Homosexual

In trying to decide on a topic for this WWW project, it seemed logical to try and focus on a current subject. Homosexuality and homosexual behavior has existed for thousands and thousands of years, probably even before the times of homo-sapiens. However, up until a few years ago, the issue was discussed mostly by people in the social sciences. Psychologists, such as Freud, studied homosexuals extensively in hopes of coming up with an explanation for their "abnormal" behavior. All of the explanations that these people created linked homosexuality to experiences that homosexuals have while growing up. Generally speaking, people in the world of psychology believed that homosexuality could be explained by a person's environment. However, in the past four or five years, the subject of homosexuality has been creeping into the world of biology. Studies have been done recently that attempt to look at homosexuality in a scientific light in hopes of coming up with a genetic explanation for sexual preference.

One of the first successful scientific studies that was done on homosexuality was reported on in 1993. The purpose of this study was to look at families in which there was an abnormally high occurrence of homosexuality. By extensively studying the family histories of these families, researchers hoped to find some clues pointing towards the genetic factors that affect homosexuality. That is exactly what happened. By looking at the family trees of gay males (For some reason, this study only focused on male homosexuality, but made the claim that their findings would be similar to the ones that would be found by looking at female homosexuality. As this paper will discuss later, this assumption that male and female homosexuality can easily be compared may be entirely inaccurate.) it seemed that the majority of homosexual occurrences were on the maternal side of the tree. From this information, researchers concluded that if in fact there was a "homosexual