carole and all – Discussing research in a friendly manner where we are looking for the truth wherever it leads is so unNarthlike that I think I will consider this on topic. Blogger’s prerogative.

darkyn – alas, yes.

SGM – Good job grasshopper 🙂

Cochran confuses homosexuality with lack of masculinity. Not so. Gay men tend to be found in big cities because they often flee a rural birthplace due to extreme hostility. Like the rest of the population they prefer not to get beaten up if they can avoid it. This is culture not flu. Ditto the silly ‘Askenazim are so like majorly intelligent’ nonsense. I’ll give him the phone numbers of a few I know. Culture. Historically, Jews sent their kids to school and expected results. My husband’s sephardic and he’s pretty bright. The Jews of Vienna and Berlin detested the Ashkenazim of Poland and thought them to be morons. Cochran seems to have nothing to say about homosexual women. Hmm. And he also seems to think that homosexuality is about sex. It isn’t. Perhaps he’s intelligent in some other areas, as a theorist on catching teh ghey off a toilet seat he’s ridiculous.

As to the Atlantic publishing this nonsense, I’m reminded of Harpers publishing a piece proving that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. Or a dermatologist I consulted once who discovered that my breathlessness was the result of mercury fillings in my teeth and some kind of magnetic alignment. He charged my insurance company $800 for this insight.

On the upside Cochran proves that being gay is biological and that choice is nowhere involved.

Sure, sometimes it can mean “existing among the Bantu, the Japanese, the indigenous Peruvians, and the Dutch.”

But in other cases it can signify merely “existing among upper-class whites in Sydney and lower-class blacks in Detroit” — in other words, two different “cultures” in the broad category of people who have English as a common native language.

I think to be honest, most same-sex attracted persons would rather not be same-sex attracted … at least, at some point in their lives.

That’s probably true.

I’ve also heard that many African Americans and Asian Americans would rather not be their ethnicity. And that’s undoubtedly true of the taller or shorter than average. There is some point in life in which you really wish you weren’t “other”. My mother told me that when she was a teenager, she very much didn’t want to be a dirt poor American Indian.

But, other than Michael Jackson, we are pretty much stuck with our ethnic heritage. It can be a point of pride or a point of shame or really just a not-all-that-interesting facet of life. I guess that’s probably pretty much true about our sexual orientations as well.

I still don’t think anyone catches the gay because we as a society are smart enough that if this were true, we would have seen a pattern by now. Just like the rash of narcolepsy cases in a defined region that was a pattern, oh a bunch of new cases, why is that? If you can catch the gay we would have seen that pattern by now, somebody would have seen the pattern.

Carole, please feel completely free to simply ignore my next thought and carry on as if you never saw it.

Do you work with Cochren or Ewald? Or are you their agent? A former student or collaborator? You seem to know so much about these guys I am curious is all. Again feel free to maintain your anonymity, it won’t bother me a bit. No need then to even mention my comment here.

He also gave a sturdy defense of secular research publication’s and their interest in religious world views at a NARTH conference I attended some years ago, a position that is unpopular at NARTH.

I think he is published in several other journals although I cannot recall them.

Could participation in early homosexual risk activity such as unprotected (or even protected) anal intercourse lead some adolescent boys down a path of homosexual activity and identity and away from what might have been an eventual heterosexual adjustment?

L, as they say, OL!

Obviously, different individuals have different sexual histories, but I would venture to say that on average, most MSMs begin to experiment with anal sex at a relatively later stage, AFTER they’ve had substantial experience with other same-sex activities like mutual masturbation and fellatio. And understanding why isn’t rocket science: learning to “bottom” (i.e., engage in receptive anal sex) is relatively difficult and takes more practice than learning to perform fellatio or give a handjob!

Thus, Rosik’s scenario may apply to a small number of males, for the most part I think he’s got things laughably backwards: Guys aren’t “led down the path of homosexuality” because they experiment with anal intercourse as teens and automagically fall in love with the sensation of getting cornholed. Quite to the contrary; anal sex is something that many people DON’T ENJOY at first — it’s like getting used to the taste of beer or caviar, so to speak. (And a considerable number of homosexual-identified men never develop a liking for anal sex, while a small percentage never even try it at all, yet are still “gay identified.”)

Moreover, anal sex remains, to some extent and for some guys, a sort of unofficial “rite of passage” that separates “bi-identified” men from “gay-identified” men. (In homosexual text-porn from the mid-20th century, it was a willingness to perform fellatio that symbolically separated the bi-curious from the confirmed-gay, but as time passed, fellatio became more “vanilla” and de rigueur even if you were “just curious”, and correspondingly, anal sex became the new rite of passage.)

So, for these reasons and others, I’m fairly confident that most MSMs already know that they enjoy same-sex mutual masturbation and fellatio (and are already inclined to seek out further opportunities for these acts), long before they’ve try anal sex, protected or not.