What makes a man gay?

What makes a man gay? Part of the reason why I started taking a few little peeks outside my closet was to learn more in an attempt to answer this question.

As an introduction, I like the metaphor that homosexuality is like coughing - one cough sounds a lot like any other, but the causes can be many and varied. You might cough because you're in a dusty room, or because you have a cold, or because you have tuberculosis, or perhaps just because you want to catch someone's attention. It's not a disease in itself, but a symptom of something else.

Similarly, all homosexual activity may look the same on the surface, but the root causes differ wildly. Some men have sex with other men because their sexual identity was screwed up by some trauma in their childhood. Some men have sex with other men because they're locked away with no female company and their sex drive overwhelms their natural inclinations. Some men have sex with other men to assert their power and dominance over them. And some men have sex with other men because they're perverts who will do anything (and I mean DO anything) to get a new kick. None of these men are really homosexuals in the pure sense... although ironically they're getting more action than me (Bastards!).

And then there are men like me, who are sexually attracted to other men for reasons that aren't really understood and don't fit into any of the catagories above. The only theory that seems to mesh with my own experience is the theory that a man is made gay in uetero, possibly by his mother's body rejecting the alien rush of testosterone being injected into the embryo. As a result, a part of the male feotus' brain that controls sexual attraction remains in a default female state, while all around it other parts of the brain and body develop normally as male.

Of course, this basic flaw in the architecture of the brain has a cascading effect throughout the whole structure, both of the brain itself and the psychology that grows from it. The brain struggles to accomodate the conflicting drives, trying to reconcile within itself a male identity and a contradictory male sexual attraction.

Thus gay men aren't screwed up because a homophobic society detests them (although I'm sure that hasn't helped). Gay men are screwed up because they're screwed up. At the very core of their idenity there is a basic contradiction, and although the brain finds ingenious ways to live with it, it's always there, and we are incapable of finding a sense of "rightness" in ourselves because of it. I'm yet to meet a gay man with a calm, sane, sensible relationship with himself, even though I meet men like that all the time in the straight world. Society can endorse male homosexuality all it wants, but gay men will always have to live with, and be tortured by, this deep, intrinsic sense of wrongness.

You may think, "That sounds tragic!", to which I would reply "Well duh." Life is tragedy, and we all have to get along with it the best we can. Conversely, you may think, "You're just a self-loathing closet case who needs to get some PRIDE!", to which I would reply "Bite me."

This in uetero theory of homosexuality has a lot of repercussions in behaviour, morality and psychology, but unless I want to make this post longer than a John Grisham novel (which I don't), I'll deal with them at a later date.

But I don't want to end on a downer, so here's a picture of a bunny.