CHAPTER II

Review of Related Literature and Studies

The related literature and studies below pertaining to

this research study is the researcher’s inspiration in

formulating the research study.

Related Studies

According to Bogaert’s, homosexuality begins at womb.

Men who have older brother have a tendency to be gay,

whether they lived with those siblings and whether the

siblings were related by blood or adopted. The only link

between the brothers is the mother and so the effect has to

be through the mother, especially since stepbrothers didn't

have the effect. Bogaert said the increase can be detected

with one older brother and becomes stronger with three or

four or more. But, he added, this needs to be looked at in

context of the overall rate of homosexuality in men, which

he suggested is about 3 percent. With several older

brothers the rate may increase from 3 percent to 5 percent,

he said, but that still means 95 percent of men with

several older brothers are heterosexual. Bogaert said he

concluded the effect was biological by comparing men with

biological brothers to those with brothers to whom they

were not biologically related. The increase in the

likelihood of being gay was seen only in those whose

brothers had the same mothers, whether they were raised

together or not, he said. Men rose with several older step-

or adopted brothers do not have an increased chance of

being gay.

Hooker's (1957) study was innovative in several

important respects. First, rather than simply accepting the

predominant view of homosexuality as pathology, she posed

the question of whether homosexuals and heterosexuals

differed in their psychological adjustment. Second, rather

than studying psychiatric patients, she recruited a sample

of homosexual men who were functioning normally in society.

Third, she employed a procedure that asked experts to rate

the adjustment of men without prior knowledge of their

sexual orientation. This method addressed an important

source of bias that had vitiated so many previous studies

of homosexuality. Hooker concluded from her data that

homosexuality is not a clinical entity and that

homosexuality is not inherently associated with

psychopathology. Some studies found differences between

homosexual and heterosexual respondents, and then assumed

that those differences indicated pathology in the

homosexuals. For example, heterosexual and homosexual

respondents might report different kinds of childhood

experiences or family relationships. It would then be

assumed that the patterns reported by the homosexuals

indicated pathology, even though there were no differences

in psychological functioning between the two groups.

“What Causes Homosexual Desire and Can it be

Changed?” Dr. Paul Carmen’s recent study stated three

traditional factors; First, homosexual behavior is a bad

habit that people fall into because they are sexually

permissive and experimental. This view holds rat

homosexuals choose their lifestyle as the result of self-

indulgence and an unwillingness to play by society rules.

Second, homosexual behavior is a mental illness,

symptomatic of arrested development. They believe that

homosexuals have unnatural or perverse desires as a

consequence of poor familial relations in childhood or some

other trauma. The third view is "biological" and holds that

such desires are genetic or hormonal in origin, and that

there is no choice involved and no "childhood trauma"

necessary.

Dr. Irving Bieber (1999) describes the difficulty of

putting homosexuality in appropriate category: is it

developmental arrestor an illness? Is it constitutional

disorder, a genetic misprint, a habit? Through his long

term research on the subject, Dr. Bieber concludes that

Homosexuality is not a normal sexual adaptation. Gay

activists groups believed that prejudice against

homosexuals could be extinguished only if, as homosexuals,

they were accepted as normal. They claimed that

homosexuality is a preference, an orientation, a

propensity; that it is a defect, a disturbance, a sickness,

nor a malfunction of any sort. To promote this aim, Gay

activists impugned the motives and ridiculed the work of

those psychiatrists who asserted that homosexuality is

other than normal.

Related Literature