when they are on meth.

I did come across research that shortly after the HIV epidemic the number of people considered gay in a family decreased. So they taught the HIV scare caused "the gay" gene to be suppressed. So basically what I see is an interplay of genes and environment.

Some have super strong gay genes and would be gay no matter what. Some are inbetween, in fact that is probably why more people are becoming gay now since society is "more accepting" of it. And some have a very weak gene that would only be express if they became if meth-head or some situation like that.

You're on to something there, but it's not just about "not caring" while on drugs like methamphetamine (which, incidentally, is also used occasionally in medicine in the management of conditions such as ADHD and severe obesity).

At very high dosages (far higher than those used medicinally), amphetamine-type stimulants (releasing agents of monoamine neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine) including methamphetamine tend to cause a gigantic increase in libido by disrupting the neural systems responsible for regulating it, which typically manifests in a constant state of sexual arousal and excitement about sexual activity (or, at least, situational arousability) and a wide expansion of the range of sexual interests, due to the threshold needed in order for the user to be aroused by anything in particular being reduced dramatically.

In my personal experience (not with methamphetamine but with legal compounds with the same mechanism of action), this has led to a massive increase in the number of different fetishes I've found myself turned on by while under the influence, but I've never ever been turned on by a female, even on very high doses of such stimulants. I obviously don't have a heterosexual bone in my body.

You're probably right in that there needs to be some element of the possibility of being sexually attracted to the unusual sex present in the individual, and it wouldn't apply to everyone.

Interestingly, I have recently learned that my dad has an absolutely tiny minute little propensity towards bisexuality, which he has never acted on or even mentioned to anyone before. I expect that applies to a lot of nominally straight people, and it is not surprising that significant levels of interest in gay sex can be elicited in such people when exposed to drugs like methamphetamine which massively increase one's sex drive.

(Sidenote: please don't use amphetamine-type stimulants for non-medical reasons — it's generally a very bad idea. )

Hmm. Didn't Walter White and Jesse Pinkman....or dear God.

I know some families with gay siblings, that's quite common.

Both me and my younger brother are gay, and I knew another family with 3 sons and all 3 were gay.

I think it's inborn personally. If it was a learned trait, it probably wouldn't be so hard or psychologically damaging to repress it. I've heard theories before that it has to do with the mother's hormones during pregnancy. I'm not sure if it's genetic, since if it was there would probably be geographical "hotspots" where incidence is particularly high (like the blue eye gene, very common among Northern Europeans and virtually non-existent elsewhere).

I really don't think it's important though. People want to prove so bad that being gay is inborn to counter the religious fundies. It doesn't matter, because even if being gay was a choice, it's still something so trivial and victimless that there's no real moral argument against it. Anti-gay sentiment would be no more legitimate even if it was a "lifestyle choice".

Yes I think the majority of Homosexuals are born that way. I would even say that most people's sexual preferences are predetermined while we are still in the womb. Yes I think environmental factors or certain influences can play a part as well. Too me our sexuality whatever it may be is hard wired in our brains very early on..just like many other types of personality traits. Whether you're a highly emotional,intelligent,kind caring or an evil person..they too stem back from when we are in the womb.Sometimes the upbringing or whatever circumstances the individual is in can trigger off the particular traits.

From the depths of time, a forgotten thread. Just read a bit of interesting thought on the topic: Forget the ‘Gay Gene,’ Because Science Has Another Explanation for Homosexuality

Granted, it's only theoretical at this point, but it's thought provoking nonetheless.

I do think epigenetics makes a lot of sense.

Agreed though my thought was: I know my mother HAD to be stressed -- she was still with my father while pregnant.