So Your Son Is Gay; So What?

I promised myself when I started this column that I would never touch on anything controversial; life itself is already too chaotic, so why even go there? No politics, no religion—never! And I’ve been quite successful in keeping within the boundaries of what I’m willing to write, if I may say so. Until now, that is, as I am compelled to talk about the “gay” issue. If an early piece on Bermuda shorts exposing the unsightliness of men’s knees brought me death threats, then I expect this to bring on a barrage of rotten tomatoes hurled my way.

We all claim that we are not homophobic, that we love gay people, that our society is not just tolerant of them but even nurturing. We sing them praises for their creativity and genius in their chosen fields, namely the arts—visual, applied, performed. We celebrate their artistic sensibility and their cutting-edge taste, which has brought universal acclaim to our humble country from the architecture, fashion, make-up, cinema, music, theater, painting, photography, etc., industries of the world. We embrace all that these people are for as long as they remain in the neat little boxes we have carved for them and as long as they don’t venture out of these well-defined roles, we feel safe and sleep well at night.

But everything changes the moment the issue of gayness is brought into our homes, when one of our very own children turn out gay. When this phenomenon enters our doorstep we, of the predominantly Catholic faith, turn quiet. We speak in hushed tones and lock our front doors in shame, hoping that nobody else notices, hoping that if we pretend it doesn’t exist, the issue would go away in time. Or worse, the supposed heads of our families—husbands and fathers—alienate these sons who agonize over this personal dilemma and barely manage to cough up the courage to come out, and punish them for deviant behavior in the most painful ways: emotional rejection, physical battery, withholding of financial support, ejection from the home, and disinheritance. Most of the time fathers with gay sons simply pretend otherwise, opting not speak about it openly and turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to their sons’ lives as a coping mechanism, so that they may endure what may otherwise be an extremely painful realization.

Having a son turn out gay is devastating; perhaps even more painful for a father because many say homosexuality hurts the same-sex parent more. They say it feels like some sort of betrayal. But there are the compassionate few—fathers who subjugate themselves to the wellbeing of their gay sons and do their best to accept all that they are—but they are the exceptions, and to my mind, truly heroes.

A friend of mine, a 50-year-old father had suspected his son of being gay from a very young age. So he tried hard to initiate him into the manliest of activities in an effort to thwart what he eventually was to become—a full fledged homosexual. At two years old he bought him robots and remote control (RC) toys, monster trucks, and real-looking assault weapons. The little boy pretended to like them; he didn’t want to hurt his father’s feelings because he saw the older man’s enthusiasm as he presented the items. But the moment he turned his back, the little boy threw them all under his bed and stole a Barbie doll from his sister’s room and played with it all day. My friend sent the son to karate and judo lessons when he got older but his classmates complained to the instructors that he kept trying to apply make-up and nail polish on them during breaks. When he reached adulthood he tried to set his son up with his friends’ daughters but the son ended up giving them make-overs. Finally, the son decided to out himself, preparing for a dramatic melt down from the father. Instead, what he heard from him was, “Well, I can now rest, that was all quite tiring, turning you into a man.” They remain good friends and although the son has moved abroad where he lives the life of a happy and successful hairdresser, he comes home once a year for Christmas and to cut his father’s hair.

What makes a man gay? There have been dozens of theories attempting to scientifically explain the root of homosexuality. Freud claims that the union of a distant father and an over-protective mother always produces a gay son, there is also the nature versus nurture theory, there is the theory on genetics, and countless others.

But I like to use this widely-used metaphor about homosexuality being like a cough—one cough sounds a lot like any other, but the causes my be many and varied. One might cough because he is in a dusty room, or because he has a cold, or because he has tuberculosis, or perhaps just because he wants to catch someone’s attention. It is definitely not a disease, but a symptom of something else.

A gentleman who wishes only to be identified as GTR says, “All homosexual activity may look the same on the surface, but the root causes differ wildly. Some men prefer other men because their sexual identity was screwed up by some trauma in their childhood. Some men become gay because they’re locked away with no female company and their sex drive overwhelms their natural inclinations. Some men take to other men to assert their power and dominance over them. And some men seek out other men because they are perverts who will do anything to get a new kick. None of these men are really homosexuals in the pure sense."

And then, GTR claims, there are men like him, who are sexually attracted to other men for reasons that aren’t really understood and don’t fit any of the categories above. He says that the only theory that seems to mesh with his own experience is the theory that a man is made gay in utero, possibly by his mother’s body rejecting the alien rush of testosterone being pumped into the embryo. As a result, a part of the male fetus’ brain that controls sexual attraction remains in a default female state, while all around it, other parts of the brain and body develop normally as male.

Males and females have a fundamental genetic difference—females have two X chromosomes, and males have an X and a Y. Still, after conception, it’s hard to tell male and female zygotes apart, except for that unseen chromosomal difference. Normally, the changes take shape at a key point in fetal development, when the brain is masculinized by sex hormones. The female brain is the default. The brain will stay on the female path as long as it is protected from exposure to hormones.

Dr. William Reiner, a psychiatrist and urologist with the University of Oklahoma, has evaluated a hundred of these cases. This “hormonal theory of homosexuality” holds that, just as exposure to circulating sex hormones determines whether a fetus will be male or female, such exposure must also influence sexual orientation. In other words, absence of male hormone exposure while in the mother’s womb may have something to do with attraction to males. Dr. Reiner’s findings represent a major breakthrough because it shows that whatever causes sexual orientation is strongly influenced by prenatal biology.

This alone should save parents of gay men a lot of stress and pain that comes with the blame game. Often, husbands and wives whose sons turn out gay waste a lot of time pointing the finger at each other, a phenomenon so human yet so self-defeating and useless. When tragedy strikes us, whether perceived or actual, we like to blame someone else in order to make sense of it. But this shows us clearly that there is no homosexuality gene that is passed on to the child from either the mother’s or the father’s side of the family. It also negates popular thinking that if you surround a boy with girlie things he will turn out gay. It is simply a biological phenomenon within a mother’s womb that absolutely no one has control over, least of all the son, himself, who turns out gay even before he is born into the world.

GTR says that this basic flaw in the architecture of the brain has a cascading effect throughout the whole structure of the brain itself and the psychology that grows from it. The brain struggles to accommodate the conflicting drives, trying to reconcile within itself a male identity and a contradictory male sexual attraction.

GTR continues by saying that, “Gay men are screwed up because they are screwed up. At the very core of their identity there is a basic contradiction, and although the brain finds ingenious ways to live with it, it’s always there, and we are incapable of finding a sense of ‘rightness’ in ourselves because of it. I’m yet to meet a gay man with a calm, sane, sensible relationship with himself. Society can endorse male homosexuality all it wants, but gay men will always have to live with, and be tortured by this deep, intrinsic sense of wrongness.”

Gay men will have to endure a conflicted life, marginalization, and never-ending challenges—all difficult, all painful. Shouldn’t we then, as parents, even if we don’t understand or condone their behavior and the world they move in, simply love them unconditionally? Shouldn’t we just say that how they develop sexually is only one part of who they are and that we are there for them regardless of how everything turns out? Couldn’t we just do that?