There were signs, even when they were little kids. "Everyone is curious about that," he says. When people meet the twins and find out one of them is gay, Greg says people have asked if he's sure, and how it can be. They had the same upbringing, have the same DNA - and yet Greg is gay and Steve is straight. But then the researchers tell you identical twins can have different sexual orientations.Ħ0 Minutes found identical twins Steve and Greg Lofts in New York.
If you can spot a child's future sexual orientation before the child even knows he or she has one, doesn't that prove it's genetic? Studies have shown that homosexuality runs in families. She also observed differences in two boys, one of whom would grow up to be straight, while the other is now gay. Isn't that interesting? She's not girly." When shown video of a toddler girl running a truck off of a table, Stahl observed, "She's really not girly. Stahl took the test and rated two girls highly feminine. In the study, volunteers were asked to rate each child's femininity or masculinity. There must be different parts of the brain that can be feminized independently from each other," Bailey replied.īut how and when does this feminizing occur? If the differences were already apparent in childhood, that would point to an early, perhaps even genetic origin - and that's what Bailey and Rieger are testing in a new study using childhood home movies. "It suggests that whatever causes a man to be gay doesn't make him feminine in every respect. "But don't you find this interesting that the one big area where gay men are more like straight men is in sex? I mean, that is…both amusing and odd," Stahl said. "They're just more successful at it, because the people they're trying to have sex with are also interested in it," Bailey explained.
"One has the impression that gay men are much more inclined toward casual sex than straight men," Stahl said. Gay men are like that, too," says Bailey. Straight men are more interested than straight women in having casual, uncommitted sex. "Straight men tend to be shallow in terms of focusing on looks. Ironically though, when it comes to their sex lives, he says gay and straight men actually have a lot in common. But to Bailey, the stereotypes suggest there's a feminizing of the brain in gay men, and masculinizing in lesbians. The researchers also studied the way gay and straight people talk, and they found differences on average there too. It's not true 100 percent of the time it is true on average. "So, is the conclusion that gay people do in fact move differently?" Stahl asked Rieger. The idea was to find out if certain stereotypes were real and observable.īased on physical movement and gestures of the figures, more often than not, the volunteers in the study could tell a difference. He then reduced them visually to silent black and white outlined figures and asked volunteers to see if they could tell gay from straight. In one study, researcher Gerulf Rieger videotaped gay and straight people sitting in a chair, talking.
There is one area of consensus: that homosexuality involves more than just sexual behavior it's physiological.īailey and his colleagues set up a series of experiments in his lab at Northwestern University. Today, scientists are looking at genes, environment, brain structure and hormones. Psychologists used to believe homosexuality was caused by nurture - namely overbearing mothers and distant fathers - but that theory has been disproved. It's in here.' There's no indication that this mother is prone to raise very feminine boys because his twin is not that way," says Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University and a leading researcher in the field of sexual orientation.īailey says he doesn't think nurture is a plausible explanation. "To me, cases like that really scream out, 'Hey, it's not out there.
When asked why he thinks that is, Adam shrugged. "I would say like a girl," Adam replied to the same question. Asked how he would describe himself to a stranger, Jared says, "I'm a kid who likes G.I.