One poster wrote:

Re homosexual orientation would any of you know the percentage of people who are “born” homosexual? I thought I heard a figure of around 4% quoted somewhere.

Nathan responded:

I don’t know whether anybody is born homosexual. I’m not aware of any persuasive evidence that there is a pre-birth cause, genetic or otherwise. I’m not sure whether anyone is born heterosexual either. What is clear though is that when sexual awareness begins to kick in, most people find themselves predominantly attracted to people of one sex or the other, and they neither understand why or have any significant power to control the direction of that orientation. When I talk to most gay people, their experience of finding themselves becoming sexually aware and orientated in one direction doesn’t sound any different from mine, except for the orientation. So unless they are all lying, it seems to me that we have to assume that for both gay and straight people, sexual orientation is unchosen, unexplainable, and almost always irreversible. If that’s the case, the best way to understand the experience of homosexual orientation is to think back over your own first emerging sexual consciousness, and ask yourself how much understanding or control you had over it. Then try to imagine what it would have been like if it had been your sexual orientation that was socially unacceptable and you had had to conceal all evidence of your attractions.

I don’t reckon it makes any pastoral difference what the stats are. If the hard line prohibition is theologically and pastorally wrong, then it is wrong even if there is only one homosexual couple in the entire world. If it is somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 20, then the implications of being wrong will be all the more damaging, but no more unjust. Of course that’s true if I’m wrong too!

Another wrote: A few years ago, Time magazine reported U.S. research on the proportion of adults who classified themselves as homosexual and the number came out somewhere around 1% – 2%, one fifth to one tenth the level reported by Kinsey in the sixties.

Nathan responded:

The figure for people who classify themselves as homosexual will always be significantly less than the actual number of people who are predominantly same-sex attracted. We held a seminar on the experience of homosexual people in the church a few weeks ago, and one of the speakers was a psychologist who is doing doctoral research into the psychological health issues facing gay men. He said that from his research, the average age of “coming out” as a gay man is 22. If that’s the average, then a lot of them are continuing to deny it, fight it and suppress it for a lot longer than that, and they won’t show up in self-classification stats until they “come out”. One gay man in our congregation didn’t come out until he was well into his thirties. Prior to that he had been vehemently anti-gay (not uncommon) and certainly wouldn’t have given the honest answer to a survey like the Time one.

One of the other points the psychologist (who is gay) made during the seminar was that since gay men, on average, spend the whole of their adolescence concealing, denying and fighting their sexual orientation, normal adolescent social and emotional development is drastically impaired. He said that – on the evidence of his research, his counselling practice, and his own life experience – the popular perception that gay men are often comparatively relationally immature and less able to cope with the ups and downs of long term relationships is actually true, but that the causes are to be found in social environments which cause dishonesty and repression, not in the orientation itself. This rings true to me. Heterosexual people who have had a repressed adolescence and were denied the opportunity to be open and honest about their sexual development and to develop healthy romantic relationships frequently exhibit exactly the same symptoms.

If I remember rightly I “came out” as straight at about 13, and I reckon very early teens is the norm for straight people. Imagine what it would be like to go from 13 to 22 having to conceal all your attractions and perhaps pretending to be having ones that weren’t real.

Someone said to me a few weeks back, “Why can’t the gays just keep quiet about it? Why do they have to “come out” and tell us all the time?” So I asked him, “Well why do you have to let everyone know about your sexuality?” and he said, “But I don’t. I don’t draw attention to it.” I replied, “But a couple of weeks ago you told us that you and your wife were celebrating your wedding anniversary. You wanted us to celebrate with you the longevity of your heterosexual relationship. If a gay couple did that, you’d say they were drawing attention to their sexuality. Imagine if you’d had to spend those years pretending that she was just a good friend and trying to make sure that people in certain circles didn’t twig that it might be anything more. Imagine if those years was a cause of whispers and suspicion instead of celebration.”

We straight people often have no idea how we come across, because how we come across has never been mirrored back to us as sinful and as grounds for rejection.

Peace and hope,

Nathan

______________________________________ Nathan Nettleton Pastor, South Yarra Community Baptist Church Melbourne, Australia

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