Via Ex-Gay Watch… University of Minnesota researchers used a technology to embed images on computer screens that were, in a sense, hidden or more properly, camouflaged, to see how their subjects subconsciously responded to them. What makes this study particularly interesting is that some of the "hidden" images were of naked human bodies…male and female…and their subjects not only included heterosexual men and women, but homosexual men and women too…
Nothing focuses the mind’s eye like an erotic picture, according to the results of a new study. Even when such pictures were actively canceled out, subliminal images of female nudes helped heterosexual men find the orientation of a briefly shown abstract shape. Such nudity-driven focusing worked almost as well for women, as long as the image accorded with their sexual preference.
Cognitive neuroscientist Sheng He of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues gathered groups of heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men and bisexual women numbering 10 each. Each viewed special images pointed directly at each individual eye. The researchers could cancel out vision of one eye’s image by presenting a specific high contrast image to the other eye. Such an image, called a Gabor patch, consists of a series of contrasting lines that form an abstract–and visually arresting–shape. "Normally, the two eyes look at the same image. They don’t have any conflict," he explains. "We create a situation where the two eyes are presented with two images, and then they will have binocular competition. One image is high contrast [and dynamic], the other is static. You basically just see the dynamic image."
Into the canceled out image slot, the researchers slipped an erotic image; for example, a naked woman displayed for a heterosexual man. To ensure that subjects did not consciously detect the invisible image, they were asked to press a specific key if they noticed any difference between the left and right images. Over the course of 32 trials, men were significantly better at detecting the orientation of Gabor patches when they appeared in the slot formerly occupied by an invisible image of a nude woman.
The heterosexual men, however, had a more difficult time detecting the same orientation when it was located where an invisible picture of a nude man had been; this was not the case for heterosexual women when viewing their own sex naked. And the homosexual men’s response was similar to that of the heterosexual women, as were the bisexual women’s and heterosexual men’s.
(Emphasis mine). Mind you, they couldn’t see the images enough to process them consciously. But at a level below consciousness something was clearly clicking in the subjects. And it clicked differently for the gay subjects.
Now isn’t that interesting. The research wasn’t into sexual orientation, but to uncover the subconscious mechanisms the brain uses to processes visual information. More here from Science Daily…
When subjects become conscious of images, the sequence of steps in brain processing becomes very complicated because neurons engage in all sorts of feedback and crosstalk–especially with emotionally charged information. The researchers were studying the flow of visual information at an earlier stage, while it is still traveling along a one-way path.
"We’re trying to reveal what happens when one doesn’t have a conscious visual perception. That is, how the brain processes visual information independent of consciousness," said He.
The researchers chose to generate brain activity by using erotic pictures because they promised to elicit strong responses and clear patterns in the data. But the researchers believe the mechanisms by which the brain processes such images are universal.
"This definitely doesn’t just work for erotic pictures," said He. "But erotic images stand out in terms of potency to generate a response."
Which makes sense considering how ancient and powerful the sex drive is. And this also makes sense…
The strongest shift in attention toward the area where the image had been was in heterosexual men who had been shown nude female images. Those subjects also tended to be repelled by nude male images. Among heterosexual women, nude male images induced a less strong attention shift toward the image site but no significant shift in response to nude female pictures. Gay men behaved similarly to heterosexual women, and gay/bisexual women performed in between heterosexual men and women.
The divergent results among the groups of study subjects provide evidence that the subjects’ brains were processing the visual information in a selective manner.
It also pretty well shows, once more, that sexual orientation isn’t a matter of conscious choice, or even self identification, as some in the kook pews keep insisting. Gay or Straight, you are drawn to the attractive sex in ways your conscious mind plays only a supporting roll in. In computergeek speak…it’s down in the kernel. We are drawn to the sex we are hard wired to mate with, and for some of us, that is the same sex as we ourselves are. It isn’t Godlessness. It isn’t rebellion. It isn’t sexual immorality. It is simply the way some of us are. We mate to our own sex, because that is how we are made…
Now…I wonder how all those folks at Exodus and Love In Action…who claim to have been cured of their homosexuality, would fare on this test, were it given to them. I propose an experiment along those lines, but with a mixture of images of nude bodies and random other objects that might also provoke a strong emotional response…so they couldn’t game their responses.
Run the experiment with three groups of men…straight, gay and ex-gay men who are absolutely convinced, or at least say they are, that not only their behavior but their sexual interests have changed. The person administering the test cannot know if they are testing a straight man, a gay man, or an ex-gay man. The person evaluating the results doesn’t know who administered the test. We can start with all those ex-gays that Spitzer claims have changed.
A former LIA "client" and now booster takes issue with this post of mine. Here’s my reply…
—–
> I, having been a client at LIA (March, 2005), would like to know some of
> Lance’s horrendous experiences caused by his time there.
A client were you? Swell. You know the difference between being a "client" and being an inmate…right? There’s the beginning of the horror right there buddy, and what’s disturbing right off the bat about your comment is that you seem utterly unable to even notice it. So you my friend, are part of the horror.
Those kids are not in there by choice. Most of them had either made peace with their sexual nature, or were at least beginning to, when they were dragged into LIA by parents terrified from the cesspool of anti-gay propaganda that the religious right vomits into the public discourse, much of which John happily repeats. Joe Stark was on Pat Robertson’s 700 club, mindlessly babbling that gays only live an average of 36 years. Where the hell did he hear that claptrap, if it wasn’t John? Even Paul Cameron isn’t claiming 36 years. But John doesn’t seem to care where he gets his facts on homosexuality, as long as they’re sufficently ugly.
For months at least, if not longer, John was linking his LIA website to a group called The International Organization Of Heterosexual Rights, and using their bogus statistics to paint a picture of homosexuals and homosexuality that was relentlessly perverse and disgusting. After community activists started pointing out how unChristianly it was to be linking to a hate site, John pulled the link. But he kept their bogus fact sheet online. So at least for a time (I haven’t been there recently), people visiting his site were still being given this crap from a hate group…only they weren’t being told who the source of this information was. Dig it. John responded to the accusation that he was spreading hate rhetoric, not by taking it down, but by making it harder for people to discover that the facts on his website were coming from a hate group.
I think part of the reason he does it is because he knows that it frightens parents, and that’s his last best source of clients now: Helpless gay teens who cannot legally refuse his dangerous blend of anti-gay religiosity and junk psychology. As more and more comes to light about the practices of these ex-gay ministries, and their spectacular rates of failure, fewer and fewer grown adults are checking in. So the kids, who cannot legally refuse, are his last best source of income, which he needs to keep the operation afloat. Never mind what it does to kids, to their parents, to the bond between parent and child…John’s on a mission from God, and Gods don’t feel shame.
Imagine a teen who is left handed. Imagine they’re told that their left-handedness is unnatural, perverse, a God condemned abomination. Imagine sending that kid to a place that claims to be able to treat left-handedness through prayer and counseling, and establishing a closer relationship to Jesus. They claim that left-handedness is a form of addiction, that using your left hand to do things like writing is no different from people who use their hands to rob, assault, and murder, people and animals. Imagine that left-handed kid being forced to sit next to grown men who’ve used their hands to do all manner of cruel and perverse things to animals and humans alike, while the staff of this treatment facility is telling him, perhaps not so much in word but sure as hell in deed, that he’s no better then those men. Someday, his desire to use his left hand instead of the God ordained right hand, will lead him into all manner of brutish, deviant, ugly acts.
Imagine this kid trying desperately…trying, trying with all his heart and soul to pray away his left handedness. But he can’t…he’s left handed. And every time he feels the urge to use his left hand, it only serves to remind him that he doesn’t love God enough, that he’s headed for the same life that all those robbers, and murderers live. He’s going to become just like them one day…
What does that sort of thing to to a kid? Well we all know what it does to an adult because it happened. Does the name Jack McIntyre ring any bells? Or has John finally erased all memory of Love In Action’s bloody birth? McIntyre was one of LIA’s first clients (I say client because he went in of his own accord…a choice of free will that neither Lance nor Zach nor any kid in the horrifically misnamed Refuge "program" are allowed) A few months ago I finally stumbled on a copy of his suicide note. You want to know what the horror is my friend? Well…take a peek into the Pit then…
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.
No. May God have mercy on yours, because I don’t have any to spare for the likes of you. Jack McIntyre killed himself, rather then make one more promise to God he knew he could not keep. Bad enough John Smid is doing this to grown adults. Now he’s dragging kids into his little psych room, where he’ll sit them down right next to grown men who have engaged in the most extreme sexual perversions imaginable, and let them know that they’re just like those men are, that their sexual orientation will lead them into all of that and worse. This is what John is subjecting gay teenagers to. He takes in kids who are more or less fine with their sexual orientation, or getting there, and puts his crowbar to their self esteem and tries systematically to utterly destroy their deepest sense of their inner selves, to make them see their sexual nature as ugly and perverse and foul, and that only a relationship with Jesus can save them from their homosexuality. But it won’t. They’re Gay. What happens is that they loose their faith, and often enough, loose their family too. But as long as the checks clear, John doesn’t seem to mind.
> I speak on behalf of LIA, not only because I believe in what they’re doing, but also
> because I care a great deal about John Smid and the LIA staff.
If you care about any of them then you need to do whatever you can to convince them to stop tormenting gay people, and particularly gay teens who are content with who they are. John is trying his best to gut their ability to ever feel good about themselves as gay people, and ever experience what it is to love and be loved, body and soul. He is systematically trying to put as much fear and loathing into teens and adults of their sexual nature so that they’ll never be able to love wholeheartedly without feeling ashamed and dirty. To assault someones sense of self to the point where they cannot see one of this life’s most wonderful, beautiful, amazing things as anything other then ugly and perverse is a crime against them of absolutely staggering magnitude. To do that to children is a crime against humanity.
> Zach Stark’s opinion of "reparative therapy," as it’s being dubbed, variegated a
> great deal after his experience at LIA. "Love In Action has been misrepresented
> and what I have posted in my blogs has been taken out of perpective and context,"
> as Zach is quoted at 365gay.com on 8-1-05. My question to Lance is this: What
> specific occurrences at LIA made your experience so horrendous?
As for Zach…I’m a little fuzzy about how you expect a kid who was forced into ex-gay therapy against his will, and who said in an update to that blog post you’re quoting from there that he could only post blogs his father approved of, to speak out publicly against his treatment. Actually, I’m being sarcastic. You know damn well he couldn’t. Since he’s still underage, and cannot speak for himself without suffering whatever consequences his parents (you know…the ones who put him into LIA in the first place) can dictate, it’s unreasonable to expect him to get on a soapbox about his feelings toward LIA. If I were you though, I would strongly suggest that his silence on the matter since those first couple of posts speaks volumes.
I was with Lance at a protest against reparative therapy in Silver Spring, Maryland. John Smid was there too, but too cowardly to come out to the line and speak with Lance himself. One of the other LIA staffers, a new guy, did come out because, as he said, he wanted to hear from Lance himself why he was upset about what LIA did to him. Lance gave him an earful, the gist of which was that he resented being made to feel horrible about himself simply because he’s gay.
John likes to boast that he brings families together. What happened to Lance after he left LIA was horrible, and he finally had to move out because his mom had become so abusive. The day he moved out, his mom cornered him and started beating the crap out of him. He’s told this to reporters and gave a more detailed account to Morgan Jon Fox who is doing a documentary on the LIA protests. Morgan and Lance let me sit in on the interview to take some photographs and Lance’s story nearly brought me to tears and I had to concentrate on what I was doing and I almost couldn’t. John did nothing, nothing for that family, except tear it apart. Oh…and he cashed the check.
You care about the LIA staff do you? Then dig up whatever stunted whithered stump of a conscience any of them still have left in them, and make them see two things they really, really need to see. First, that they are committing a monstrous assault on the human identity of the people they’re "treating" and their capacity to love and accept love from another. Second, that John has no brakes, and one of these days he’s going to push a gay kid too far and then they’re be more then Jack McIntyre’s blood on the LIA account books, and if you think the judgment on LIA has been harsh up till now, you haven’t seen anything. Yet.
Kinsey never said that ten percent of the male population is gay. What he did was construct a range from the behavior of his subjects, the Kinsey scale, which went from zero, which was exclusive heterosexuality, to six, which was exclusive homosexuality. It was only later, as gay people began to fight against oppression, that the data for 5s and 6s were combined to come up with a figure of ten percent. Kinsey never said it, but when you looked at it that way it was a figure that made sense to throw out there. Ten percent of the male population is exclusively homosexual, or nearly so.
It’s a figure that the kook pews have challenged ever since, because it is in their interest to claim that we are a tiny, insignificant, worthless part of the human family. Except when we’re the vast conspiracy of militant homosexuality that controls the news media, Hollywood, liberal churches and the democratic party. Then we’re a looming menace. But a looming menace mind you, that only amounts to 1, or maybe 2 percent of the human family at most.
Almost one in 10 straight men on the `down-low,’ study finds
PHILADELPHIA – Almost 10 percent of men who say they’re straight also happen to be having sex with men, according to a new study, one of the largest ever to specifically address "down-low" behavior.
The study, based out of New York City, found that most of the down-low men did not use condoms and that 70 percent were married. Researchers said they hoped their report would change the way doctors asked patients about their sexual behavior.
"Everyone talks about it, but it’s the first time I’ve seen data on this issue," said Thomas J. Coates, a psychologist who specializes in sexual behavior at the University of California at Los Angeles. Even so, he said the numbers were probably low estimates.
"It’s probably above this, because it’s hard to get people to admit to this kind of behavior."
What’s really interesting about Kinsey’s figures is how well they’ve withstood the test of time, considering what it was he actually looked at. All he studied was the behavior of his subjects over a three year period. But why three? Why not just one? Why not five? It’s like Mendel and his damn beans. Mendel was the monk who did that now famous experiment in which he showed how traits are inherited. For his subjects, he used a bean plant, and he tested for seven characteristics. And as it turns out, seven is the most you can cleanly test for, without getting some cross linkage on the genes, because the bean plant only has seven genes. But Mendel knew nothing of genes. As Jacob Bronowski once put it, you can be elected abbot of your monastery, you can even be elected pope, but you can’t have that luck. Mendel had obviously done some background work with his beans prior to his experiment, which told him which traits he could test for. Kinsey had to have done something similar, that told him three years of sexual history was all he needed to know about his subjects, to have a good idea of the whole.
Clearly, the stigma surrounding homosexuality is still strong here in America, and in particular in minority communities. While many of us are now able to live lives out and proud, many cannot. The religious right would like to bring the stigma back down on all of us in the name of righteousness and morality. But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon. Homosexuality they say, brings only disease and pain and suffering. No. Shame does. Here is what shame buys you.
"We found that those who identified as straight but had sex with men were also less likely to be HIV tested within the last year and less likely to use a condom," than men who said they were gay, said Preeti Pathela, a research scientist at the department.
Pride has the power to lift us out of the gutter of self abuse and self destructiveness. And that is why the religious right hates gay pride. In the relentless logic of knuckle dragging fundamentalism, if we’re not bleeding, they’re not righteous.
These warnings beg a very serious question: can people, children in this case, become homosexuals by exposure to certain ideas and behavior? In other words, can a person who would not otherwise become homosexual, start the behavior, come to prefer it and continue it?
Can a society create more homosexuals? The answer quite clearly is yes. That is how current homosexuals, in fact, came to be. There is no evidence–none– for a genetic origin for homosexuality. That may come as a surprise to many people, but it’s true. It’s even more astonishing when one realizes how many influential groups and people now accept homosexuality as inborn for some, but when you look behind the rhetoric, you find that there is nothing but wishful thinking. For an excellent paper debunking this myth, see Culture and Family Institute’s article at http://www.cwfa.org/images/content/bornorbred.pdf .
In view of this, the promotion of this behavior to our children has incredibly destructive potential, yet this unprecedented trend is occurring with few objections by parents.
People, especially the young, can be seduced into homosexual behavior and have their identity molded around the homosexual lifestyle, through a combination of persuasion and circumstances which may include the following:
• Being convinced homosexuality is acceptable;
• Reading or viewing explicit homosexual pornography;
• A close relationship with a peer who is practicing homosexuality;
• Admiring an older teacher or mentor who is homosexual;
• Attending homosexual social venues (a “gay” club, bar, church youth group);
• Being homosexually molested;
• Having parents who espouse liberal values;
• No strong ties to a conservative church, and hostility toward traditional views.
And in that spirit, I would like to offer my own tips on how to make people homosexual. I should know, right, because I am one. Trust me, this stuff really works. The Gay Mafia could have me silenced for telling you people this stuff…
Vote democratic.
Stand too close to a homosexual on the bus or in the subway. Five minutes might be enough.
Breath in a homosexual’s second hand smoke.
Enter a restaurant where a homosexual is eating.
Call your senator or congressman and ask them to support extending the Voting Rights Act.
If you are a woman, applying for a job outside the home will make you a lesbian.
If you are a man, disrespecting your boss will make you gay.
If you are a woman, enjoying sex will make you a lesbian.
If you are a man, caring that your wife enjoys having sex with you will turn you gay.
Enjoying sex with her will also make you gay.
Yielding the right of way to oncoming traffic makes men gay. Real men don’t yield, they penetrate.
Oppose repealing the Estate Tax
Oppose the war in Iraq.
Question George Bush’s leadership. This one will turn you gay in a heartbeat.
If none of these work, use the following brute force methods. These are guaranteed to work.
Learn something new every day.
Read a book.
Question authority.
Think.
This wicked world is chock full of ways to turn people gay. In point of fact, everything can make you gay. Except when it doesn’t. You have been warned.
Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection—she’s no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can’t explain the homosexuality that’s been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality—long disparaged as a quirk of human culture—is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.
Male big horn sheep live in what are often called "homosexual societies." They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males "effeminate."
Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in "penis fencing," which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.
As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there’s a vertebrate out there that does it. Nevertheless, most biologists continue to regard homosexuality as a sexual outlier. According to evolutionary theory, being gay is little more than a maladaptive behavior.
Roughgarden has a particular bone to pick with Peacocks…
Darwin’s theory of sex began with an observation about peacocks. For a man who liked to see the world in terms of functional adaptations, the tails of male peacocks seemed like a useless absurdity. Why would nature invest in such a baroque display of feathers? Did male peacocks want to be eaten by predators?
Darwin’s hypothesis was typically brilliant: The peacocks did it for the sake of reproduction. The male’s fancy tail entranced the staid peahen. Darwin used this idea to explain the biological quirks that natural selection couldn’t explain. If a trait wasn’t in the service of survival, then it was probably in the service of seduction. Furthermore, the mechanics of sex helped explain why the genders were so different. Because eggs are expensive and sperm are cheap, "Males of almost all animals have stronger passions than females," Darwin wrote. "The female…with the rarest of exceptions is less eager than the male…she is coy." Darwin is telling the familiar Mars and Venus story: Men want sex while women want to cuddle. Females, by choosing who to bed, impose sexual selection onto the species.
Darwin’s theory of sex has been biological dogma ever since he postulated why peacocks flirt. His gendered view of life has become a centerpiece of evolution, one of his great scientific legacies. The culture wars over evolution and common descent notwithstanding, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection has been thoroughly assimilated into mass culture. From sitcoms to beer ads, our coital "instincts" are constantly reaffirmed. Females are wary, and males are horny. Sex is this simple. Or is it?
Indeed, biology now knows better. Nobody is hornier than a female macaque or bonobo (which mount the males because the males are too exhausted to continue the fornication). Peacocks are actually the exception, not the rule.
Roughgarden first began thinking Darwin may have been in error after she attended the 1997 gay pride parade in San Francisco, where she had gone to walk alongside a float in support of transgendered people. Although she had lived her first 52 years as a man, Roughgarden was about to become a woman. The decision hadn’t been easy. For one thing, she was worried about losing her job as a tenured professor of biology at Stanford. (The fear turned out to be unfounded.)
After living for a year in Santa Barbara while undergoing the "physical aspects of the transition," Roughgarden returned to Stanford in the spring of 1999 and decided to write a book about the biology of sexual diversity. In particular, she wanted to answer the question that had first surfaced in her mind back in 1997. "When I was at that gay pride parade," Roughgarden remembers, "I was just stunned by the sheer magnitude of the LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender] population. Because I’m a biologist, I started asking myself some difficult questions. My discipline teaches that homosexuality is some sort of anomaly. But if the purpose of sexual contact is just reproduction, as Darwin believed, then why do all these gay people exist? A lot of biologists assume that they are somehow defective, that some developmental error or environmental influence has misdirected their sexual orientation. If so, gay and lesbian people are a mistake that should have been corrected a long time ago. But this hasn’t happened. That’s when I had my epiphany. When scientific theory says something’s wrong with so many people, perhaps the theory is wrong, not the people."
Like Roughgarden, my own sexuality has forced me to think about Darwin and natural selection, and why homosexuality exists. I think most gay people go through this process of questioning our existence, in part because the culture we grow up and live in keeps telling us that at best we’re some sort of very strange anomaly that needs explaining, if not some kind of curse on civilization that needs wholesale eradicating. Mary Renault’s wonderful same sex romance, The Charioteer, set in England during world war II, contains a scene where a group of gay British soldiers ponder the question in ways that were typical of those times. One of them says…
"In the first place I didn’t choose to be what I am, it was determined when I wasn’t in a position to exercise any choice and without my knowing what was happening. I’ve submitted to psychoanalysis; it cured my stutter for me, which was useful as far as it went. All right. I might still be a social menace, like a child-killer, and have be be dealt with whether I was responsible or not. But I don’t admit that I’m a social menace. I think that probably we’re all part of nature’s remedy for a state of gross overpopulation and I don’t see how we’re a worse remedy then modern war, which from all I hear in certain quarters has hardly begun."
The overpopulation theory of homosexuality was popular back in the middle 20th century. It seemed to become ingrained in the popular culture after someone did a study of overpopulation in rats which seemed to reinforce the notion that it was packing huge numbers of people together in close quarters that caused all the ills of modern city life…crime, violence, and homosexuality. It was an explanation that explained nothing. If city life caused such maladaptive behavior in humans, then why do humans persist in bunching themselves together all the same? And if homosexuality is a side effect of squalid urban living, then why do homosexuals exist at all in rural communities? Ask gay people in the trendy urban gay zones where they came from, and a lot of them will tell you they fled to the city from the sticks.
But the heterosexual premise is hard to get past. Everyone is heterosexual by default… For years scientists have simply ignored evidence that homosexuality is both common and natural in species. The thinking has always been that it needs some kind of special explanation, that it exists apart from the natural world in some way, because it is maladaptive on its face.
Roughgarden’s first order of business was proving that homosexuality isn’t a maladaptive trait. At first glance, this seems like a futile endeavor. Being gay clearly makes individuals less likely to pass on their genes, a major biological faux pas. From the perspective of evolution, homosexual behavior has always been a genetic dead end, something that has to be explained away.
But Roughgarden believes that biologists have it backwards. Given the pervasive presence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, same-sex partnering must be an adaptive trait that’s been carefully preserved by natural selection. As Roughgarden points out, "a ‘common genetic disease’ is a contradiction in terms, and homosexuality is three to four orders of magnitude more common than true genetic diseases such as Huntington’s disease."
For Roughgarden, homosexuality exists to re-enforce bonds between members of a group. I’m with her there, but I think there is more to it. We are a sexual species…that is, we reproduce sexually. So that dating and mating urge is hard wired into us at a very low, a very ancient and primative level. And for creatures such as we, whose offspring have very long childhoods, sex is plainly not only for producing children, but also for reinforcing the intimate bond between a couple. But why would natural selection care that couples who can bear no children, also experience this sexual gratification? And yes, nature patently does care that they do.
Consider the humble prostate gland. You can bring a human male to orgasm by massaging it, which is what happens during a certain kind of male to male sex. Tell me what other glands in the human body produce a sensation of pleasure when you to that to them. Rubbing most of them I think, will produce pain not pleasure. But that one particular gland, located in that one particular spot in the male anatomy, is very different in that regard. Why? That’s a question I think biologists need to look at carefully, because it isn’t overpopulation that did that, nor loose sexual mores nor rampant godlessness. It was millions of years of adaptive evolution that gave that to human males, even the ones who have utterly no use for it at all. So clearly there is something that makes same sex coupling worthwhile enough, that nature has given all human males a special adaptation to make it pleasureable for them, whether or not any given individual male actually makes use of it.
Homosexuality is certainly not harmful to the individual, nor is it necessarily harmful to the species. In the first place, homosexuality does not equal sterility. But more importantly, survival of the species involves just a tad more then reproduction. Giving birth to a zillion offspring isn’t going to help the species survive, if they all die before they mature. You see in species all the time, that some individuals will forgo reproduction in favor of helping the rest survive. In fact, in some species of insects, like honey bees, nearly none of the individuals in the group reproduce. Most of them work to insure the survival of the whole. Most honey bees don’t have sex at all in their lifetimes, yet honey bees are a very successful form of life on earth. You would expect people comfortable with the concept of evolution to acknowledge that simple staringly obvious fact. Reproduction alone isn’t everything.
Humans can’t win the battle of survival, or even hope to stack the deck, by reproducing like insects. Human individuals just aren’t capable of having that many children, and human offspring have a long childhood, during which they need a lot of attention. So the mating game for humans can not be merely single minded gene shopping. It must also be about looking for families and tribes that can best raise and care for our young, and ourselves. Your family, your tribe, can make you a lot more desirable then you all by yourself are. Evolutionists have a term for this. They call it "Kin Selection".
This isn’t rocket science. Let’s say we have two eligible human male bachelors in their physical prime. Bachelor ‘A’ is a perfect genetic specimen. Tall, muscular, and beautiful. You take one look at this guy and you know he’s never going to be sick a day in his life. Bachelor ‘B’ on the other hand, isn’t horribly ugly…he’s just not dazzlingly attractive either. He’s an average Joe. Not very well muscled, but not sickly. A little flab around the gut, but not too much. A weak jaw, but a good back. He’s already starting to loose a little of his hair. Seems obvious which one of the two will get the most dates, right? But add another set of facts into the mix. Bachelor ‘A’s family are dirt poor. Bachelor ‘B’s are billionaires. Now who gets the most dates?
It seems cynical, but there’s something else at work there besides pure greed…something very, very old. You see it at work over and over again in the natural world. Mates are selected not only for their own desirability, but for their family’s, or their tribe’s.
And here’s where the peacocks come back into the picture…
Why Do Peacocks Stick Together in Avian `Singles Bar’?
Groups of peacocks strut their stuff in hopes of attracting the finest peahens, but only a few lucky guys will find a willing mate in the wild kingdom’s equivalent of a singles bar.
Scientists have long wondered why the unsuccessful peacocks stick around the same group year after year when the hens tend to select the same few males each breeding season.
Research published Thursday in the journal Nature suggests a sound evolutionary reason: Many of the bird buddies within individual groups are brothers. By working together, the brothers are increasing the odds that their genes will be passed to another generation.
"By helping your relatives to attract mates, your genes are spread," said Marion Petrie, a researcher at Britain’s University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The research sheds light on why some peacocks seem unconcerned with sex and are content to be hangers-on in the animal singles scene: Larger groups of peacocks attract more females, so some of the peacocks are there just to make the group bigger.
"The benefits of helping closely related dominants to attract more females may outweigh the subordinate males’ own meager mating opportunities," said Cornell University researcher Paul Sherman in an accompanying Nature commentary.
Petrie and her colleagues studied about 200 free-ranging peafowl in Whipsnade Park north of London. Using DNA fingerprinting, the researchers found birds inside the strutting groups are more likely to be related to each other than those outside the group.
But how do the related birds find each other? That’s unclear, but it is not because the peacock brothers grew up together.
In fact, the researchers found that when peacock brothers were separated before hatching, and then were released into Whipsnade Park when they were yearlings, the brothers still tended to group together.
The mechanism by which the birds found their relatives is unclear. It could be by odor, feather patterns or the sounds the birds make.
"There is some way in which kin can be associated, which doesn’t require learning or environmental clues," Petrie said. "They didn’t know their fathers or mothers. They could not possibly learn who their brothers were. They had no reference points to where they were born, but they still found each other."
If you don’t pass on your genes, but you help your siblings pass on theirs, your family genes get passed on, and that’s good enough as far as natural selection is concerned. If you help make your family, or your tribe look desirable, then the genes in that pool, which likely include a good many of yours too, get to go a few more rounds. If a trait is recessive, not everyone in the group needs to express it, for it to get passed along too, with all the others.
How do Gay people fit into this? Well again it isn’t rocket science. Our child bearing years are also the years of our physical prime, for fairly obvious reasons. Let’s say you have two groups of humans, one in which all the members in their physical prime are preoccupied with caring for their own offspring, and one in which a small minority isn’t. And if that small minority is welcomed and accepted by the rest, their nurturing and protective instincts can become attached not to their own offspring, since they don’t have any, but to the group as a whole. So here is a small group out of the whole, who are in their physical prime, intimately bonded to one another, looking after, and taking care of the needs of the whole. (You can make a case that the narcissism gay people are often accused of today, happens when they are not accepted by their families, and their community and those nurturing instincts turn inwards.)
Question: which group of humans is going to have more resources to take care of its members during times of stress? Which tribe has the better resources to take care of its old? In preliterate times, your old people are your history books. They know where the game went when the last big drought came, and where the water could be found. They know how the tribe over the hill was defeated the last time they came to raid your territory. They know how sickness was cured, how disease was avoided. Who can be there to look after them while the others are caring for their young? Which tribe can better care for its and sick, and provide for the orphaned? Who can spend the most time manning the defenses, watching for predators, or predatory humans, without also having to worry about their own young? Which tribe, over the long haul, be better able to weather bad times, and prosper in good times? Whose members then, will look the most desirable?
For social animals, homosexual members of the group provide a survival edge for the group as a whole. It may not be a big one. But it is enough of one that the trait, far from being selected out, has been adapted for. And you see it everywhere in the animal kingdom. The trait survives today in nearly all animal species that reproduce sexually, and live and raise their young in groups. It is present today in the human family, as it almost certainly was in the families of our pre-human ancestors. They would have needed it more. The African plains of our birth were I am told, not a very friendly place for the human line. There were times we almost didn’t make it.
Agriculture and industrialization sweep the demands of our tribal past away…a person can now take care of both their own young, and the needs of the whole without having to choose between them most of the time. You can become a policeman or a fireman or a doctor or a scientist. Civilization gives us the means to take care of our community and our families both without overgreat burden. Yet that tribal past is where we came from. It made us what we are. For good and for ill, as when our tribal instincts cause us to separate each other into groups of ‘us’ verses ‘them’, that tribal past is the bedrock upon which we make our modern lives. We live in the twenty-first century, but we were born in a prehistoric past, long gone over our horizon. It made us what we are. To understand ourselves, we must look to those ancient times from which our kind began its walk to the present.
Natural selection not only allows for a homosexual minority in human societies, you can make a good case that it actually predicts one.
It was about a year ago that I first read these words…
I pray this blows over. I can’t take this… noone can… not really, this kind of thing tears you apart emotionally…It’s so horrible. This is what it’s doing to me… I have this horrible feeling all of the time… I wish this on no person…
A 16 year old gay teenager had been outed to his parents. It happens probably every day in this country, and all too often with brutal results for the kid. Parents, who should love their children unconditionally, are taught by this nation’s men of god to hate them instead if they are homosexual, the better to make gay teens hate themselves, and thereby produce self destructive, self hating adults: convenient scapegoats for all the problems heterosexuals would rather not deal with in themselves.
Zach’s misfortune was not only to have parents who could not see the child for the homosexual, but also to be living just a few miles from the first ever ex-gay program, Love In Action, which had relocated from its San Fransisco birthplace to the friendlier climes of the bible belt, and its current leader John Smid had only recently decided to create a program, ostensibly for teens, but actually for frantic fundamentalist parents who were easy pickings for his ex-gay snake oil. Smid was able to talk Zach’s parents into his little two-week teaser program, which of course led to the full eight week course.
It’s a brutal, sexually abusive program where a teen’s deepest feelings about themselves, their bodies, their sexuality, their relationships to their parents, peers and god are systematically ripped out of them using the same mind control techniques that cults throughout the world use to alienate people from the world, the better to imprison them within themselves. And make no mistake, Love In Action is a cult. You want proof, read the rule book that Zach found on his parent’s computer, and posted on his blog for the world to see. A teen who is forced into the "program" finds their life utterly controlled, who they can talk to, what they can read, what they can wear, even down to the kind of underwear they’re allowed to put on, when they can eat, and even – I am not kidding – how many minutes a day total they can spend in the bathroom. There are actually timers placed in or near the bathrooms to insure compliance.
It has one purpose and one purpose only: to break a kid’s spirit. Not to make them a better person. Not even, really, to make them heterosexual. As with any cult, the purpose is to erase the soul within, so the cult leaders can put their will in its place. And in June of 2005, a 16 year old gay teen was thrown into that cult, that ex-gay soul grinder so laughingly misnamed Love In Action. But before he vanished into it completely, he was able to get a cry for help out to the world. You can pretty much bet that John’s advice to parents nowadays is Take The Fucking Computer Away Before You Tell The Kid Where They’re Going!!!
When I read Zach’s words, and the LIA rule book, I literally could not sleep for about a week after, so sick with worry was I for him, and for other gay teens who I believed were almost certainly being forced into that "program" too. I was later to learn that it was not an uncommon reaction. People from all over the world have since told me the same thing: I couldn’t sleep for days after reading that… But for Zach’s amazing, loving, devoted friends, worry and stress turned into activism. They could not stand silently by, they did not stand silently by, while their friend was being abused behind closed doors. They took to the street, and stood side by side in front of the door to a gay teen’s nightmare, and with their simple presence sent a message of support of their friend, and all the other teens inside, and they took to the Internet, to shout out to the world what was being done to helpless kids in Memphis, and to spread the word about LIA and programs like it, so other teens wouldn’t have to suffer the same silent abuse.
Now, on the one year anniversary of that moment, the Queer Action Coalition is calling for a protest at LIA’s hollow church in Memphis. And the need is as urgent as ever, because even having suffered setbacks and losses, John Smid is as determined as ever to expand his "program" directed at gay teens. Child abusers are like that…they never stop with just one:
From LIA’s document: REFUGE International BOOK/Summer 2006:
Although we have seen success in our ministry, we see the culture relentlessly fighting back. So, we are expanding our ammunition to battle for young people and their families. Our experienced counselors and staff will offer a whole new array of options starting during the summer of 2006:
• Residential recovery for young adults (ages 18-25)
• College campus outreach
• Revamped summer program for youth (ages 13-17)
• Seminars to equip church and community youth leaders
• Conferences to heal wounds within families
• Creative support for parents and families
It appears, in this 8 page document, that LIA will launch a 3-month pilot program this summer for youth ages 13-17, and have begun to request funds for its operation. They have also launched a MYSPACE.COM blog in an attempt to further target youth by adopting main-stream/pop-cultural avenues of communication/outreach….these tactics seem to be the stepping stones towards a much larger front in an attack on youth, and their vunerable parents…
The Queer Action Coalition is rather concerned about these actions on LIA’s behalf, simply because WE ARE CONCERNED ABOUT THE WELL BEING OF OUR FELLOW CITIZENS.
The Lords Of The Ex-Gay Cults claim they act in love. During the first week of protests in Memphis last year, witnesses saw for themselves what had been largely hidden from the world up until that moment: their love, in action:
Whilst in this centre he [Zach] had to spend the first three days in total silence unable to talk while he was talked to by their counsellors. An eye witness has reported "When we drove around to the front…we saw these men and trailing behind them–four young guys, all with their heads hung, staring at the ground as they walked. They are not allowed to make eyecontact with ANYONE for the first few days.so they are forced to fucking…i’m crying now…but…they have to look at the ground as they walk, for three days it’s a walk of shame, their heads hanging for being themselves, for having the courage to stand up and say "this is who i am"…and now all these people are saying ‘no you aren’t and we will change it. and you will be punished for thinking such things.’ I will NEVER get that picture out of my head. those four guys…"
You may have a different definition of love then beating shame into an innocent kid because you hate what they are. If so, then come to Memphis on June 5, and show your love in action.
Lesbian brains differ from straight women’s brains. Last year, a study showed that gay men, like straight women and unlike straight men, processed a male pheromone in a sex-related part of the brain (the hypothalamus) but processed a female pheromone in a scent-related part of the brain. Now the authors of that study report differences among women: 1) Lesbians, like straight men, prefer the female pheromone and find it less irritating than the male pheromone. 2) Straight women find the female pheromone more irritating. 3) Straight men and women process same-sex pheromones in the scent area but process opposite-sex pheromones in the hypothalamus. 4) Lesbians process pheromones of both sexes in the scent area. Interpretations: 1) Sexual orientation is biologically based, not a choice. 2) Sexual orientation is more biologically based in men than in women. (For a summary of the study of gay men, click here. For Human Nature’s take on gay marriage, click here.)
Coming soon: Exodus president Alan Chambers discusses why breathing leads to sexual brokenness.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
