Sexual orientation: Gay, Straight, or Bi? - a summary of chapter 13 of Understanding human sexuality by Hyde and DeLamater

Sexology
Chapter 13
Sexual orientation: Gay, Straight, or Bi?

Sexual orientation: a person’s erotic and emotional orientation toward members of his or own gender or members of the other gender.
Homosexual: a person whose sexual orientation is toward members of the same gender
Heterosexual: a person whose sexual orientation is toward members of the other gender.
Bisexual: a person whose sexual orientation is toward both men and women.
Queer:a self-label used by some LGBs, as well as by some heterosexuals who prefer unusual sexual practices.

Attitudes toward Gays and Lesbians

Your sexual orientation has implications for the attitudes people have toward you.
Heteronormativity: the belief that heterosexuality is the norm.

Attitudes

Many Americans disapprove of homosexuality.
The gay liberation movement has a slow effect on changing the negative attitudes.

Homophobia: a strong, irrational fear of homosexuals; negative attitudes and reactions to homosexuals.
Antigay prejudice: negative attitudes and behaviours toward gays and lesbians.
Heterosexism: the belief that everyone is heterosexual and that heterosexuality is the norm.

Some prejudice is subtle.
The most extreme expressions of anti gay prejudice occur in hate crimes against LGBs.
Hate crimes against and harassment of sexual minority individuals are common whether physical, emotional, or sexual.
These incidents exact a psychological toll.

In previous decades there were almost no portrayals of gays, so they were invisible in the mass media.
There are now more representations of sexual minorities.
This has mixed results.

Gays and lesbians as a minority group

Like members of other minority groups, LGB people suffer from job discrimination.

Discrimination goes hand in hand with stereotypes.

LGBs, unlike other minorities, can hide their status.

• his makes it fairly easy to get along in the heterosexual world
• It encourages people to live and lie and to deny her or his true identity
  This may be psychologically stressful

Life experiences of LGBs

There is a wide variety of experiences.
One of the most important aspects of this variability is whether the person is covert (in the closet) or overt (out of the closet) about his or her homosexuality.
The lifestyle of gay men differs somewhat from that of lesbians, as a result of the different roles assigned to males and females in our society.
There is more discrimination against gay men than there is against lesbians.

LGB development

Some evidence indicates that gender variance or non-conformity in childhood predicts later LGB orientation.
But, this prediction is far from perfect.

First questioning of one’s sexual orientation occurs on average at age 12 for males and age 15 for females.
Self-labeling as LGBQ occurs on average at age 16 for men and 17 or 18 for women.

Coming out: the process of acknowledging to oneself, and then to others, that one is gay or lesbian.
Whether the person experiences acceptance or rejection from family, friends, and others to whom they come out can be critical to self-esteem and mental health.

These developmental processes are complicated by the negative climate for sexual minority youth that exists in middle school, high school, and college.
Support from adults, especially parents and adults at school, is crucial.

Sexual fluidity: changes that occur over time in sexual attraction, identity, or behaviour.
For some people, patterns of attraction and behaviour can continue to develop and evolve well past adolescence.

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities

A loose network of lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities extends around the world.
These links have been cemented in the last decade by increases in international travel, globalisation, and the international reach of the internet.

Symbols and rituals are important in defining LGB community, just as they are with other cultural groups.

Gay and lesbian relationships

A substantial number of lesbians and gay men form long-term, cohabiting relationships (and now marriage).
Gay and lesbian couples, like heterosexual couples, must struggle to find a balance that suits both persons.
Three aspects of the relationship typically have to be negotiated and can be sources of conflict

• Money
• Housework
• Sex

Lesbian and gay families

Increasingly, gay couples and lesbian couples are creating families that include children.
Three concerns

• Will they show disturbances in gender identity or sexual identity?
• Will they be less healthy psychologically than children who grow up with two heterosexual parents?
• Will they have difficulties in relationships with their peers, perhaps being stigmatized or teased because of their unusual family situation?

Research dismisses these fears.
Research consistently shows no difference between these children and those in heterosexual families.
Children need at least one loving, supportive parent, and that can be found in many family constellations.

How many people are gay, straight, or bi?

How many people are gay depends on how one defines homosexual and heterosexual.

Sexual identity: one’s self-identity as homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, queer, or something else.
There may be contradictions between people’s sexual identity and their actual choice of sexual partners.

Homosexuality and heterosexuality can be seen as a continuum.

Sexual orientation and mental health

Sin and the medical model

Before the 20^th century, the dominant belief in Europe and the US was that homosexuality was a sin or a heresy.
In the 20^th century, this view was replaced by the medical model.
Medical model: a theoretical model in psychology and psychiatry in which mental problems are though of as sickness or mental illness; the problems in turn are often thought to be due to biological factors.

Research evidence

Clinical studies

Clinical studies provided evidence that homosexuals were poorly adjusted and neurotic.
But the reasoning behind this research was circular.
Homosexuals were assumed to be mentally ill, and then evidence was found supporting this view.

Studies with control groups

These studies compared a group of people in therapy with a group of people not in therapy and found, not surprisingly, that people in therapy had more problems.
So, bad research.

Non-patient research

Gays and lesbians seem to be as well adjusted as heterosexuals.
This research made the APA remove homosexuality from the DSM.

Population studies

These studies find somewhat higher rates of depression and anxiety among gays and lesbians compared with heterosexuals.
Scientists agree that higher rates of depression and suicide do not mean that homosexuality per se indicates mental illness. The higher rates reflect

• The exposure of LGBs to maltreatment, discrimination, and violence
• The lack of support or downright rejection by family and friends that some LGBs experience
• The stress of concealing their true identity

Resilience in sexual minority individuals

Factors that promote resilience in LGBs include

• Social support
  Especially support for the person’s sexual orientation
• Personal traits of hope and optimism
  Help LGBs maintain their psychological health even when they encounter prejudice

Can sexual orientation be changed by therapy?

Conversion therapy or reparative therapy:; any one of a number of treatments designed to turn LGBs into heterosexuals.
Come from far-right religious groups.

The consequences of reparative therapy can be ugly, because they do not actually change people’s sexual orientation but they do make them feel awfully guilty about it.

Because homosexuals are not mentally ill, reparative therapies make no sense.

Why do people become gay or heterosexual?

Biological theories

A number of scientists have proposed that homosexuality is caused by biological facors.

Genetic factors

There is a genetic contribution.
Factors other than genetics also play a role in influencing sexual orientation.
It seems likely that multiple genes contribute to sexual orientation.

Prenatal factors

Exposure to atypical hormones during fetal development can lead to genetic female to have male genitals, or a genetic male to have female genitals.
It has been suggested that a similar process might account for homosexuality.

According to one theory, homosexuality is caused by a variation in prenatal development.
There is a critical time in fetal development during which the hypothalamus differentiates and sexual orientation is determined.
Any of several biological variations during this period will produce homosexuality.

• Severe stress to a mother during pregnancy tends to produce homosexual offspring
  The stress to the mother reduces the amount of testosterone in the fetus
• Gay men are more likely to have a late birth order and to have more older brothers but not more older sisters
  The fraternal birth order effect
  With each successive pregnancy with a male fetus, the mother forms more antibodies against an antigen produced by a gene on the Y chromosome.
  This antigen may affect sexual differentiation in the developing fetal brain.
• Men’s index fingers are relatively shorter than their ring fingers, compared with women’s.
  Lesbians have a smaller ratio than heterosexual women.
  This is thought to be an indicator of prenatal androgen exposure, so these results suggest possible prenatal effects on women’s sexual orientation.
  Also, gays are more likely to be left-handed.
• Some scientists hypothesized that same-gender sexual orientation results from epigenetic factors during prenatal development that make the fetus more or less sensitive to androgens

Brain factors

There are differences between gay and straight men in certain cells in the anterior portion of the hypothalamus.
Anatomically, the hypothalamic cells of the gay men were more similar to those of women than to those of straight men.
But, there were problems with this research.

Currently, there are no well-documented anatomical brain differences between gays and straights.

Both heterosexual men and lesbians are turned on (in their brains) by women’s pheromones.
Gay men and heterosexual women are turned on by male pheromones.

Hormonal imbalance

No differences are found.

Learning theory

The assumption is that humans have a relatively amorphous, undifferentiated pool of sex drive, which, depending on circumstances, may be channelled in any of several directions.

Evidence on learning theory’s explanation of sexual orientation is mixed.
The idea that homosexuality results from early unpleasant heterosexual experiences was not supported by the data.
Homosexuality is not ‘learned’ from one’s parents.

Sociological theory

Sociologists emphasise the effects of labelling in explaining homosexuality.
The label homosexual may act as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The bottom line

We do not know yet which theory is correct.

Differences between gay men and lesbians

• Women are more likely to be bisexual, and less likely to be exclusively homosexual, than men are
• Some theories discussed earlier seem to work for gay men or for lesbians but not for both

Sexual orientation in multicultural perspective

Just as different cultures around the world hold different views of same-gender sexual behaviour, so do various US ethnic minority groups.

The very definition of homosexuality is set by culture.
Some ethnic groups are even more disapproving of homosexuality than are US whites. In those cases, LGBs feel conflicts between their sexual identity and loyalty to their ethnic group.

Bisexuality

Bisexuality is more common than exclusive homosexuality.

Stereotypes and prejudice

Bisexuals may be viewed with suspicion or downright hostility by the gay community.
Heterosexuals too can be quite biased against bisexuals, especially men.

Bisexual development

Bisexuality is not just a phase.

Mostly heterosexuals

Mostly heterosexuals: people who are not exclusively heterosexual, but also not quite bisexual.
This supports the claim that sexual orientation exists along a continuum.