Theories of Homosexuality

Theories of Homosexuality Through the biological perspective of deviance, sociologists have linked homosexuality to hormones, genes and the brain (Taylor, Thio & Schwartz, 2013). Hormonal theory does not describe a cause of homosexuality. Genetic Theory describes the cause of homosexuality as people being born gay. The brain theory is much more in depth about the cause of homosexuality. It states that the size of a person’s hypothalamus will cause them to be homosexual or not. Gay’s hypothalamuses were less than half of the size of straights'. The sociological perspective of deviance describes society and socialization to be the causes of homosexuality (Taylor, Thio & Schwartz, 2013). The conclusion that society causes homosexuality arises from the fact that same sex practices are common in some societies such as Azande of Africa and some New Guinea societies, although they are rare in Western societies. This suggests that same sex orientation can vary by society thus allowing society to be the casual factor in homosexual individuals. The other cause of homosexuality, which the sociological perspective of deviance refers to, is socialization. Research suggests that if a mother has much more physical contact with her son than her daughter, the boy will likely grow up to be gay and the girl, lesbian. In this case, socialization from a parent was the cause of homosexuality (Taylor, Thio & Schwartz, 2013). While the biological and sociological perspectives of homosexuality may explain the causes, the origin or how homosexuality first came to be is not described in either of these perspectives. These perspectives fail completely in describing when and how deviant populations first became categorized and called homosexuals. The origin of homosexuality occurred in the 1860's when European public administrators first began noticing that some people in society were being deviant by organizing their life on various forms of sexual pleasure instead of on the family,