So Why Are You Gay?

There are as many reasons to be gay as to be straight except one; and that is just a maybe.  Much recent research points out the fact that stress in the womb alters the stress hormone levels and that can change the testosterone levels and that can lead to homosexuality; if, certain conditions are there. First of all, we don’t always know if and how much sex hormones have been altered.  We don’t always know if changing hormones leads to being gay.  Except we know this”  if you give female animal male hormones they display “male” behavior including mounting males.
And they play more rough and tumble with their cohorts.

So why can’t it be that stress to a carrying mother can change her hormones and her baby’s?  Now for the second step—need.  A child needs parental care and loving.  If that is absent he will go elsewhere. Sometimes my patients, a number of them, will wear dresses and walk the streets that way.  That is the way he feels close to a mother who showed no love.  I have written about a mother who left early and came home late from work; a single mother.  The boy lacked a mother’s love, but he found a substitute, her clothes and her smell.  It became a lifelong ritual.  Something he was never aware of it.  He just thought it was a quirk, a neurotic act. But need drove and it and it should not be stopped because it is a signal of desperate need that was fulfilled in the only way possible.

Or the case of a stressed mother who, in the middle of pregnancy found herself bereft of her husband who found a young girlfriend.  That stress is transmitted to the fetus.  If the stress reaction goes on it gets stamped in, engraved as a memory that can change his hormones.  He may be feminine very early in life. Now add a missing father and a distraught mother who is devastated and unloving.  The boy can later gravitate to male love. Not always, but it is a factor in some of the gay men I have treated, over one hundred.  The boy, somewhat feminized, seeks out male love over female love partly due to his hormone shift.  No different from the young animals who seek out males to play with rather than someone of their own gender.  Their interest has been altered, and by hormones.  I am not setting down unalterable rules but rather elements to explain some behaviors.  In the cases of homosexuality I have treated there has nearly always been that first-line deep and early trauma.  Perhaps I am treating a selected group and my perspective is biased, but I could be right, as well. If we never posit these factors we will never know.

This change in testosterone is prevalent in all primate mothers; and it is largely due to the stress of the mother which becomes imprinted into the baby.  The patients come to me and say, “I don’t know why but I have been attracted to men nearly all of my life.  I knew at six years that something  was different.”  So one thing we need to do is a comparative study of stressed and unstressed mothers, and look at any differences.  Is it possible that being gay is epigenetic (due to experience) and not totally genetic?  We need to avoid political correctness and defensiveness and do what is correct scientifically.

Oddly, let’s look at one group of primates, the bonobos. They are gentle and loving and settle most problems with sex.  Not so with chimps, who organize groups to go on raids and kill other chimps.

Bonobos are high in testosterone, male and female, much higher than chimps, Chimps develop their levels later after puberty.  Up until them the bonobos are quite high.  And they play tough with their pals but rarely violent as chimps.  This is only to say that hormones matter, a lot.  And that hormones are radically affected by experience, especially very early experience when hormones are beginning their life and are vulnerable to trauma that can change levels.

Does that mean it is a neurosis? Could be but no more than a man who wears dresses every day. It means that early in life there were experiences that change things. Those experience for the mother can means she drinks, smokes, takes drugs, is anxious or depressed, and so on.

Now the important point: can we or should we treat the hormones?  Yes but only after we know if experience and early trauma changed them permanently. No different from those who have chronic hypothyroid.  Shouldn’t we see what may have caused it? I am of the view that most of us would be born normal if we were not made abnormal by early trauma and neglect.  Yes, we need to treat such afflictions as very low thyroid but let us never forget that for every symptom there can be an ultimate cause.  Why do we consistently neglect that fact?

So why am I not gay?  I had all the elements for it happening.  A psychotic/anxious mother and tyrannical unloving father.  But when I was sexually vulnerable at age thirteen, I was in the back of a car necking with a girl whose name I have preserved in memory. Those hugs and kisses sank in and changed everything.  It made me feel that I could get love from a female.  Having never been kissed she taught me how to kiss and hug. It was the first love I ever knew and it was critical.  So thank you, Liz.