Recently, I was perusing over at The Atlantic, and I came across an article called “The Gay Guide to Married Bliss” by Liz Mundy. In the article, she argues that heterosexual couples could stand to learn a few things from homosexual couples in relation to marital roles.
Mundy lists three “rules” that she thinks are present and praised in homosexual couples. Continue reading
The “man-on-street” interview is rarely an insightful exercise in news gathering, but sometimes it can be a revealing window into American culture — like in the video above, where residents of a small Colorado town are asked, “When did you choose to be straight?”
The video features advertising executive and amateur photographer Travis Nuckolls and Buzzfeed Labs’ Chris Baker asking a bunch of straight people about homosexuality. Many of those interviewed say they think being gay “depends on upbringing” and “has a lot to do with development.” But when the question gets flipped and the subjects are asked when they decided to be straight, they struggle to find an answer.
“That’s a good call,” says one man, laughing nervously. “I didn’t choose to be.”
Not all those interviewed say they think being gay is a choice, however. In perhaps the most profound comment in the video, one woman sums up her views about “choosing” to be gay: “If [gay people] were gonna choose a lifestyle, that’s not one they would have chosen. It’s too difficult.”
Disclaimer: This video was actually filmed back in 2008, but it recently came across our radar after Upworthy’s Rebecca Eisenberg posted it to the site’s LGBTQQ section. Props to Boing Boing for discovering this back in 2010.
via ‘Hhuffingtonpost
The brains of gay men and women look like those found in heterosexual people of the opposite sex, research suggests.
The Swedish study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, compared the size of the brain’s halves in 90 adults.
Gay men and heterosexual women had halves of a similar size, while the right side was bigger in lesbian women and heterosexual men.
A UK scientist said this was evidence sexual orientation was set in the womb.
Scientists have noticed for some time that homosexual people of both sexes have differences in certain cognitive abilities, suggesting there may be subtle differences in their brain structure.
This is the first time, however, that scientists have used brain scanners to try to look for the source of those differences.
A group of 90 healthy gay and heterosexual adults, men and women, were scanned by the Karolinska Institute scientists to measure the volume of both sides, or hemispheres, of their brain.
When these results were collected, it was found that lesbians and heterosexual men shared a particular “asymmetry” in their hemisphere size, while heterosexual women and gay men had no difference between the size of the different halves of their brain.
In other words, structurally, at least, the brains of gay men were more like heterosexual women, and gay women more like heterosexual men.
A further experiment found that in one particular area of the brain, the amygdala, there were other significant differences.
In heterosexual men and gay women, there were more nerve “connections” in the right side of the amygdala, compared with the left.
The reverse, with more neural connections in the left amygdala, was the case in homosexual men and heterosexual women.
The Karolinska team said that these differences could not be mainly explained by “learned” effects, but needed another mechanism to set them, either before or after birth.
via BBC NEWS