• Question: Why are some people homosexual?

    Asked by whstephanie to Anil, Blanka, Cees, Emma, Mike on 3 Jul 2012.
    • Photo: Emma Trantham

      Emma Trantham answered on 3 Jul 2012:


      Good (and tricky) question

      Research has shown that homosexuality (being attracted to people the same gender as you) is just a normal variation on human sexuality.

      I don’t think we yet know exactly why some people are attracted to people of the same gender(sex) as them and some people are attracted to the opposite, just as we don’t know exactly why man A is attracted to woman B and not woman C.

      What we do know is that it is perfectly normal.

    • Photo: Michael Cook

      Michael Cook answered on 3 Jul 2012:


      Thanks for the answer Emma. I didn’t know that we know so little about human sexuality – interesting!

    • Photo: Blanka Sengerova

      Blanka Sengerova answered on 4 Jul 2012:


      Good question, and a difficult one to answer. Slightly off-topic but I have just read Jodi Picoult’s Sing You Home, which you may find interesting if you’d like to find out about some legal issues surrounding homosexuality (although with an American slant). In it both sides in a legal dispute present arguments, some claiming homosexuality is genetic, some it’s due to your environment, but the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle, but we don’t know yet.

      What historical writings show is that homosexuality has been around forver, it’s just recently been more accepted as being OK rather than a problem. From an evolutionary point of view, homosexuality is important as you clearly can’t reproduce, but maybe there is an as yet unknown explanation for this.

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