What doesn't make a man gay?

Almost all of the traffic that this blog gets from Google searches comes via one specific search: "what makes a man gay?" The traffic comes to me because of this post, and because it's a question that few blogs bother to consider. This is odd, when you think about it, because it's a question that every gay man asks himself as part of his search for identity.

Of course my blog isn't the only place that this Google search identifies. While checking my stats the other day, I clicked on this link to a Times review from 2007 of Desmond Morris' book 'The Naked Man'.

Desmond Morris is best known as the author of the seminal 1967 anthropological work 'The Naked Ape'. His theory, as outlined in the review, is that homosexuals are men who do not break away from the all-male bonding that boys seem to prefer for a roughly ten year stretch between toddlerhood and puberty. For some reason - possibly a misfiring of hormones - they stay stuck in a preference for the company of men, even as their interests turn sexual.

This is, of course, utter bunk.

I've met several little boys who couldn't be more proto-gay if they minced around wearing pink feather boas singing Liza Minnelli medleys... which they occasionally do. We've all met such boys. Their homosexuality isn't an upcoming failure to make the leap into an interest in girls. It's already part of who they are, something they started expressing from the very first moment they could express anything. Puberty does nothing other than ramp up the testosterone and supercharge their orientation with horniness and lust.

Reading this review makes me suspect that research into the causes of homosexuality is a young person's game. When looking for reasons and influences, it seems that every generation of researchers latches onto the scientific discipline du jour and clings to it, like a barnacle on a ship's hull, for the rest of their days. It's kind of alarming to witness otherwise impeccably-credentialed scientists supporting theories that are about as scientifically rigorous as phrenology and perpetual motion. It seems that young researchers are the only ones who have any chance of coming to the issue with open minds.

Desmond Morris was 80 years old when 'The Naked Man' was published. Candidly, he may be too old to be able or willing to consider fresh ideas or advancements in other fields. He's viewing the world though the mindset of his 1967 heyday, when homosexuality was still considered a psychiatric disorder. Weighed down by the baggage of more than half a century of misinformation and misinterpretation, he fails to grasp truths that are self-evident to any gay man.

Apart from being set in his ways, why does Morris support such a ridiculous theory? Part of the answer, I think, comes from the comment thread following the review. "Why are you even asking this question", demand several commenters. "Stop trying to put me in a box. I am who I am and I'm fabulous!" To which I can only reply, "Well good for you, honey, but if scientists listened to you and stopped trying to find out how the world worked, we'd still think the earth was flat and cower in terror during every thunderstorm."

There's no use in pretending that people don't want to know why some men are gay. It's probably for the best if gay men themselves look into it, tell scientists when their theories are off-kilter, and try to get to the bottom of the puzzle. Knowledge is always a good thing.