Homosexuality remains controversial in the United States. Some people see homosexu­ality as a mortal sin, others argue that homosexuals are a “bad influence” on society and children (and, for example, believe they should not be parents or teachers), and still oth­ers defend homosexual rights and attack America’s whole view of sexuality. Many other countries are […]

Social psychologist Daryl Bem (1996) has proposed that biological variables, such as ge­netics, hormones, and brain neuroanatomy, do not cause certain sexual orientations, but rather they contribute to childhood temperaments that influence a child’s preferences for sex-typical or sex-atypical activities and peers. Although this theory may seem a bit outdated to us today, his premise […]

Sociological theories are constructionist and try to explain how social forces produce ho­mosexuality in a society. They suggest that concepts like homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality are products of our social imagination and are dependent on how we as a society decide to define things. In other words, we learn our culture’s way of thinking about […]

It is interesting to point out, however, that in a society like ours that tends to view heterosexuality as the norm, it would seem that very few men and women would be so­cietally reinforced for homosexual behavior, yet homosexuality exists even without this positive reinforcement from society.

Storms (1981) suggests a purely constructionist theory of development. Noting that a person’s sex drive begins to develop in adolescence, Storms suggests that those who de­velop early begin to become sexually aroused before they have significant contact with the other sex. Because dating usually begins around the age of 15, boys who mature at the […]

One group of studies that has begun to fuel debate about the role of early childhood in the development of homosexuality is gender-role nonconformity research. The studies are based on the observation that boys who exhibit cross-gender traits—that is, who be- have in ways more characteristic of girls of that age—are more likely to grow […]

Developmental theories focus on a person’s upbringing and personal history to find the origins of homosexuality. Developmental theories tend to be constructionist; that is, they see the development of homosexual behavior as a product of social forces rather than being innate in a particular individual. First we will discuss the most influential de­velopment theory, psychoanalytic […]

Two articles in the early 1990s reported differences between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men (S. LeVay, 1991; Swaab & Hofman, 1990). Both studies found that certain areas of the hypothalamus, known to play a strong role in sexual urges, were either larger or smaller in homosexual men than in heterosexual men. Even though […]

Researchers have also examined effects of birth order. Many gay men have been found to be born later than their siblings and have older brothers, but not older sisters (Blanchard, 2004; Camperio-Ciani et al., 2004; Ridley, 2003). Overall it has been esti­mated that 1 in 7 gay men’s sexual orientation was a result of fraternal […]

Biological theories are essentialist—that is, they claim that differing sexual orientations are due to differences in physiology. This difference can be due to genetics, hormones, birth order, or simple physical traits. Genetics In 1952, Franz Kallman tried to show that there was a genetic component to homosex­uality. Kallman compared identical twins (who come from one […]