Or…to put it another way…

They don’t fly very well either…

The Scene: A table in an upscale restaurant located in a trendy vacation resort.   Two old friends are sitting across from each other.   One openly gay since he was seventeen, the other a Happily Married Man having long since overcome the unwanted same-sex attractions of his youth.   They are discussing Openly Gay Friend’s problems finding someone to love and settle down with. Happily Married Man is finding it hard to believe that Openly Gay Friend has been single and struggling all these years.

Happily Married Man: Don’t you have any gay friends?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh yes.   About half my friends are gay.   I have a regular Happy Hour crowd I try to go out with every Friday.   It gets me out of the house.

Happily Married Man: How long have you known them?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh, most of them since the mid-eighties…

Happily Married Man: Wow…I can’t believe they haven’t tried to hook you up. Didn’t they ever even try?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh get me started…there was this one time…

Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!

Openly Gay Friend: They’re nice people. I think they just don’t get me…they just don’t get romantic types. They think I should just go get laid and that’ll make me feel better. They don’t get how random loveless sex might make someone like me feel a whole lot worse afterward, not better.

Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!

Openly Gay Friend: I want you to understand something…that isn’t just a gay thing. If I was straight and my happy hour group was a bunch of other straight guys I’d be getting the same advice. Just go get laid and you’ll be fine.   The cure for every lonely heart is to just get laid.   The popular culture pays a bunch of lip service to the idea of love and romance, but it’s all about just having sex in the straight scene too.

Happily Married Man: Sex is overrated…

Openly Gay Friend: I’m not saying that…

Happily Married Man: It’s just a bodily function.

Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…

Happily Married Man (emphatically): When you’re on your death bed it won’t be the times you had sex you’ll be remembering, but all the people you loved.

Openly Gay Friend: Yes…absolutely! That is so very true. But I would want my last memory to be the times I spent laying down with the one I loved. That one special body and soul relationship…that’s what you would be remembering. At least I would…if I’d ever had that. (looks wistfully at Happily Married Man, then looks away) But your life is what it is…

Happily Married Man (rolling his eyes): Stop whining….

Openly Gay Friend: I’m not whining…

Happily Married Man: You’re whining. You have to work with what you’ve got to work with and accept that. Stop thinking about what ifs. Sex is overrated…

Openly Gay Friend: Well yes, I agree completely that it isn’t all there is to life, but it’s still important…

Happily Married Man: It’s like a fart.

Openly Gay Friend: I’m sorry?

Happily Married Man: This may sound strange but think about it. It stinks for a little while, and then it’s gone.

(Openly Gay Friend looks blankly back at Happily Married Man)

Happily Married Man: Sex is like that.

Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…it helps if you’re having sex with a person you’re sexually attracted to.   (ironically) Then it’s actually a lot of fun…more engaging…more satisfying…(looks Happily Married Man in the eyes) and it makes a whole lot more sense that way.   You kinda understand then why everyone else is so into it.

Happily Married Man: You’re a piece of work…you know that?   Well it’s getting late and I have to go home now.   I’m a happily married man.

Openly Gay Friend (unhappily): So I see.   And I’m still single and unhappy.   And for gay men of our generation it will always be a time before Stonewall won’t it?

Happily Married Man: Stonewall?

(This was mostly a real conversation.   Some lines were edited for brevity, and Openly Gay Friend didn’t actually say his last two lines to Happily Married Man because just then his head was spinning.   But now he wishes he had.)

I just have one comment to make on the unfolding story of Kirk Murphy. This can’t be shouted out loudly enough: The subject of this study, which formed much of the basis for the ex-gay movement’s claim to scientific legitimacy, killed himself and his therapy so deeply wounded his family they are still, decades later, suffering from it.

The Ex-Gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. In his book, Anything But Straight, Wayne talks about the formation of the very first ex-gay ministry, Love In Action, its first clients, and how one of them, Jack McIntyre, chose to end his life rather then keep failing at becoming heterosexual.

In 1973 John Evans, who is gay, and Rev. Kent Philpott, who is heterosexual, co-founded the original “ex-gay” ministry, Love In Action on the outskirts of San Francisco. Philpott soon wrote The Third Sex?, the first ever “ex-gay” book which touted six people who supposedly converted to heterosexuality through prayer.

Although time eventually revealed no one in his book actually had changed, the people reading it had no idea the stories were fallacious. As far as they knew, there was a magical place in California that had figured out the secret for making gays into straights. Inspired by his book, a few enthusiastic individuals spontaneously began their own “ex-gay” ministries.

Evans, however, denounced the program he co-founded after his best friend Jack McIntyre committed suicide in despair over not being able to “change”…

McIntyre wrote a suicide note. If the ex-gay movement could be said to have a heart and soul, here it is:

TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?

I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.

I loved my job and my clients.

I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.

I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.

All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.

However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.

It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.

I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.

Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.

I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?

May God Have Mercy On My Soul.

A Brother & A Friend.

And as Wayne writes…

Still, Love in Action survived because many people who read The Third Sex? came to California in hopes of changing.

And George Rekers was still citing his success at fixing Kirk years after Kirk had taken his own life. When reporters caught up with him recently Rekers dismissed the idea that Kirk’s suicide could have had anything to do with the experimental gender identity therapy he’d inflicted upon the child. Oh no…that was years ago…

“That’s a long time ago, and to hypothesize, you have a hypothesis that positive treatment back in the 1970s has something to do with something happening decades later. That would, that hypothesis would need a lot of scientific investigation to see if it’s valid…”

More apparently, then the initial therapy got according to Jim Burroway who writes of his surprise that there was little to no independent verification of Reker’s claims. But according to his family Kirk was a troubled soul the rest of his life, though he had moments when it seemed he had made peace with himself. And it bears noting that the therapy deeply disturbed then, and continues to this day to disturb, his mother and his straight older brother, his sister being too young at the time to remember any of what happened.

“I do grieve for the parents now that you’ve told me that news. I think that’s very sad.” – George Rekers

Look carefully at this: Kirk was the patient who made Rekers’ career and he only just now learns of his suicide when CNN reporter tracked him down? Yes. Of course. He never stayed in touch, clearly and sickeningly never felt the slightest curiosity about how his most famous patient was doing. This is not science, it is politics. The client is not important. The client’s family is not important. It’s the message, that that there is no such thing as a homosexual only broken heterosexuals, that is important. Because inside that message is another: that homosexuals bring their own persecution upon themselves, since they can choose whenever they want to not be homosexual.

…no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed… The Ex-Gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. It continues to destroy lives and wreak families with no more tangible regard from its leadership for the human toll now then in the moment of its birth. Their allegiance is to a higher agency. No…not God. The culture war. Failure is not a bug, it’s a feature. The scapegoat must hate themselves too.

Just saying…

Misadventures in Atlanta
A Dating Scene Blog

Excuse me ma’am, but your husband is gay
By Blanca

When I moved to the South, I thought I lost an important tool: my gaydar. I routinely met men I believed were gay, only to discover they either only dated women or were married to them.

I mourned the loss of my sixth sense, but then a co-worker clued me in: Blanca, if you think they are gay, it’s likely because they Are.

Obviously this isn’t always true, but I’ve since learned that some of the couplings I questioned were indeed what I suspected.

As we all know, Atlanta has an expansive, vibrant and seemingly supportive gay community, but some men (and women) instead choose a traditional partnership with someone of the opposite sex. In some cases, their spouse knows, while in others it can either be a lifelong secret or a Jerry Springer episode…

In the case of people who go into these gay-straight marriages knowing what they’re doing, as opposed to being in denial about their sexual orientation, I’m willing to bet that it’s mostly a generational thing, with more older gay folk doing this then younger, and that it’s also mostly a bible-belt thing.

As I said in a previous post, I’ve had this track record in my dating life of falling for guys who later claimed to be completely, perfectly, absolutely heterosexual.  Yet my shyness when it comes to dating nearly immobilizes me, and I am not one of those who likes to hit on straight guys by any means.  And yes, there are gay guys like that.  Think of it as the gay male version of a straight guy who thinks lesbians are hot.  I am not anything like that guy.  I need someone who is on the same page as me.  Very much so.  And between that and my shyness I have never, Never approached any guy who wasn’t pinging my gaydar pretty solidly…or so I thought at the time. 

Yet I seemed to keep making the same mistake over and over again.  So over the years I came to think that the problem is I have lousy gaydar.  I began making jokes about how bad my it is.  But now I look back over the course of my adult life and I realize that I have spent most of the waking hours in a week in the workplace with tons of heterosexuals.  And when I look at how those heterosexuals relate to each other, verses the ersatz straight guys in my life, I have to wonder.  Anyone who thinks that gay people, gay men in particular, are way more preoccupied with sex then heterosexuals are, is living in Fantasyland.  The subtext between them is always there, just as it is between gay guys or lesbians…

Harry Burns: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally Albright: Why not?
Harry Burns: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Sally Albright: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Harry Burns: No you don’t.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: No you don’t.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: You only think you do.
Sally Albright: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Harry Burns: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: How do you know?
Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally Albright: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail ’em too.
Sally Albright: What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU?
Harry Burns: Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Sally Albright: Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.
Harry Burns: I guess not.
Sally Albright: That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York. 

–When Harry Met Sally 

And it’s exactly that subtext, which I see all the time when I’m in a mixed company of straight men and women, that I just never pick up on in certain other contexts.  Just as there is a difference between acting gay and being gay…

…there is a difference between acting and being straight. 

Was I really mistaken about the sexual orientation of those guys I tried to date once upon a time?  Or was it the nobility I thought I saw within them that I was mistaken about? 

PFOX, (Parents and Friends of eX-Gays), would have you believe it’s different from P-FLAG, (Parents and Friends of Gays), in that PFOX supports people who are "struggling with homosexuality" and P-FLAG does not.  But that’s not it. 

Here’s the difference:

Anti-Gay Distortions of Research

Take a look at this story at OneNewsNow, which begins:

Quoting a recent study, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX) is warning of the increased risk of suicide that is linked with young people who identify themselves as homosexuals before achieving full maturity — a process encouraged by many homosexual high school clubs.

The study in question, as it turns out, is a seventeen year old work published in the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, back in June 1991.  Not exactly recent…but never mind.  What PFOX is saying there is that supporting gay teens as they come out to themselves puts them at risk of suicide.  Their solution?   

Schools should not be encouraging teens to self-identify as gays, bisexuals or transgendered persons before they have matured. Sexual attractions are fluid and do not take on permanence until early adulthood. Rather than affirming teenagers as ‘gay’ through self-labeling, educators should affirm them as people worthy of respect and encourage teens to wait until adulthood before making choices about their sexuality. If teens are encouraged to believe that they are permanently ‘gay’ before they have had a chance to reach adulthood, their life choices are severely restricted and can result in depression.

So says PFOX Executive Director Regina Griggs.  Note the doublespeak there about affirming them as "people worthy of respect".  But how much respect is it, to tell a kid gay kid they don’t have to be gay if they don’t want to?  Look again, at what came slyly out of the other side of her mouth there…

Sexual attractions are fluid and do not take on permanence until early adulthood.

Thats religious rightspeak for There Is No Such Thing As A Homosexual.  Don’t believe me?  Look again…

If teens are encouraged to believe that they are permanently ‘gay’ before they have had a chance to reach adulthood, their life choices are severely restricted and can result in depression. 

Permanently ‘gay’.  Note both the quotes around the word gay and the word permanently preceding it.  You don’t have to be gay if you don’t want to.  Change is possible.  This is what PFOX wants teachers to tell the gay kids that come out to them, and/or to their peers.  Griggs is sliding that under the radar their, in a cotton candy cloud of PFAUX respect.  But in today’s hostile school environment, where the word Gay has itself become a generic put-down among school kids, a kid who comes out, almost certainly already knows how impossible change actually is for them.

And that has consequences.

But leaving aside the fact that a 17 year old study was cited as "recent" and was cited as evidence against the existence of GSA clubs, which didn’t exist at the time of the study, this argument also makes a causal claim that can’t be justified by the study itself (see the full text of the study here).

First of all, they make no distinction at all between correlation and causation. If a higher percentage of those who self-identify as gay or bisexual early attempt suicide compared to those who self-identify later, is that a causal relationship or might both factors be effects of some other cause? Griggs makes no attempt to analyze this, it is enough for her that there is a correlation.

It never occurs to Griggs that those who attempt suicide soon after self-identifying as gay do so because that is when they first become aware that their identity is in such stark conflict with societal expectations. As any gay person can tell you, the initial coming out period is the most difficult because it often leads to serious conflicts with friends and family (and that was even more true in 1991 than it is today). She also ignores all of the other far more important risk factors that are obviously more likely to be causal. The study notes:

In 44% of cases, subjects attributed suicide attempts to "family problems," including conflict with family members and parents’ marital discord, divorce, or alcoholism. One third of attempts were related to personal or interpersonal turmoil regarding homosexuality. Almost one third of subjects made their first suicide attempt in the same year that they identified themselves as bisexual or homosexual. Overall, three fourths of all first attempts temporally followed self-labeling. Other common precipitants were depression (30%), conflict with peers (22%), problems in a romantic relationship (19%), and dysphoria associated with personal substance abuse (15%).

There are far more serious risk factors for suicide in the study, all of which are ignored by Griggs and PFOX. For instance, 61% of those who attempt suicide were sexually abused, while only 29% of those who did not attempt suicide were sexually abused. There’s an obvious causal factor. Those who attempted suicide also reported much higher rates of friendship loss due to being gay, drug use and having been arrested. Again, these are far more rationally viewed as causal factors in suicide than the age at which one self-identifies. Griggs ignores all of this because it doesn’t fit her ideological preferences.

But to call it ‘ideological’ ennobles it.  This isn’t ideology, it’s hate.  A hate so bottomless it will cheerfully let children kill themselves rather then allow them to have the support they need at that critical moment in their lives.  What Griggs is saying there to kids, stripped of its PFAUX respect, is that thinking you are gay will make you kill yourself.  That is, seriously, the message they want kids who are just coming into puberty and feeling same sex desire for the first time in their lives to hear, and internalize.  These feelings are going to make me kill myself.  And when they can’t stop themselves from having those feelings, feelings they’ve never had before, feelings that seem to come out of nowhere whenever an attractive classmate walks by, feelings that they have no control over whatsoever, what do you think is going to happen?

Here’s what: Griggs will cheerfully blame those of us who want gay kids to feel good about themselves when those kids take Griggs message, that thinking you are gay makes you want to kill yourself, to heart and actually do it. 

And there is the essential difference between P-FLAG and PFOX.  One group supports gay people.  The other, ex-gays.  And it doesn’t get any more ex then dead.

[Edited a tad for clarity…] 

I always knew this…

Sexual Orientation Revealed by Body Type and Motion, Study Suggests

An individual’s body motion and body type can offer subtle cues about their sexual orientation, but casual observers seem better able to read those cues in gay men than in lesbians, according to a new study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

…

"We already know that men and women are built differently and walk differently from each other and that casual observers use this information as clues in making a range of social judgments," said lead author Kerri Johnson, UCLA assistant professor of communication studies. "Now we’ve found that casual observers can use gait and body shape to judge whether a stranger is gay or straight with a small but perceptible amount of accuracy."

Johnson and colleagues at New York University and Texas A&M measured the hips, waists and shoulders of eight male and eight female volunteers, half of whom were gay and half straight. The volunteers then walked on a treadmill for two minutes as a three-dimensional motion-capture system similar to those used by the movie industry to create animated figures from living models made measurements of the their motions, allowing researchers to track the precise amount of shoulder swagger and hip sway in their gaits.

Based on these measurements, the researchers determined that the gay subjects tended to have more gender-incongruent body types than their straight counterparts (hourglass figures for men, tubular bodies for women) and body motions (hip-swaying for men, shoulder-swaggering for women) than their straight counterparts.

In addition, 112 undergraduate observers were shown videos of the backsides of the volunteers as they walked at various speeds on the treadmill. The observers were able to determine the volunteers’ sexual orientation with an overall rate of accuracy that exceeded chance, even though they could not see the volunteers’ faces or the details of their clothing. Interestingly, the casual observers were much more accurate in judging the orientation of males than females; they correctly categorized the sexual orientation of men with more than 60 percent accuracy, but their categorization of women did not exceeded chance. 

Emphasis mine.  Why am I not asked to participate in experiments like these?  This is the one area where my weak gaydar seems to work most reliably.  I love to watch beautiful guys walk.  There’s just something about the sight of the male body in motion.  And in the gait, sometimes, I can just see it.  Some guys just have a more beautiful, or at least a more attractive to my my eye, gait then others.  The gay ones.  Makes my heart beat. 

There’s this Bob Segar song…  I realize that, according to the story, he’s singing about about a specific person…but ever since it started playing on the radio, whenever I hear it I just mentally flip a pronoun and rock to it…

But oh, they love to watch him strut…

The play on words about how they all respect her, but…doesn’t quite work with the male pronoun so I end up mentally adjusting the lyrics further as the song goes on.  But I seldom pay that much attention to the lyrics of a rock song anyway…it’s about the music, and the music of that particular song is just about right for watching beautiful guys walking.  And sometimes you just find yourself following along…er…you know…to the rhythm of it…

But there’s a disquieting side to all this, that you also need to pay attention to…

The findings build on recent research that shows that casual observers can often correctly identify sexual orientation with very limited information. A 1999 Harvard study, for example, found that just by looking at the photographs of seated strangers, college undergraduates were able to judge sexual orientation accurately 55 percent of the time.

"Studies like ours are raising questions about the value of the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy," Johnson said. "If casual observers can determine sexual orientation with minimal information, then the value in concealing this information certainly appears questionable. Given that we all appear to be able to deduce this information to some degree with just a glance, more comprehensive policies may be required to protect gays against discrimination based on their sexual orientation."

The findings also are part of mounting evidence suggesting that sexual orientation may actually be what social scientists call a "master status category," or a defining characteristic that observers cannot help but notice and which has been scientifically shown to color all subsequent social dealings with others.

"Once you know a person’s sexual orientation, the fact has consequences for all subsequent interactions, and our findings suggest that this category of information can be deduced from subtle clues in body movement," Johnson said.

A lot of gay guys,,,myself included…just assume most of the time that we’re not really all that "obvious".   In particular, those of us who grew up being fed a lot of stereotypes about swishing and limp wrists and lisping and that kind of crap, tend to assume that to the degree we don’t fit the stereotype, we’re probably passing.  Well guys…it looks like they can see right through us anyway.

And in a world that’s been so relentlessly polarized, gays so relentlessly demonized by this kind of republican party crap…

…that can have, as the article points out, consequences.   

Have you ever had a business interaction that all of a sudden just turned negative and you couldn’t quite put your finger on why?  You’re talking to a clerk at a store somewhere, or trying to arrange to have some professional come and do some work on your house, or your car, or whatever, and suddenly they turn all cold and contemptuous and suddenly find a million excuses why they can’t sell you what you were looking for, or do the work for you that you need done?  I’ve had that happen over and over again and usually I put it down to being a longhair in bluejeans and sneakers, and the lingering resentment some folks still feel toward the 60s counter-culture. But what if it really is homophobia?

It’s all too easy to fall into the suffocating trap of putting every negative reaction down to prejudice against gay people.  But there’s another side to that coin and it’s called denial.  I don’t think I have any obvious effeminacy to me, I’m no macho guy by any means, but I’ve always pictured myself internally as pretty much an average middle class, suburban American guy.  Okay…so I don’t much care for sports.  I love fast cars, firecrackers, and hard rock.  I am a stereotypical male in so many ways, some pretty embarrassing.  No…I don’t ask for directions.  I hate shopping for clothes.  Weekends when I’m cleaning house, I am always scolding myself for not picking up after myself like I should.

But maybe none of that matters anyway.  Maybe none of it ever mattered.  The clues are subtler, and they’re hard wired into us.  The way we talk, the way we move, even according to this 60 minutes article, the way we sit…

Bailey and his colleagues set up a series of experiments in his lab at Northwestern University. In one study, researcher Gerulf Rieger videotaped gay and straight people sitting in a chair, talking. He then reduced them visually to silent black and white outlined figures and asked volunteers to see if they could tell gay from straight. The idea was to find out if certain stereotypes were real and observable.

Based on physical movement and gestures of the figures, more often than not, the volunteers in the study could tell a difference. 

You can be flaming and you can be quiet and reserved and it doesn’t matter.  You can be fabulous and you can be a geek whose clothes never seem to fit quite right and it doesn’t matter.  The people we interact with on a daily basis may never even be aware consciously what it is they’re picking up on.  They just know, somehow, that they’re dealing with a homosexual.  And that can have consequences.   Especially after so many elections where gay people were painted as the demons who were going to take over America, prey on children, spread AIDS and destroy marriage and family if the democrats won.

Historically and linguistically, being left-handed has long been associated with the mark of the devil. In Latin, the word "sinister" means "left." In French, it is "gauche" – a far worse sin in France than being sinister, no doubt.

There is the left-handed compliment, which is no compliment at all; the bad guy was made to sit at the left hand of God; and there has been a higher than average number of left-handed, insane villains like Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler.

-Beth Quinn – Good News From The Left-Handed Liberation Front

Sin.  Sinister.  Left-Handed.  We don’t have to imagine a religion that regards left handedness as a mark of the devil, because it existed.  Perhaps in some corners of the human world, it still exists.  And some of us of my generation don’t have to imagine what reparative therapy for left-handedness would look like, because we have seen it with our own eyes.

The myths and superstitions surrounding left handedness were almost completely dead, at least in the United States, when I entered grade school back in 1959.  But they hadn’t died out completely.  I’m old enough to remember watching two teachers tie a classmate’s left arm to his side after he was caught writing something with his left hand. 

They did it at the kid’s parent’s request, and they were not brutal about it.  It wasn’t like they were binding him tightly or anything.  The thinking was that if you just train a kid to use their right hand early enough, it would take and they wouldn’t be left handed anymore.  It was a bit like putting something bitter on the thumb of a small child that won’t stop sucking their thumb.  They just lightly tied a small strap around the kid’s waste and left arm, to prevent him from reflexively using his left hand to write with.  The kid did not resist, he just sat there crying, humiliated, because he knew he’d done something wrong.

Except…he hadn’t.  Put aside for a moment that their model of how handedness works was all wrong.  That it was something like a bad habit which, if caught early enough, you could correct.  Even if handedness was a completely chosen thing, there is nothing wrong or evil or harmful about using your left hand over your right.  Unless that is, you believe that it’s a sin.  Left-handed.  Sinister.  Sin.  Or you believed the few remaining mental health professionals of the day who said  that left-handedness leads to a host of mental and psychological problems.  Didn’t you know that a higher then average number of serial killers are left handed? 

It isn’t hard to picture how an ex-leftie ministry might work to suck the pride and joy and love of life out of a young guy, a kid maybe who keeps having these…urges…to use their left hand.  Every time he gets that urge he believes he is being unfaithful to God.  He believes this, because his church is telling him this.  The Devil baptizes his followers with his left hand…  His peers either ridicule him, or bath him in suffocating patronization.  He has this…condition.  He can’t help himself.  There is something tragically wrong with him.  His parents are profoundly ashamed that their son uses his left hand.  The kid is deeply ashamed of himself.  And every time he feels the urge to use his left hand, the shame deepens.

But there is one final hope.  Reparative therapy.  Thousands have found freedom from left-handedness.  Question left-handedness.  There are stories of hope and redemption.  This one has been living as a right handed man for over a decade, and is now a successful painter who, he says, never feels the urge to use his left hand to pick up a brush.  That one has been in a successful relationship with another ex-leftie and they are raising a healthy, godly family of right handed children.  This one has been freed from left-handedness through the power of faith.  That one abandoned the left-handed lifestyle, and all its self destructiveness, the drugs, the booze, the litany of health problems, and has been living a clean and sober life ever since.

So he checks himself in for a round of ex-leftie therapy.  Perhaps he misses the fine print on the form that says he will never be completely cured of this left-handed urges.  Perhaps it is not in the fine print.  Perhaps, full of all the stories of hope and cure and…redemption…he decides not to notice. 

So he spends months…then years…and thousands of dollars in the ex-leftie world.  He abandons school, career, the life he had, the life he could have had, on his quest to rid himself of his urge to use his left hand.  But he can’t.  He’s left handed.  After a long struggle he eventually becomes adept at using his right hand to do simple chores.  He can write…sort of.  An accomplishment he’s proud of.  Now he can write with a fountain pen and not smear the ink.  He can use scissors with his right hand.  He can pitch a ball with his right hand…sort of.   But the urges never go away, and maddeningly after years of adapting to a right handed life, he…falls…again and again. 

Sometimes its unexpected, like when his neighbor’s kid playfully tosses a ball at him and he catches it in his left hand.  Sometimes it happens when he lets his guard down, and he catches himself doodling something with the pen in his left land.  It seems the devil won’t let go of him.  But it’s not the devil.  It’s just his biology.  The model of handedness he’s been fed is all wrong, and no amount of sincerely held religious belief can change that any more then it could change the fact hundreds of years ago, that Galileo and Copernicus were right.  And yet, it moves. 

All his life this left handed man has been fighting his nature.  And…for what?  To please a lot of right handed people who have bought into, for whatever reason, a model of handedness that is not true, and which…surely only coincidentally…elevates them above their left handed neighbors.  His own nature has been used against him since childhood, to implant shame, self loathing, disgust.  To make him accept his lowly status.  He has been denied a wholesome and nurturing spiritual life, being made to feel himself alienated from God Every Time He Gets An Urge To Use His Left Hand.  Which he keeps getting, Because He’s Left Handed.

He is either condemned, or at best, patronizingly offered help for his…condition.  When he is not being told that his sin is the worst sin of all, he’s being patronizingly told that well…we’re all sinners in the eyes of the Lord.  But this sin seems woven into his very being, like a taint on his very soul.  He just can’t stop the urges.  His body fights him every time he picks up a pencil or pen.  It reminds him constantly that, somehow, he is fundamentally wicked, in a way no one else seems to be.  No one else except other devil marked lefties.  

He has been denied wholesome and nurturing relationships with his peers, with his community, with his family, because every time he catches himself using his left hand for something, or even feeling the urge to, he is ashamed, and so he withdraws, feeling ashamed, unclean, unworthy. He has been denied the career he might have had, the friends he might have made, and all the joy and fulfillment they might have brought. 

Who knows…perhaps he was even denied the love of his life, because he was taught from such an early age, that there was something innately unclean about him.  A feeling of shame and despair that was reenforced, again and again within him, every time he had that perfectly natural urge to use his left hand.  Sin.  Sinister.  Left-handed. 

The devil baptizes his own with his left hand…  He sees himself as someone profoundly, horribly tainted.  Unworthy.  He gets on his knees nightly and begs God, tearfully, to take the urges away from him.  But they don’t go away.  He’s Left Handed.  It isn’t something you can pray away. 

He pays therapists thousands of dollars to talk him into being right handed.  Perhaps it was an overly dominant mother.  Perhaps when a boy uses his left hand to write with, he is subconsciously rebelling against his manhood.  Left is associated with the feminine isn’t it?  Whereas right is associated with the masculine.   Perhaps his father was too distant.  Perhaps he isn’t getting enough masculine activity.  But therapy doesn’t work either.  He’s Left Handed.  You can’t psychoanalyze it away.  It wasn’t his mother.  It wasn’t his father.  It’s his biology.  It’s perfectly normal.  Not average.  Not common.  But nonetheless, normal.

But he is never told that.  There are nights when he wonders why God even allowed him to be born.

There is nothing wrong with him.  Nothing.  He’s just left-handed.  It neither harms him, nor his neighbors, that he uses his left hand.   And it doesn’t separate him from God, because if God is the creator then God made him that way.  If anything, it is trying not to be what he so clearly is, that is separating him from God.  It is also separating him from his family, and from his community.  It has separated him from the whole life he could have had.

Reality matters.  Existence exists.  When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.  You would think that someone of a deeply religious nature, wishing to be faithful and devoted to God almighty would instinctively grasp how the hand of the creator has the final, absolute say over all our human pretensions.  However we might wish reality to be, reality is what it is.  There is a lesson on standing humbly before the Creator in that, which you’d think the religious conservative would find completely agreeable.  You’d think.  But if that were so, then there wouldn’t be a movement to teach creationism to school kids, let alone a movement to teach homosexuals to hate themselves, and to teach their peers, their neighbors, their country, to treat them with contempt.  The problem with standing humbly before the creator, is that its…well…humbling. 

That’s something I was taught to consider in a structured analysis and design class I attended once and it’s the kind of thinking that we should all practice.  You really need sometimes to look critically at the obvious, the taken-for-granted, those "everyone knows such-and-such is true" truths.  They can be delicate, nearly invisible curtains hiding from your eyes the reality that’s staring you back in the face.

Via aTypical Joe, comes this story of 81 words that were once in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and how they were there in the first place, simply because everyone just assumed they were true.  And this particular assumption got its first really critical looking at, when Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist at UCLA, met Sam From, a student…

Evelyn was a psychologist at UCLA and Sam was her student. He was also a homosexual. They started spending time together in the mid 1940s and Sam introduced Evelyn to his group of friends most of whom, like Sam, were gay.

Now, as I said, everyone in this group was homosexual but curiously, none was in therapy. They were all well-adjusted young men who utterly failed to conform to the traditional psychiatric image of the tortured, disturbed homosexual.

This, naturally, got Evelyn thinking.

Now, prior to Evelyn Hooker, all of the research on homosexuality – all of it – was done on people who were already under serious psychiatric treatment. Let me repeat that: In the history of psychiatric research, no one had ever conducted a study on a homosexual population that wasn’t either in therapy, in prison, a mental hospital, or the disciplinary barracks of the armed services.

Evelyn thought about this and decided that this kind of research was distorting psychiatry’s conclusions about homosexual populations. To test her theory, Evelyn came up with an experiment. Through her former student she located 30 homosexuals who had never sought therapy in their lives and matched those homosexuals with a group of heterosexuals of comparable age, IQ and education.

Evelyn then put both groups through a battery of psychological tests including a Rorschach Test, the famous ink-blot test. After disguising her subjects, Evelyn gave the results to three experienced psychiatrists and asked them to identify the homosexuals. She figured that if homosexuals were inherently pathological, the psychiatrists would be able to pick them out easily. But the judges were completely unable to distinguish the homos from the hets.

Equally important was the fact that the judges categorized two thirds of the homosexuals and the heterosexuals as perfectly well-adjusted normally functioning human beings. 

Hooker’s study challenged the idea that homosexuality was a pathology in the first place, and in doing this it not only called into question an entire generation of research on homosexuality, it also challenged psychiatry’s basic concept of disease. If you believed Hooker’s data the only conclusion you could come to was that psychiatry was deciding that certain behaviors were diseases, not out of any sort of scientific proof, but based on their own prejudices.

Beside Evelyn Hooker, psychiatrists who wanted to change the DSM really had only one other scientific study on their side: Alfred Kinsey’s famous 1948 sex survey which found that a whopping 37% of all men had had physical contact to the point of orgasm with other men, a finding which – besides shocking the hell out of 63% of the American public – seemed to suggest that homosexual acts were too common to be considered a disease.

In spite of all this work, psychiatry continued to maintain that the homos were sick and steadfastly refused to reevaluate the DSM. And then luck, or maybe fate, intervened.

This is but a small excerpt from a really good This American Life broadcast, which originally aired in January 2002.  It’s available for listening at the link above.  If you have iTunes it can also be purchased for ninty-five cents.  I highly recommend it.  The broadcast is the story of the DSM change as told by Alix Spiegel, the granddaughter of the man who was the president elect of the APA when the change occurred.  Like many profound historical events, this one is something more, and something less, then the mythologies that have grown up around it.  It involved political theater, and behind the scenes activism.  It involved many diverse people from many diverse backgrounds…most of them heterosexual, some of them gay.  Most of the gays in the APA at that time were in fact, deeply, deeply closeted, and what is probably a striking thing for modern ears to hear is how many of them accepted the prevailing assumptions about the pathology of homosexuality.

But if the internal behind the scenes politics, and the external pressure of gay activists accomplished anything, it was to hasten what the science would eventually compel them to do anyway.  That is not to ether dismiss, nor exaggerate the impact of the activism.  There is a scene near the end of Alix Spiegel’s story that needs to be in any film or TV recreation of these events, and it is that moment when Robert Spitzer is brought by one of the activists who had been protesting the APA’s categorizing of homosexuality as an illness, uninvited, to a gathering of the closeted gay professionals, and he sees how many distinguished and successful people of his profession are homosexual, people he would never have suspected, people whose accomplishments were considerable, people who would, every one of them, have been drummed out of their profession had their sexual orientation become known then.  For Spitzer, it is a profound revelation.  And then…a young man in uniform walks in the door.

You should listen to this episode.  It’s nearly an hour long but well worth it, to get to that scene.  There is a historian toward the end who says that questions of disease and pathology ultimately resolve down to moral questions, not scientific ones.  I disagree.  Science can certainly tell us whether or not something is or is not harmful to us mentally and physically.  And the moral question was answered millenia ago: First Do No Harm…  But there is a profound moral question at the bottom of every scientific one and that is the question of truthfulness and letting the evidence speak for itself.  Even if means you have to discard a cherished assumption you’ve held on to for years.  Even if that assumption has given you the recognition of your peers, fame, and made you a pretty good living. 

Robert Spitzer has taken a lot of justly deserved criticism for his so-called study of clients of ex-gay ministries, but you have to give the man credit for that one dazzling moment near the end of this report, when he let the evidence he could clearly see with his own two eyes, finally, speak for itself.  Charles Socrades comes off by contrast, as a man so blinded by dogma that he’s even willing to regard himself as a parental failure to his own gay son.  But as he says, his business was booming.  He speaks with pride toward the end about some parents who took their 16 year old gay son to one psychiatrist after another, only to be told there was nothing wrong with the boy…until they met him.

And now you know what happens to a soul that stops asking questions.

It’s true.  Some years ago, after Maryland started allowing us to view our grade school records, I took a trip to my old High School and asked to see mine.  Reading all the comments in my file from all the teachers I’d had over the years was a real eye opener.  Two of them stood out in particular: one from a fifth grade teacher who wrote Bruce "Takes excessive interest in personal art projects".  The other was a write-up by one of my first grade teachers for a discipline infraction.  I’d been caught kissing other boys.

It wasn’t until I read her words that I even remembered the incident.  Perhaps I’d just shut it out of my mind all those years because the embarrassment was too much for my little first grade sensibilities.  Or perhaps I just let the incident slide on by because I hadn’t thought it was any big deal at the time.  All I remember of it, was getting scolded for kissing a boy.  But that particular teacher was always scolding me and then dragging me into the coat closet, where she dragged all the kids at one time or another to make them pray for forgiveness because of something they did, or that she though they’d done.  I still remember how livid she was when the Supreme Court ruled that public schools can’t force the kids in them to pray.  Picture a first grade teacher standing stone faced in front of her classroom of small children, and telling them that the Supreme Court had just taken God away from them.

Which is all to say that my sexuality, even at that age, was probably already beginning to surface in various little telling ways, and that some of the adults in my life were already starting to brand me for it.  There’s a really interesting article in this weeks’ Village Voice about parents and teachers struggling to cope with developing gender and sexuality in grade school children and younger in a culture that simply doesn’t want to aknowledge that children have any such things.  But if there is a bioligical basis to sexual orientation, then its a no-brainer that they do.

But why not? We know almost nothing about gender and sexuality in young children, but what we do know is that they both emerge in children quite early.

"It varies, and development varies from child to child, but awareness of sexuality begins in elementary school," says Caitlin Ryan, a researcher studying LGBT families with the Family Acceptance Project in California. "Even though adults who work with children or adolescents are typically not aware of this as part of their professional training, regardless, it’s happening. It’s very common for young people to have attractions to same-sex peers if they’re young."

I remember my grade school crushes to this day.  I often drove my friends back then crazy with my heated emotional attachments.  In those days though, strange as it may sound today, a young boy was almost expected to dislike girls and find more emotional gratification in his male pals until he got to a certain age.  There was a saying for it "Going through a phase…"  As time went on and my male pals began their first tentative efforts at courtship, I would reach for that saying to describe myself and my own emotional responses to the same and the opposite sex, over and over again like a mantra.  "I’m just going through a phase…just going through a phase…just going through a phase…"   I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded like a good enough excuse to avoid dating girls…something I was really really not interested in.

If only someone had told me that I could date boys instead.  Oh…I’d have jumped right on that… 

Just ask the parents. "In their kindergarten class, I’ve definitely observed three or four of the boys being flirtatious, with both girls and other boys," says the mother of the little boy who wants to marry his "god brother."

Ryan says that elementary school health teachers have told her that they hear children talking about crushes beginning as early as kindergarten. "Children can describe thinking of Valentine’s day and of having that little special feeling of having butterflies in their stomach," she says. "Why would we think that this is only something that takes place in their twenties?"

And why would we think that only straight kids are getting twitterpated? Is it because we still think gayness is such an undesirable outcome?

Twitterpated.  I love it.  Describes my schoolboy crushes perfectly.  Twitterpated.  Except I had no idea what it was all about, because I wasn’t allowed to know that boys could fall in love with other boys.  Those years could have been a lot happier for me then they were.  Every kid should be allowed to get twitterpated without getting dragged into the closet to pray for forgiveness.

Dr. Warren Throckmorton, who in 2004 wrote and produced the Ex-Gay documentary I Do Exist, finds Paul Cameron’s latest wanting…

However, to address the actual claims of early demise, I asked Morten Frisch, Danish epidemiologist, to review the Cameron’s paper “Federal Distortion Of Homosexual Footprint (Ignoring Early Gay Death?). Morten is the lead author of a recent report on environmental influences on marriages decisions among heterosexuals and homosexuals. I wrote about this study here and blogged about it here. He very kindly agreed to do so and replied earlier today. As I suspected, he did not find their arguments compelling, or use of data appropriate. Here is his brief analysis:

Cameron and Cameron’s report on ’life expectancy’ in homosexuals vs heterosexuals is severely methodologically flawed

It is no wonder why this pseudo-scientific report claiming a drastically shorter life expectancy in homosexuals compared with heterosexuals has been published on the internet without preceding scientific peer-review (http://www.earnedmedia.org/frireport.htm). The authors should know, and as PhD’s they presumably do, that this report has little to do with science. It is hard to escape the idea that non-scientific motifs have driven the authors to make this report public. The methodological flaws are of such a grave nature that no decent peer-reviewed scientific journal should let it pass for publication.

As a measure of gay individuals’ average ‘life expectancy at birth’, Cameron and Cameron gathered information about age at death from obituaries for homosexual people in the U.S., and they obtained Scandinavian data regarding the average age at death among homosexually partnered persons who died within a period of up to 14 years after the introduction of laws on homosexual partnerships.

Due in part to reports like the present homosexual persons remain subject to stigmatization. The majority of homosexual people, even in comparatively liberal countries like Denmark, are not open about their sexuality in public. Particularly older homosexuals who grew up in periods when their sexuality was either a crime or a psychiatric diagnosis tend to remain silent about their homosexuality in public. Therefore, the higher prevalence of self-reported homo/bisexual experiences and feelings in younger than older age groups most likely reflects that young gays and bisexuals are less hesitant than older ones to provide honest answers in sex surveys.

The majority of homosexual individuals in the report by Cameron and Cameron were presumably open about their same-sex preferences. The groups studied comprised homosexuals who had entered registered partnerships in Denmark or Norway, and homosexuals in the U.S. whose relatives considered homosexuality to be such an integrated part of their deceased loved ones’ personalities that they felt it natural to mention in the publicly available obituary. Since, as noted, age is a strong determinant of openness about homosexuality, the study groups of deceased homosexuals in Cameron and Cameron’s report were severely skewed towards younger people. Consequently, the much younger average age at death of these openly homosexual people as compared with the average age at death in the unselected general population tells nothing about possible differences between life expectancies in gays and non-gays in general. All it reflects is the skewed age distribution towards younger people among those who are openly homosexual.

To further illustrate Cameron and Cameron’s methodological blunder, imagine a country that sets up a new register to record all cases of sexual harassment against women. After 14 years of operation the register is contacted by an advocacy group who gets access to the data to examine how sexual harassment influences women’s life expectancy. Among those women who died during the maximum of 14 years of follow-up, few women will have died after the age of 50, simply because most sexual harassment cases occurred among young women. Using the same logic and methods as Cameron and Cameron, this advocacy group could arrive at the conclusion that sexual harassment reduces women’s ‘life expectancy’ by 30 years or more. Needless to say, this would be as pure nonsense as the conclusion reached by Cameron and Cameron that heterosexuals outlive gays by 22-25 years.

(Emphasis mine) Throckmorton, to his everlasting credit, denounced forcing gay teens into reparative therapy when the Love In Action protests hit the news during the summer of 2005.   He has moderated his stance on ex-gay therapy since then, retired I Do Exist, split with PFOX and the Ex-Gay movement, and now says his work "…does not emphasize changing sexual orientation as much as it does achieving congruence with chosen beliefs and values (which may or may not lead to change of attractions)."  So I guess he’s not in a playing along mood. 

My Day Of Truth happened one morning in June of 2005 when I read the desperate posts of a 16 year old gay kid whose parents were forcing him into Love In Action…when I read that horrible rule book he posted on his blog.  I suspect that was a Day Of Truth for a lot of people.  Who knows…maybe Throckmorton too…

They say that fundamentalism springs from fear of the unknown. They say it’s a retreat from reality into the comfort of dogma: a mental padded cell where no doubt ever disturbs the peaceful tranquility. It is a place they say, where there are no questions, no doubts, only comfortable certainties. A place where you don’t have to think for yourself, and most importantly, where you are not responsible, only forgiven.

I disagree. Fundamentalism I believe, springs not from fear of the unknown, but from fear of the people next door. Fear that they can cope with the world as it is, better then you can. Resentment of their courage in facing a world that you cannot. Envy that turns into hate. Fundamentalism doesn’t so much give you a place to hide from the world that the rest of us manage, somehow, to go on living in, as give you permission to put your thumb into our eyes.

Here, Mara Schiavocampo captures Peterson Toscano in a couple all-too-brief passages from his one man play, Doing Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House. She intercuts excerpts from Peterson’s play, and an interview with him, with an interview of John Smid inside his little ex-Episcopalian church, turned conversion therapy camp. There’s a moment in the video with that’s telling, and it comes when Peterson explains how he finally had to ask himself one day, what he was doing to himself, and John he insists that The Truth…The Truth…The Truth…has set him free…

The Truth…The Truth…The Truth… Jacob Bronowski in his magnificent book and BBC series on the history of science, The Ascent of Man, devoted an entire episode to the difference between truth and dogma, titled Knowledge or Certainty. He begins with the face of his friend, Stephan Borgrajewicz who, like himself, was born in Poland. And he asks us, how well, how precisely, can we describe this man’s face? He asks a painter to render it, and says…

We are aware the these pictures do not fix the face so much as explore it; that the artist is tracing the detail almost as if by touch; and that each line that is added strengthens picture but never makes it final. We accept that as the method of the artist. But what physics has now done is to show that that is the only method to knowledge. There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.

This episode is the heart of the entire series. In it, Bronowski calmly and methodically rips to bits the view that science is only about dry facts and figures. It is a method of knowledge he insists…a very human one. We are not Gods, we do not have the perfect God’s eye view of reality. So we must approach what we know with humility, and question it, and test it, and verify it, because we do not have that perfect absolute knowledge of Gods. We can be right, we can be wrong, but when we do not test our knowledge against reality, when we set ourselves apart from that need to test our understandings and let nature speak its truths for itself, we open the door to the worst that is possible within us. And that worst has no bottom. Bronowski ends the episode on one of public television’s most powerful, most moving moments, and it ends as it began, with the face of Stephan Borgrajewicz, many years younger, taken when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp…

We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people. The truth John, is that you won’t stop forcing gay teens through your program against their will, because it’s the ones that are comfortable with who they are that you need to force your cheapshit cowardly self loathings into the most. The truth John, is that you sold out every moment of pure and honest happiness you could ever have had, for the sake of pleasing a world that Still thinks you’re a pervert. The truth John, is that now you can’t bear to see a happy, well adjusted gay kid, because they remind you of everything you could have been, everything you could have had. The truth is the wall is yellow John. Take a look at it someday god damn you. An honestly lived life isn’t necessarily an easier one, but it’s…you know…Authentic and Real.

…and…a blender?

Here’s Peterson Toscano and Lance Carroll on the Montel Williams show, briefly discussing how they came to find themselves in reparative therapy. Two things are worth noting here: Peterson went in of his own free will, while Lance was forced into it by his parents. Peterson left of his own accord, finally accepting himself just as he was, and remained very close to both his parents. Lance is now estranged from both of his. 

This conversation is all too brief, but I guess that’s the format of the Montel Williams show, to flit from one topic to another to another during the course of an hour. Someone should sit those two down together for a long talk on camera where they can talk about their experiences in more depth, how it felt, what it did to them, what their lives are like now: the one who went in of his own accord out of devotion to God, and the one who was forced in against his will.

And here’s a clip from a Boston Legal episode about a man suing his ex-gay ministry. Great line at the end…

John…are you reading this? Have you given Lance’s parents back their money yet? Bring families together do you? Ever tell Lance you’re sorry? Ever find where you buried your conscience? You had one once…didn’t you? Do you remember what it was like…way back then…to have a conscience…?

The BBC site has a really interesting little brain sex test you can take.  It ask you to answer a battery of tests on verbal and spacial ability, how well you can judge someone’s feelings by looking at just their eyes, asks you to measure your finger lengths, and so forth.  One test presents pairs of faces (you can choose between male or female) and asks you to select which face in each pair is the more attractive.  Another gives you a minute to study the objects in a drawing of many random objects, and then presents them again but with some of them moved around and gives you another minute to correctly identify which objects have changed position.

An interesting test.  So I took it…and hit the bull’s eye…

This is just my summary…there is a somewhat more detailed analysis after it, but I’m not sharing.  Suffice to say that while it gave me some surprises, the test also confirmed a bunch of things about the way my brain seems to work that I’d always suspected.  My finger ratios were close to the average male’s, but my verbal skills were closer to the average female’s.  My spot the difference score was lower then both male and female averages, but that might be because my short term memory is so weak and always has been.  My empathy score was actually two points above the average response of women, yet I systematize way more then the average male. Oh…and I tend to prefer a feminine face over a masculine one.  Mind you, I asked the test to test me on guys, not gals.  Everyone who knows me from way back when would have a good laugh over that one.  I’ve been asked point blank by friends (gay and straight) based on the males I find attractive, if I am really gay.  Yes…I am. 

In the next installment of A Coming Out Story, I’ll start getting into the left brain/right brain struggle that’s been pretty central to much of my life.  It’s…something of a relief to see that I haven’t been just imagining it all these years. 

Left Brain/Right Brain

You can take the BBC Brain Sex Test Here. 

There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.  -Ezra Pound

Via the Log Cabin Republicans (yes…I know…) A little bit of shear brilliance from Chandler Burr:

The raging debate about gay rights ultimately turns on one simple question.  And, bizarrely, the fact that answering this question will put a definitive end to the national battle over gay rights is almost completely unknown, not only in America in general, but among gay people as well. At its core, the answer to this question is the only one that matters, the one that determines the most appropriate public policy course, and the one that will win the political struggle over gay rights: Is homosexuality a lifestyle choice or is homosexuality an inborn biological trait?  Put another way, does someone choose to be gay or are they just born that way?  You may be surprised to find out that we already know the answer to this question. In fact, surprising as it may be, we’ve known the answer for several decades.

I disagree that this is the only question that matters.  But never mind.  The brilliance I’m referring to here, isn’t in Burr’s framing of the question, but of his framing of the answer.  We’ve known the answer for several decades.  Yes.  Just so.  If the question is a pitch by the religious right, then Burr smacks it clear out of the ballpark with this…

A bit of Biology 101: For every human trait they study, clinicians and biologists assemble what’s called a "trait profile," the sum total of all the data they have gathered clinically (clinical research basically means research done through 1. questions and 2. empirical observation to answer the questions) about a trait. Researchers gather groups of subjects from different areas of the world, question them about their trait, observe the trait in them, and record the data. The various aspects of the trait are precisely described: gradations and variations in eye color are assessed, eye color’s correlation or lack thereof with gender, geography, race, or age is noted, scientists observe the way eye color is passed down through generations—all of which are clues as to whether or not eye color is a biological trait. The data are summarized in papers and charts and published in the scientific literature. That, in sum, makes up the trait profile.

Here is the profile of a trait on which clinical research has been done for decades. It is taken from the published scientific literature. The trait should be rather obvious:

1) This human trait is referred to by biologists as a "stable bimorphism"— it shows up in all human populations as two orientations— expressed behaviorally.

2) The data clinicians have gathered says that around 92% of the population has the majority orientation, 8% has the minority orientation.

3) Evidence from art history suggests the incidence of the two different orientations has been constant for five millennia.

4) The trait has no external physical, bodily signs.  That means you can’t tell a person’s orientation by looking at them. And the minority orientation appears in all races and ethnic groups.

5) Since the trait itself is internal and invisible, the only way to identify an orientation is by observing the behavior or the reflex that expresses it. However—and this is crucial—

6) –because the trait itself is not a "behavior" but an internal, invisible orientation, those with the minority orientation can hide, usually due to coercion or social pressure, by behaving as if they had the majority orientation. Several decades ago, those with the minority orientation were frequently forced to behave as if they had the majority orientation— but internally the orientation remained the same and as social pressures have lifted, people with the minority orientation have been able to openly express it.

7) Clinical observation makes it clear that neither orientation of this trait is a disease or mental illness. Neither is pathological in any observable way.

8) Neither orientation is chosen.

9) Signs of one’s orientation are detectable very early in children, often, researchers have established, by age two or three. And one’s orientation probably has been defined at the latest by age two, and quite possibly before birth.

These data indicated that the trait was biological, not social, in origin, so the clinicians systematically asked more questions. And these started revealing the genetic plans that lay underneath the trait:

10) Adoption studies show that the orientation of adopted children is unrelated to the orientation of their parents, demonstrating that the trait is not created by upbringing or society.

11) Twin studies show that pairs of identical twins, with their identical genes, have a higher-than-average chance of sharing the same orientation compared to pairs of randomly selected individuals; the average rate of this trait in any given population— it’s called the "background rate"—is just under 8%, while the twin rate is just above 12%, more than 50% higher.

12) This trait’s incidence of the minority orientation is strikingly higher in the male population— about 27% higher—than it is in the female population. Many genetic diseases, for reasons we now understand pretty well, are higher in men than women.

13) Like the trait called eye color, the familial studies conducted by scientists show that the minority orientation clearly "runs in families," handed down from parent to child.

14) This pattern shows a "maternal effect," a classic telltale of a genetic trait. The minority orientation, when it is expressed in men, appears to be passed down through the mother.

Put all this data together, and you’ve created the trait profile. The trait just described is, of course, handedness.

Yes.  What we’re all seeing with regard to human sexual orientation, is nothing new or surprising.  Burr compares the two traits, handedness and sexual orientation side-by-side and the likenesses are striking, as is the obvious conclusion.  We already know this…  I entered first grade back in 1959.  I remember vividly the sight of a classmate having his left arm tied down to his side by the teachers (two of them).  The boy’s parents had asked them to do that, if they saw the boy using his left hand to write or draw with.  The thinking being that if you just forced a kid to use their right hand, they would eventually grow out of using their left.  That was 1959.  You may notice that they’re not doing that to left handed kids anymore.  But there was a time when left-handedness was considered a mark of the devil.

It’s an image that has stuck in my mind ever since, and all the more so after I began my own process of coming to grips with my sexual orientation.  I’m gay.  You can pressure me into acting against it…teach me one lie after another about homosexuality, make me come to fear and loath my sexual nature so much I might never touch another male with desire without experiencing waves of guilt and self hatred and fear.  You can pass one law after another, penalizing and even criminalizing same sex relationships…in effect tying that part of me down.  And yet I am still gay.  The idea that you can make me not-gay by tying that part of me down is false.  You can no more make me not-gay then you can make me left handed by tying down my right arm.  That model of sexual orientation, as a learned or adaptive behavior is wrong.  It isn’t like that.  Neither was handedness.  But…we know that.

We’ve known the answer for several decades…  Burr, and many other people of good conscience, need to look at that simple fact.  I mean…really look at it.  Ironically, Burr gives it a glancing shot here:

Behavior isn’t sexual orientation, and the difference between behavior and orientation is as obvious as lying: When you tell a lie, you know perfectly well what the truth is inside…

And so do people like James Dobson, and all the others of his kind in the religious right, who routinely lie about the work of real scientists in order to incite anti-gay passions.  Because inciting anti-gay passions translates into money in the collection plate, and votes at the polls, and tens of thousands of obediant followers who jump whenever you tell them to…and more importantly, bend their knees.  You can’t distort the science the way the leaders of the religious right are, without knowing that you’re distorting it.  That’s lying.  And when you lie, you know you’re doing it.  They Know.

This is where Burr, and others, chiefly honest men and women of science and other civilized people, get it wrong.   Yes, facts matter, because ultimately you cannot fool nature.  But this isn’t a matter of convincing the opposition that they’re wrong.  They know they’re wrong, or they wouldn’t be lying.  The only question that matters isn’t whether sexual orientation is chosen or not, it’s whether the people who still insist that it is, have a conscience or not.  Because if they don’t have one, then appealing to it is utterly futile.

But…you should go read the rest of Burr’s piece.  For the shear pleasure of watching him smack the ball out of the park.  For the next time next time someone like Dobson goes babbling on about homosexuality and choice, so you can see with sickening clarity what a moral runt they are.  We don’t force right handedness on left handed kids because we know how damaging that is to them.  It’s damaging to gay kids too.  Profoundly so.  And yes…the religious right knows that too.  They’ve known for several decades.

Emil Steiner at the Washington Post asks, "What’s going on in Colorado’s Evangelical community?"  Well…here’s what’s going on, and not just in Colorado…

Sitting cross-legged in jeans and an open-collar shirt, Barnes spoke in his video about evolving feelings growing up in a firm moral family: from confused little boy to adolescent racked with self-loathing and guilt.

In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a "fag" approached him.

Barnes thought, "’Is that how you’d feel about me?’ It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed."

I have a strong hunch that dad was having some thoughts about how manly his boy was, and decided to lay it on the line for him.  It did it’s work.  When Abraham took his son to the sacrificial altar, so the story goes, an angel stayed his hand just at the moment he was about to put the knife into his son.  But I don’t think even an angel could stop some parents.