Posted by:
sophia
(
)
Date: October 09, 2010 11:22PM
Former BYU biology professor Bill Bradshaw has done a lot of work on homosexuality. Here is a link to a lecture he gave at BYU:
http://mormonstories.org/?p=1158In the lecture he says that the most common predictor of or contributor to homosexuality among males is having an older brother. I don't remember the exact word he used, but that is the gist of it. I've heard this before, but Bradshaw's lecture was detailed and instructive.
The theory is that when a woman carries a male fetus, its Y chromosome is a foreign body to her, and she produces antibodies that make it more likely that her hormones in a subsequent pregnancy with a male fetus will affect the developing fetus in a way that causes or contributes to homosexuality. Having an older brother is not the only contributor, and first born males can also be gay, but the correlation between being a gay male and having an older brother is a pretty strong one.
Given that correlation, it is very possible that Mormon families produce a higher number of males with older brothers than the general population. If that is so, then it should follow that more Mormon males than non-Mormon males are gay.
Estimates of how much of the population is gay range from about 4 percent to 10 percent, depending on the criteria used to determine who is gay (i.e., self-reporting of attraction vs. self-reporting of same sex experience, with more reporting the latter than the former).
If the figure is really 10% (which I doubt--I think it's closer to 4%), then maybe it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to think that BYU students might be double the national average.
I read just this past week of a survey in which 15% of the men surveyed reported same-sex sexual activity at some time in their life, but most of these men did not consider themselves homosexual. If that percentage is correct for the broader society, then it isn't too far-fetched to think that 20% of male BYU students have at least some interest in havine sex with another male, even if they would not consider themselves homosexual. Given Mormon rules against sex outside of marriage, however, my guess is that fewer Mormon males explore having homosexual relations.
When I went to BYU about a hundred years ago, I was not aware of any gay men. That was actually right at the time when they were doing aversion therapy. (OK, so it wasn't really 100 years ago when I was there.) At the time, though, I had no gaydar, so I probably wouldn't have noticed a gay man if seemed repulsed by the idea of holding hands with a female.
Anyway, 20% sounds pretty high to me, and I'm skeptical that the incidence is that high, but I think it is likely that there is a higher percentage at BYU than in the broader population. That said, maybe dr5's friend spends his time hanging around the drama and music departments, stereotypically attractive fields to gays. Maybe there are fewer in, say, engineering and physical science. (And yes, I know that there are gays and straights in both kinds of fields, but my music-major daughter knows a disproportionate number of gay males.)