This have anything to do with the "LUG" phenomenon at women's colleges and the like?

Or, you know, this?

Or maybe it explains goths wearing lipstick......

Hmm, there is a huge imbalance of males in females in China. Maybe the Chinese military threat will just fade away as the army flocks to boutiques.

Or.....birds of a feather flock together. Or........homo's are women. Or......who cares? It leaves their gene pool dead and they are doomed to extinction. Or.......you can grow up and be a flaming worthless pile of human excrement like andrew (slob-me-knob) sullivan. They shoot faggot's (er horses) don't they.

If a male gets shut out of the breeding lottery, some sort of chemical change occurs and it turns female, either entirely female or at least largely female.

This would explain my new vagina.

...

Ron--

While I hate the word and how it's used as a mindless response to anyone who objects to same-sex marriage or those LGBT Studies programs at certain schools and universities...

You, sir, are a homophobe.

They shoot blogtrolls, you know. Bang.

I think everybody's dancing around the real issue here: if these penguins are gay, they ought to be allowed to get married. And if they're denied this fundamental penguin right, well, that means Kerry was really and truly the conservative choice in the last election. 'Nuff said.

Now, if you'll excuse me, the beagle and I are off to P-town for a month. Don't forget to hit the tipjar--the bandwidth costs for my comments here on ace's blog are killing me.

Actually, penguins would have been my second guess for gayest animal. First guess? Those damned pandas the zoos fly all around the world trying to get laid.

It would be hard to separate out the threads of causality here. Homosexuals tend to move out of areas of low population density and into areas of high population density, probably to increase their chances of meeting other homosexuals. This tendency might have muted in recent years, as homosexuality has become socially more accepted and "unencrypted" communications among them has become more prevalent, but it continues to some degree.

Here's another interesting idea: has homosexuality become more accepted in Western society because of our declining emphasis on procreation?

A group of gay penguines is called a Rave?

BWAHAHAHAHA!

I am so gonna figure out something bad to say about you....

Being gay, I've never thought homosexuality was all that biological. Maybe there's a genetic predisposition, but I don't really buy into "born that way."

Of the gay friends I've talked to openly about the idea it's nurture, we can all more or less track how we became gay through environmental factors. Some of us can even pinpoint exact moments or phases in our lives where we go "There, right there. I blame that for making me gay."

Of course, this is heresy to the "community." If I mention it to liberalish, PC heterosexuals, they blanch as if I just cursed in Church (which they would probably approve of).

The thing is, if we say we're born that way, then it becomes a physical component being discriminated against, on par with racism. So we have a little stronger position when trying to gain things like marriage. So we get "We're born that way!" and all other discussion is closed.

That's a shame, because I'd really like to know what causes it. I think it's an interesting topic. And Ace's pheremone theory is as interesting an idea on it as I've ever heard, though I've had similar thoughts about the relation to population.

The real fear, though, is that if we discover what causes homosexuality, there's an idea that science will attempt to stamp it out. Like there would be some mass persecution and we'll all be sent to Montanan concentration camps. All terribly over-wrought and dramatic. But, uh, these *are* gay people after all.

Ron - You're an ass

Sean - Funny, but Andy actually *has* made that argument using penguins, so it's tough to parody =)

And whoever came up with "a rave of penguins," - I'm so stealing that. That's fantastic.

Hey, maybe they are just roommates. The article did say anything about sex.

This is an issue where the combination of wishful thinking and ignorance causes people to grasp desperately at any evidence that homosexuality is genetic and thereby absolve homosexuals of any responsibility for their own behavior.

Humans are highly social animals, and our sexual preferences have been shown time and again to be almost entirely dependent on social context and sexual imprinting. There have been many, many societies throughout history in which homosexuality was openly practiced by large majorities of the populace. So if there is a genetic component, it is at most a very small one.

Humans, like all animals, want sex. They will generally have sex with whatever (man, woman, child, animal, self) they can, preferentially first with the characteristics they have imprinted on in childhood, then whatever else is available and acceptable.

"What if homosexuality is both genetic and chemically determined? What if when there are too many male pheremones around-- signalling overpopulation, or, more commonly now, prison -- a homosexual attraction is engendered in some?

I don't know. Has anyone studied the incidences of homosexuality in cities -- or in big familes; lots of bodies in cramped spaces -- as opposed to the countryside or small families?"

Fascinating, Captain.

Oops, I should elaborate on the first para:

I don't think you can rationally take the position that homosexuality itself is wrong, especially not in the modern era, and I don't take that position. That's not the behaviour I'm talking about absolving. I'm referring to things like AIDS or hepatitis that are spread by irresponsible behavior among homosexuals, where it's a much easier sell (, as Rob pointed out above) for taxpayer-funded solutions to these problems if you can say it's "nature" rather than "nurture" at fault.

>>>>Guys suddenly go gay in jail. Why? I've had years upon years of no action whatsoever and I never considered sex with a guy as fungible for sex with a girl.

Opportunity. Has lack of sex with women given you more opportunity to have sex with men? In jail, opportunity is there for a the bigger and stronger to take sexual advantage of the smaller and weaker.

There's also an interesting parallel between modern prisons and ancient Greece. As Victor Hanson recently noted in a column at his site, Greek society attached no social stigma to being the guy doing the penetrating, but the one being penetrated was "feminized" by being so used and was stigmatized as such. Similarly, in jail, those being used are generally referred to as "bitches" and accept an inferior social role.