But I think it’s every bit as difficult on a personal level because heterosexuality is still the default cisgender is still the default. Especially among the younger generation, the attitudes toward it seem to be much more matter of fact. I think for someone just coming to terms with their sexuality, it’s easier now in some ways. I’d like to take credit for being the pebble that started the landslide. He opened the floor up to questions and I asked, “Are there going to be domestic partner benefits?” My recollection of what happened is that he turned to Linda Stevenson, who was sitting next to him, with a very surprised look on his face, to the effect of, We don’t already have domestic partner benefits? How is that possible? He said, “We’ll get on that.” And shortly thereafter, we had domestic partner benefits. He said that it had been discussed among the leadership and that he believed it would eventually happen, but he couldn’t guarantee when.Ī few years later, Harold Varmus held a town hall for faculty soon after he became president. When I interviewed for a job at MSK in 1997, one of the very first things my interviewer - Ken Marians, then the Molecular Biology Program Chair - and I talked about was the fact that MSK didn’t have domestic partner benefits. But being gay was not something many straight people were personally familiar with or understood at the time, and almost all of the scientists I knew were straight. Compared to lots of places, Berkeley was pretty enlightened. This was at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the very early days of ACT UP and other activism around AIDS.
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Part of the reason why I picked the Bay Area, and Berkeley in particular, was because I had figured myself out to that degree and that was an obvious place to go. I graduated in 1987 and then I went to the University of California, Berkeley for grad school. I came out as gay my senior year of college, at Virginia Tech. He is a member of the Molecular Biology Program at the Sloan Kettering Institute. If, on the other hand, you consider someone to be gay only if they act on their same-sex attraction then being gay can be considered a choice depending on an individual's behavior.īut the real question is, does this really matter? If a person is an adult, is it anyone's business whom he or she is attracted to or has sexual relations with? Whether science can ultimately prove the biology of being gay or not, it's important to support all adults in their choices no matter how they identify.Scott Keeney is a molecular biologist studying genetic recombination during meiosis. It very much appears that same-sex sexual attraction is not a choice but acting on it is so if you define gay as the mere presence of same-sex attraction, then from everything we understand, being gay is not a choice. Is Being Gay a Choice?Ĭonsidering whether people choose to be gay is complex. While psychological factors may increase the likelihood that someone is gay, no single factor is known to cause homosexuality.
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Study of family history reveals that homosexual men have more homosexuals in their family tree than do heterosexuals." "In recent years, evidence has accumulated that a homosexual orientation is inherited. Modern science is working to show that genetics is one of the causes of being gay, although some science conflicts in this area. (read: Cure the Gay: Gay Conversion Therapy – Real or Hoax?) The reasons people are gay are both physiological and psychological.
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No one knows for certain why any individual is gay, but the current thought is that being gay is not a choice. In other words, 5-10% of people experience same-sex sexual attraction or behavior of course, this doesn't speak to what makes people gay.
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"Of, pertaining to, or exhibiting sexual desire or behavior directed toward a person or persons of one's own sex." The simplest answer is to look at the definition of the word "gay." The term gay is a synonym for homosexual, which is defined as, 1,2 Estimates as to the number of gay people in the population range from 1-in-20 to 1-in-10, so why are some people gay? Are they gay by choice or is being gay genetic?