Presumably, whether or not it is true that some medications increase or decrease incidences of homosexuality, bisexuality, or heterosexuality, as Lee Ellis and Jill Hellberg say they do, matters to pregnant women who have strong preferences about sexual orientations of their children and the power elite who can shape public health policy about behaviors of pregnant women. I'd suspect that homophobic mothers (or doctors or public health administrators) might be interested in taking (or prescribing) anti-nausea and -vomiting medications in an attempt to decrease the chance of birthing homosexual offsprings. I doubt that many pregnant mothers would be rushing to take diet pills or synthetic thyroid medications in order to increase the chance of having homosexual offsprings, if any do so at all. On the whole, the type of research undertaken by Ellis and Hellberg is likely to lead to futile efforts to curtail the number of homosexuals and bisexuals. Futile, because their research (and others' like it) is unlikely to be replicated and proven true. It's a waste of money at best and a reinforcement of homophobia and heterosexism at worst.
>>The most important strategic/useful truths are that, historically,
>>homophobia has not been universal and that heterosexism -- the idea
>>that human beings should be categorized into homosexuals,
>>bisexuals, and heterosexuals and that heterosexuals are the normal
>>majority -- is a relatively recent historical phenomenon, beginning
>>to arise first among the middle class in Britain and Europe in the
>>late nineteenth century and getting exported worldwide as
>>capitalism has conquered the world.
>
>To me an even more useful/strategic truth is that men have been
>sucking each others' cocks and women have played with one anothers'
>pussies since the beginning of human beings. Whether you call us
>gay, lesbian, queer, dykes, faggots, or peanut butter and jelly
>sandwiches is beside the point.
Behaviors and identities are not the same thing, however.
Generally speaking, in pre-capitalist and pre-modern societies that were more hierarchical and exploitative than so-called "primitive" societies, the most common norms about sexual behaviors were that men could fuck both women (with or without marriage) _and boys_; women could fuck men only when they were married; while it was all right for boys to be fucked by men, it was not all right for boys to fuck men or men to be fucked by other men. People were categorized by their castes and genders, not by their sexual orientations (the concepts of which they did not possess). Even today, when heterosexism is on the way to becoming globally hegemonic, this older understanding of gender persists in many nations -- especially among working-class men who are not acculturated to the heterosexist norms initially developed by the West.
In some societies (ancient Greece and Japan are the most prominent examples), men's same-sex relations (especially if men in question are of the ruling class) were celebrated (we have art, poetry, and prose narratives to prove that); in some societies (where Christianity became the dominant religion), men's same-sex relations (among other behaviors such as bestiality that could be classed into the flexible and expansive category of sodomy), which was regarded as a universal temptation rather than a proclivity of a minority, were weapons that their enemies could (but did not always) use against them; in some societies, same-sex behaviors were de rigueur as rites of passage for males ("Gilbert Herdt [1981, 1984a, 1987, 1990] and other anthropologists have reported on a pederastic puberty ritual shared by thirty to fifty Melanesian and New Guinea cultures that may be historically related to similar practices that developed among aboriginal Australians some 10,000 years ago. The focus of intense speculation by anthropologists and fierce opposition from Western governments and missionaries, these ritualized homosexual relationships are a necessary part of the coming-of-age training for boys. Their basis is the belief that boys do not produce their own semen and must get it from older men by "drinking semen," i.e., playing the passive insertee role in oral-genital sex or anal sex before puberty and during adolescence. This is the opposite of the traditional Western view in which the recipient [insertee] of anal or oral sex is robbed of his manhood" [Shirley Oliver-Miller, "Papua New Guinea," <http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/IES/papuanewguinea.html>]); in others, there were at least three genders: men, women, and the third gender of men behaving as women (berdaches among American Indians, hijras who continue to exist in India and Pakistan, etc.).
It's only in the late nineteenth century in Britain and Europe when people -- first among the middle class -- began to categorize themselves and others into homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals (which are concepts of sexual identities rather than sexual behaviors) and regard heterosexuals as the normal majority.
>But the methods used to establish truth in the academic world --
>statistical models, theories and scholarly give-and-take -- are not
>the methods used in the everyday world. In this world truth is
>determined by utility.
The power elite can make what's not true very useful for them -- after all, they own the means of communication; but for those of us fighting against the power elite, what's not true is seldom useful, though what's true in itself is insufficient for us to win. The exploited and oppressed have more interests in finding out the truth of our social relations than the power elite, and we have a better chance of arriving at it than they do. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>