Apparently, theme week again. Such is life.
NEWS.com.au | Big brothers 'may make boys gay' (March 27, 2003): THE more older brothers a boy has the likelier he is to be a homosexual, according to a theory aired in a British science magazine. A Canadian researcher has found that boys with a statistical average of 2.5 older brothers are twice as likely to be gay as boys with no older brother. A boy with four older brothers was three times as likely to be gay, according to a report on the findings in New Scientist. The study, first published in a specialist journal, Archives of Sexual Behavior, was led by Ray Blanchard, a psychologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada. [...] His notion was at first ridiculed, but is now accepted by many in his field, and other studies have taken this idea further, suggesting that the link exists regardless of culture, New Scientist said. [...] The research raised intriguing questions, the New Scientist article said. "If Blanchard is right, then clearly, as average family size decreases, so will the incidence of male homosexuality. "It also follows that historically there have been more gay men that there are today."
Well, yes, but because they didn't call themselves "gay" (or whatever the term du jour was back whenever) and because they behaved rather differently -- much more likely to get married and stay married, but probably fooling around outside marriage to satisfy their emotional needs -- there's no way to track that.
The part that gets me is that, as society decided to identify and get more hostile toward gay men, the incidence was likely decreasing. However, since the population was growing at a startling rate, the actual visibility and the raw numbers increased.
Posted by iain at March 26, 2003 03:19 PM
