artfarted

I think this question will never be answered beyond any doubt. I’m not even sure if referring to the animal behavior is gonna help this ongoing debate. Humans have way more complex brains and, if any conclusions were to be drawn, then only primates, dolphins and whales should be considered, the most intelligent of all species. I have no idea about homosexuality at sea but I have seen footage of chimp homosexual contact and got the impression that the male chimps involved had just taken their regular playing sprees one step further. I doubted that they knew, that what they were doing was “homosexual”. I believe that to them it was just a game of “let’s get off”, played by giving each other blowjobs and hand jobs! Now if any scientists recording chimp lives have observed exclusively “homosexual” preferences by certain chimps, male or female, I have no idea.

I believe that homosexuality is a genetic affair; that, by far, in most cases people are born homosexual. One cannot “learn” not to crave the opposite sex if they are born with the “normal” trait. Whether it is for religious or psychological reasons, a “normal” person [normal is one who follows the norm, the majority] who does not engage the opposite sex will still feel the urge and will have to withstand soul-ravaging sessions of desperate resistance to their omnipotent sexual urges. Very few succeed.
There are times people result to homosexuality out of fear, because they feel inadequate before the opposite sex or even because of extreme narcissism. Also, a lot of times they are skillfully led to homosexual acts by sexual predators who prey on their minds. Does this qualify as nurture? Were these “homosexuals” given a clear and free choice and did they choose happily and freely?

Perhaps the best case in favor of the “nurture” proponents is the prison populations. But are all of the tens of thousands of inmates, men and women, who engage in homosexual acts, homosexual? Apparently, for a lot of them the conviction that prison is their last home makes it easier to come to terms with the limited choices of prison life. For most inmates it is either f*cking the fellow inmate or cutting it off altogether. But this isn’t grounds for a free choice. Is a sexually active inmate, who had never before sexually desired/engaged his/her own sex, homosexual? If one lifer manages to perfectly abstain while another gets all he can, can we draw conclusions about who is and who isn’t or are there other important factors involving the personality of the individuals?

However, if one is a born homosexual there is going to be a token course; the one all conscious homosexual people travel and whose experiences are fairly common among themselves. Straight boys and girls often kiss and touch each other in a sexually curious way. Once puberty sets in though, things become clear and preferences develop and they generally don’t change. Some people may be forced to live terribly pretentious lives. A “closet-homosexual” is a “straight” person to everybody but to themselves. What exactly does such an individual nurture? Homosexuality or heterosexuality?

I reckon that the question “Nature or Nurture” concerns the heterosexual segment of society only. To the gay individual such pondering must be either useless and/or irrelevant. People are gay or they aren’t. Soul-searching and trying to remember if you fancied the doctor who delivered you, is rather pointless. The pressing need, if gay, is not to figure out how you got there but just how to live as best as you can while belonging to a small and discriminated minority.

Note: In my opinion bisexuals are just sexually greedy folks who may be gay or straight but they can and do welcome sexual variety from both sexes.