Comments on: Bootboy: Born Gay?

By: Born Gay or Knitted That Way? | MARK SIMPSON .com

Born Gay or Knitted That Way? | MARK SIMPSON .com — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:42:39 +0000

[...] piece by the brilliant Irish columnist Dermod Moore in Dublin’s Hot Press about the BBC John Barrowman doc about the ’causes’ of his homosexuality called The [...]

By: Mark Simpson

Mark Simpson — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 02:28:02 +0000

Better be careful Mike, else you’ll have the psycho biologists coming after you, strapping you into their ‘sexual lie-detector machines’….

Actually, they sound kinda fun. I wonder if you can order them online?

By: MikeM

MikeM — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:14:03 +0000

Thanks for the link Mark…and the fascinating read. I’ve never understood the gaps in this type of research- it always seems to center around the anti hetero behavior and the tendency of many gays to be more feminine. You know, the old saying about if all the gay folks turned purple we’d be surprised how many sports jocks were queer. Did they all play with dolls and have a strange psychoanalytical relationship with their mothers. Your Doctor Who man’s shrine and collection really creeped me out, yet he seemed to have turned out OK, if a little white bread. I have some typical gay interests, but have never collected Barbies..burned GI Joes at the stake actually. I “twitch” from all sorts of things, but except for men, would not go out of my way to have those experiences. I saw a large dick flop out of some boxer shorts at age five and maybe it was just a normal childhood thing to feel the need to touch it, but there was certainly some sort of inherent early sexual feeling. I went on to love men, do manly things (military rescue forces) and never felt like I was faking masculinity. It seemed natural to me- even if it developed real early as a “presentation”. The continual effort to force folks into a checked box and not admit the fluidity across a wide spectrum is something that will always confound me.

By: Mark Simpson

Mark Simpson — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:38:04 +0000

A particularly wonderful post, Dermod – one which saved me the trouble of watching that edition of ‘The Making of MEEEE!’, which I’ve had on my HDD recorder for months. I feel that I’ve now seen it through someone else’s less jaundiced eyes.

Even without seeing John Barrowman’s mothballed Bates Motel I would have suspected his Ma might have had at least as much to do with his sexuality as his career in musical theatre.

By the way, whatever the researchers into ‘gay brains’ might like us to think, the differences they claim to have discovered have NOT been demonstrated to be ‘hard-wired’ in pregnancy. They could be ‘learnt’. So, the results could just show us that little John Barrowman was very close to his Ma. Which I think we knew.

By: arctic_jay

arctic_jay — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 04:27:32 +0000

Why do people insist on finding a single cause for homosexuality as if there were a single type of homosexual? It seems obvious to me that there are numerous causes and types. Sometimes its a mild form of transgenderism, sometimes its a fetish, sometimes an aquired taste, and these, I’m sure, only combine to make a small list of potential types.

I certainly don’t feel as if I were born gay. In fact, the notion of having a sense of one’s own sexual orientation well before puberty is completely foreign to me. As for describing my adult sexual orientation, it’s hard to know what to actually refer to. If I analyze it on the level of pure visual response, than sexually I’m attracted to men who are older and masculine in a blue-collar average joe way, but I never have crushes or become infatuated with this type of man. Those kind of feelings are reserved for scruffy, lanky intellectual types who are around my age. The more I consider them in highly emotional scenarios, the more erotic that consideration becomes, while conversely mixing emotions in with my relationships with the average joe guys makes me see them less sexually. On the level of aesthetics, I find androgynous boys to the most beautiful category of person, and yet, I don’t respond sexually to them at all. And don’t get me started on the types of women I’m attracted to.

It’s like my sexuality has no common denominator as to its target whether it masculinity or even maleness. In fact, I’m sure it’s evolved along with my artistic tastes and ideological beliefs, believe it or not. I’m also sure had I lived a different life, my attractions would have taken on a significantly different character.