Sex In The Lab

We’ve just finished watching “The Making Of Me” in which John Barrowman tried to discover what makes him gay.

Yes, newsflash John Barrowman is gay!

For me he can be a bit theatrical at times but I do find him endearing and even more so since I discovered that when he’s with his parents he switches from an American accent to his parents’ Scottish brogue.

The conclusions of the programme are almost irrelevant for the purposes of this post and if you want top find out what they were I suggest you browse to the BBC’s iPlayer and watch the show – Sorry people outside the UK, you may not have access to iPlayer.

However, the bottom line is that all the empirical evidence presented in the programme pointed towards sexual orientation being fixed during pregnancy. The search for a gay gene was inconclusive, but there was a definite correlation between being the younger of two or more siblings and being gay. There is also some evidence that non-conformist children go on to become gay men and women.

The relief on John’s face when he found out that all the scientific evidence he was presented with pointed towards sexual orientation being fixed before birth was clearly evident. This posed a question: Do gay men and women blame themselves in some way (perhaps “letting their families down”) for not being heterosexual?

John has wonderful parents, loving, kind and obviously accepting of his sexuality. We know gay men who have had much rougher experiences when they came out, or being totally disowned by their parents. Yet even with John’s parents’ obviously sympathetic attitude he still felt relief that he had no choice in his sexual orientation.

Is society still so judgemental that gay man and women still feel the need to justify their orientation?