He won South Africa's version of "Idol", beating a black man and causing controversy, then letting his looks go and now resembles a German Shepard. I firmly believe I will be the only person in the audience who knows who he is.
I found this article next to a section "Hunks in Trunks - Celebrity Swimwear":
"Viewed purely from an evolutionary standpoint, there is only one valid biological lifestyle for the human male and that is heterosexual. Like all higher forms of life, the human species relies on sexual reproduction to avoid extinction. If a man does not allow his sperm to fertilise an egg at least once during his lifetime he has no chance of passing on his genes to the next generation, and the genetic line, hundreds of millions of years long, that led up to his appearance on earth is terminated.
The question is why a certain, small percentage of adult human males, with or without the approval of society at large, find members of their own gender attractive as sexual partners. Evolution has gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that it is the opposite sex that is erotically appealing, so how can it be that so many men have somehow switched off these basic responses?
When questioned about the onset of their same-sex interest, many homosexuals say that from boyhood onwards they felt a strong attraction to other males, and never felt drawn to young females. This sets them apart from young boys who often play homosexual games with their male friends, but who pass on to a new phase when their interest switches to girls. For the lifelong homosexuals, this switch never happens. To understand why, it is important to look at the typical sequence of events in the first 20 years of the life of the human male.
For the first few years toddlers make no distinction between male and female friends. Then, when they reach the age of 4 or 5 the sexes suddenly draw apart. For a small boy, the little girls who were his close friends only a few weeks before must now be avoided. Now he plays only with other boys.
He becomes part of a group and the boys hang out together. This phase will last about ten years, during which time he will be going through an intensive educational period, programming the amazing computer inside his skull. Even if boys and girls go to school together during this phase, they will separate from one another socially. Indeed, despite modern educational theory, mixing boys and girls during this phase of growth is of little advantage. It may even be distracting.
This ten-year learning phase is something that other primates do not have. They reach sexual maturity in about half the time but, of course, they have smaller brains and far less to learn. The boys-together schooling phase is something special that has been added to the human life cycle. At the end of it, in the early teens, the bodies of both boys and girls start to flood with sex hormones and now, suddenly, the opposite sex is of interest again. During the ten-year stand-off they have become distant objects, often disliked. Now they are a new shape and have new features, as the secondary sexual characters begin to develop.
So the stand-off period has made the opposite sex into a novelty, a mystery, something to be explored. (For boys, this reaction does not apply to their sisters, because as siblings they have been pushed close together by family constraints, a fact that helps to avoid incest.) At this point boy-meets-girl is a theme that dominates the lives of teenagers, and intense sexual exploration is not far away.
There will be a brief period when there is a conflict between the old, all-boy gang and the new interest in girls. Each boy will have to report back to his chums to tell them how he has progressed with a particular girl, until, one day, there is a stubborn refusal to give them any details, and they know instantly that they have lost one of their group.
Returning now to the boys who do not reach the teenage heterosexual phase, they get stuck in the stand-off phase, and stay there for the rest of their lives. They cannot understand why young boys, who were playing sex games with them only a few months before, are now only interested in chasing girls. The all-boy phase seems perfect and when sexual maturity arrives, they feel no urge to abandon their all-male social existence. Their sex hormones activate them erotically, but their focus of interest is still masculine. This is how the lifelong homosexual male starts his sexual journey, but why does it happen to just a few boys, while the majority move easily to the heterosexual phase?
The answer seems to be that it is the unique addition of such a lengthy ten-year learning phase in our species that causes the problem. During that phase, male bonding is intense and male-to-male attachment is powerful. It takes a massive jolt from the sex hormones at puberty to break down the boy-to-boy loyalties, and if there are any special social factors adding their weight at this point, the break can be thwarted.
These factors can be of several kinds. A boy who has especially unpleasant experiences with girls during the stand-off phase may find that, even flooded with sex hormones, he cannot switch into the state where he finds them appealing. Or he may have found the boyish sex games that are so common in the stand-off phase to be particularly exciting and this may have fixated him on other males as sexual companions. For him it is impossible to make the switch because he cannot bear to leave behind what he had before.
There are many other social factors that impinge upon the prepubertal male and imprint upon him powerful attachments. The reason it happens to him and not to young monkeys is that other species lack this vital stand-off phase and are never put in this position of key switch from boys-together to boy-plus-girl.
In his study of what he calls The Eternal Child, zoologist Clive Bromhall says this extended childhood is part of a general infantilising of the human species, a process he sees as the basis of our evolutionary success story. As a way of maximising our human playfulness and curiosity, evolution has made us more and more childlike over the past million years or so. While this has made us more inventive and given us the technology that has made us great, it has also had certain side effects. To explain these, Bromhall suggests that there are four types of human male.
There is the Alphatype, like an alpha male ape, ruthless, determined, ambitious, strong and intolerant. Then there is the Bureautype, still concerned with high status, but much more cooperative, making him the perfect business partner. Thirdly there is the Neo-type, more childlike, the exuberant, fun-loving family man.And finally there is the Ultra-type, imaginative, insecure, and unable to move on past the all-boy phase of childhood.
If, as a result, the Ultratypes accidentally became “reproductively challenged” they also became unusually imaginative and intellectually inquisitive. Bromhall reports that their academic achievements are well above average. A male homosexual is six times as likely to gain a college education and 16 times as likely to have a PhD as males in general.
But what of the future? People deserve to be treated as individuals rather than as members of a group that they did not join but which was thrust upon them. Isolating homosexuals as though they are members of some exclusive club does them no favours. It encourages bigots to attack them, which makes about as much sense as outlawing left-handers or redheads."
I do think there is something in the Neverland discussion about gay boys never growing up and would like to see that more in-depth by someone who is sane. Unfortunately this article isn't it, I have been gay my entire life and this "psychological" viewpoint article doesn't account for the fact that I was born that way. I think there may be something to the fact that gay men don't want children and families like their straight counterparts do, and I think this separation phase may have something to do with that. But I find most gay men played with girls growing up and switched to boys when they hit puberty, like all their friends were doing. So there has to be something to explain that phenomenon earlier that this author does. Also I find interesting how many times he refers to gays as a "small" number. How many are we really?
Let's look as it's 2:30 in the morning and I can't sleep. The Family Research Institute, which I will not link here, says that in men aged 20-39, only 1.1% of men have had only male homosexual partners within the last 10 years. I believe that really, as I think a large percentage of gay men have sex with women because of societal pressure to be straight. The interesting question about numbers, and why I think it has not been stated and widely accepted is how do you define gay? Do you include bisexuals? Men who have sex with men but identify as straight (Larry Craig)? Even the article above repeatedly mentions sexual play among adolescents.
I like the Kinsey report definition, men who have orgasmed with another man after the age of 17, which I believe Kinsey stated at 25%. I'm not sure as Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, is $60 and my library only has one copy (note to self: buy a copy).
How often has the Kinsey study been discounted? Perhaps I should update it, it could be my life's work. Of course the problem is how many people say they're gay when you knock on their door versus how many say they're gay when they're naked. Again, my life's work!
I think this quote, taken from Google Answers says it all:
(Under the question of gay vs. straight sites on the internet)(first post) typically in a ratio of about 60:40 (for women)
(second post) I think the ratio will be 1:38.
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