Homosexuality and the Nature vs Nuture Debate

Gays have long had a hard time fitting into a predominantly heterosexual culture. With heterosexuality so overwhelmingly the majority and especially because heterosexual relationships are tied to the reproductive act, gays are viewed as something aberrant and dysfunctional and for this reason gays have been subjected to much prejudice and outright persecution over the years.

Gays often feel like the helpless victims in this arrangement as they do not feel any power to control the impulses that set them apart from mainstream society.

Sooner or later the question, "how did I get this way?" enters every gay's mind and many activists, both pro- and anti-gay have championed different answers, for different reasons, of the great question of whether people are born or become gay.

Those arguing that someone is born gay come to that position for a couple different reasons. From gays themselves and their supporters the reason is to separate being gay from any sort of conscious, or even subconscious, decision.

Most of the condemnation that comes from social and religious authorities about homosexuality is based upon the idea that a gay person has freely chosen to be gay and thus that they are willfully disobeying social and religious rules.

For this reason, some gay activists support the idea that we are born gay in order to free the gay person from any personal responsibility, as they can't be held accountable for a congenital condition any more than someone else can be blamed for having a certain hair or eye color.

On the anti-gay side of the fence, many hope that recognizing that people are born gay will pave the way toward isolating a genetic cause for homosexuality and that eventually homosexuality can be "cured."

On the other end, there are many arguments supporting the idea that people become gay sometime after birth. Pro-gay activists who value freedom of choice tend not to like the born gay hypothesis both because it takes away freedom from the individual and also because it's essentially a negative way of viewing homosexuality, as something abnormal that someone is cursed with, like a congenital disease. While few claim to explain why someone would become gay, as very few gays can identify a moment when they became gay, they simply see it a question of personal choice that should be defended in a free and liberal society.

Anti-gay arguments tend to emphasize this for the same reasons mentioned earlier: that a person who chooses to become gay is then guilty of a "sin" because they are willfully living lives that go against social and religious conventions.

Whether we are born gay or become gay is definitely a major question that might never get a straight answer. While some gays will feel a great burden lifted from their shoulders if they can prove that homosexual is "just the way they were made" others see it as their own business that should be respected by all members of a free and democratic society.

At the end of the day, however, what's probably most important is that however they came to be that way, gays are here and here to stay. All the academic debate in the world on the question of whether they are born gay or become gay won't change the reality of sexuality for millions of people around the world.