One of the hardest things for some people to accept is that sexual orientation actually exists. Not simply sexual behavior, not sexual practice, not habit, but something involving attraction and the way a person experiences desire.
Perhaps even harder is accepting something else: homosexuality is no longer considered a psychiatric disorder.
The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the DSM in 1973. The World Health Organization removed it from the International Classification of Diseases in 1990. It is therefore not a pathology that contemporary medicine considers something to be cured.
For some religious communities, this created—and continues to create—a serious problem. If homosexuality is not an illness, it becomes much harder to speak of “healing.” And yet, particularly in some North American evangelical circles, so-called reparative or conversion therapies continue to circulate, despite the consensus of major scientific and medical organizations that sexual orientation is not a pathology to be corrected.
This is where a whole series of alternative explanations begins.
One of the most common is that homosexuality is, essentially, a substitute.
The reasoning seems straightforward: when a person cannot have sexual relations with the opposite sex, sexuality will nevertheless seek an outlet. Hence the sailors spending months at sea, all men, confined together in a limited space. Hence prisons, where people are forced to live together, often under harsh conditions. Hence convents and monasteries, where men and women live separately and sexuality is supposed to be restrained.
In the absence of the opposite sex, according to this interpretation, desire simply finds a replacement.
The same reasoning is sometimes applied to people who supposedly have greater difficulty finding a partner: the shy, unattractive, socially isolated young man; the woman considered undesirable by men. If the opposite sex is unavailable—or consistently rejects them—desire will supposedly find another outlet.
But it takes only a little attention to reality to see that something does not quite add up.
What happens when the gay man in front of us is handsome, confident, socially desirable, and exactly the kind of man who could easily attract plenty of women?
And what happens when the lesbian woman is beautiful, charismatic, desired by men, and perfectly capable of participating in the conventional heterosexual dating world?
This is where the old stereotype of the ugly, awkward, shy person who is systematically rejected begins to fall apart.
If homosexuality were really a refuge for people who cannot succeed with the opposite sex, then an attractive gay man who is openly desired by women would have very little reason to resort to such a “substitute.” And an attractive lesbian woman who is desired by men would have even less reason to do so.
Yet homosexuality does not disappear as physical attractiveness increases.
In fact, the mere existence of homosexual people who are perfectly aware that they could be desired by the opposite sex creates a major problem for the substitute theory.
If you have every opportunity to obtain what the theory says you ought to want, why do you continue to want something else?
The question does not, by itself, prove the origin of sexual orientation. But it is enough to undermine an overly simplistic explanation.
Perhaps we are not dealing with someone who cannot obtain what they want and therefore settles for something else.
Perhaps we are dealing with someone who actually wants that thing.
And that apparently minor distinction changes the entire problem.
A prisoner may have sex with another man without being gay. A sailor may have a homosexual experience during a long period at sea and continue to be attracted to women. A person may engage in a sexual act that does not correspond to their sexual orientation.
And this is where the argument becomes more complicated.
It explains behavior, not necessarily orientation.
If homosexuality were simply a sexual outlet caused by the absence of the opposite sex, we should expect the attraction to return automatically toward the opposite sex once the obstacle disappeared.
But even that conclusion is not so simple.
Because the obstacle is not always actually removed.
A person who has spent years being excluded, rejected, marginalized, or convinced that they cannot succeed with the opposite sex may develop expectations, habits, and mental patterns that end up reinforcing the original belief. The prophecy can become self-fulfilling: I believe I am undesirable, I behave like someone expecting rejection, I interpret ambiguous signals as confirmation of rejection, and I eventually accumulate precisely the experiences that reinforce my original conviction.
At that point, the explanation can easily be modified.
It is no longer merely the original “substitute” that supposedly produces the behavior. Habit, the strengthening of neural connections, reward mechanisms, cognitive biases, and the tendency to seek confirmation of one's existing beliefs all enter the picture.
And this is where an apparently simple theory risks becoming remarkably elastic.
If a person changes, one can say that the therapy worked.
If they do not change, one can say that the habit was too deeply ingrained.
Or that their cognitive patterns were too firmly established.
Or that they were unconsciously seeking confirmation of their identity.
Or, more simply still, that they did not want it badly enough.
And this last explanation creates a serious problem.
Because attributing the failure of reparative therapy to a patient's lack of will can turn the theory into something that is virtually impossible to disprove.
If it works, the theory was correct.
If it does not work, the patient is to blame.
It is a logical mechanism that resembles a familiar kind of rhetoric found in Neuro-Linguistic Programming: if the method produces the desired result, the method works; if it does not, the person apparently did not believe strongly enough, did not try hard enough, or did not apply the technique correctly.
But a theory capable of explaining every possible outcome risks explaining nothing at all.
It is like building a door that always opens, provided we are allowed to decide afterward what “opening” means.
And this brings us back to the starting point.
If homosexuality were merely a behavior produced by an obstacle, then once the obstacle was removed, the behavior should gradually lose its function.
If the answer is instead that the obstacle may remain inside the mind, that habits can become entrenched, that neural pathways can become reinforced, and that people can unconsciously confirm their own identities, then the explanation becomes considerably more complicated.
But above all, one thing would still have to be demonstrated rather than simply assumed:
that the homosexual behavior originated precisely because of that obstacle.
Otherwise we risk using the consequence as proof of the cause.
And this brings us to the most delicate point in the entire argument: sexual behavior, sexual attraction, and sexual identity are not necessarily the same thing.
A prisoner can engage in homosexual behavior without being gay.
A gay man can be a virgin and already know that he is gay.
A heterosexual person can have a homosexual experience without becoming homosexual.
And a homosexual person can have numerous heterosexual experiences without becoming heterosexual.
Sexual practice, therefore, does not appear to be some kind of stamp certifying one's orientation.
And this leads us to the simplest—and perhaps most devastating—question:
If you have never had sex with a man, how do you know you're gay?
The answer becomes immediately obvious when the question is turned around:
If you have never had sex with a woman, how do you know you're straight?
A virgin boy can fall in love with a girl. He can desire her. He can fantasize about her. He can know that he is attracted to women without ever having had sex.
Nobody would tell him, “You have to try it first. Then you can decide.”
Why should it be any different for a boy who falls in love with another boy?
Why, in the first case, is attraction considered sufficient evidence of orientation, while in the second, physical experience is demanded as proof?
Here, however, another question becomes even more interesting:
Why is this asymmetry so deeply rooted?
There is no need to invoke religion to explain it. Religions have certainly played a major role, in many historical periods and societies, in defining legitimate and illegitimate forms of sexuality. But the phenomenon is older and deeper than religion.
Human societies have been organized for thousands of years around reproduction, family, and lineage. The heterosexual couple constitutes the biological structure through which sexual reproduction occurs and, in traditional societies, the basis for filiation, inheritance, the transmission of family names, property, and social status.
Heterosexuality, therefore, was not merely considered “normal” in a moral sense. It was built into the very structure of society.
This helps explain why a heterosexual teenager is rarely asked to prove their orientation.
Their attraction to the opposite sex corresponds to what society expects, to what the traditional family has historically been organized around, and to what ensures the continuity of lineage.
Homosexuality, by contrast, did not fit the same reproductive framework.
And for precisely that reason, throughout history it has often been interpreted as an anomaly, a deviation, a vice, a sin, a disorder, or something to be hidden and suppressed.
This does not mean that every society has regarded homosexuality in the same way, nor that history can be reduced to a simple opposition between “tolerated heterosexuals” and “persecuted homosexuals.” Cultures have produced very different—and often contradictory—attitudes.
But one historical pattern is difficult to ignore:
heterosexuality has generally been the social and reproductive norm; homosexuality has often been treated as a deviation from that norm.
And perhaps this historical legacy helps explain some of the questions that are still directed at homosexual people today.
“When did you realize you were gay?”
“Are you sure?”
“Could it have been an experience?”
“Have you ever tried being with the opposite sex?”
Questions that appear to be seeking information.
But often they already contain an assumption.
They assume that heterosexuality is the default state from which we begin, while homosexuality is something that needs to be explained.
And so we return to the earlier question.
Why do we grant a heterosexual virgin the right to know their own orientation, while asking a gay virgin for evidence?
Perhaps because one orientation has historically been regarded as the norm and the other as the exception.
And when something is treated as an exception, there is an almost irresistible desire to find a cause for it.
If it is an anomaly, someone must have caused it.
If someone caused it, perhaps it can be corrected.
If it can be corrected, then the failure to correct it must have an explanation.
And so the circle closes.
Wrong upbringing. Pornography. Abuse. An “initiator.” Habit. Neural pathways. Trauma. Cognitive bias. Lack of willpower.
The circle closes.
But perhaps that is precisely the problem:
the circle has been designed to close no matter what happens.
If orientation were produced by sexual practice, we would have to explain how a person can desire that practice before ever experiencing it.
If, instead, desire precedes experience, sexual practice cannot automatically be regarded as the cause of orientation.
This does not mean that experiences have no influence on sexual life. Of course they can. Experiences can shape behavior, habits, fantasies, fears, preferences, and even the way a person understands themselves.
But influencing behavior is one thing.
Manufacturing a sexual orientation is another.
This is also where the discussion of pornography becomes more complicated. A person may encounter images, stories, or sexual experiences that amplify an existing curiosity, or may experiment out of curiosity, pressure, circumstance, or simple opportunity. But that does not automatically mean that they have “learned” to be homosexual.
Otherwise we would have to reach some rather strange conclusions.
We would have to imagine that every heterosexual person became heterosexual because someone taught them how to be heterosexual.
And we would have to ask when, exactly, that learning took place.
A theory that seeks to explain homosexuality as learned behavior would therefore also have to explain how heterosexuality is learned.
And perhaps this is the most revealing point of all.
We often fail to notice how asymmetrical the questions we ask homosexual people really are.
The experience can give a name to something that already exists.
It can also be the way someone discovers something about themselves.
But it does not necessarily mean that the experience created it.
Perhaps, then, the real difficulty is not accepting that some people engage in sexual behavior that differs from what religious morality considers permissible.
The difficulty is accepting that not everything we desire was chosen by us.
And that is a question much larger than homosexuality.
Because if sexual orientation is not a disease, not simply a vice, and not necessarily the result of learned behavior, then it becomes much harder to maintain that therapy, prayer, or moral discipline can simply transform it.
A person can choose a behavior.
They can choose whether or not to have sex.
They can choose marriage.
They can choose celibacy.
They can even choose to live their entire life without publicly expressing their sexual orientation.
But none of this means they can choose whom they are capable of desiring.
And perhaps this is precisely the contradiction that some theories are desperate to avoid.
Because if homosexuality were merely a substitute, removing the problem that supposedly caused it should be enough.
If it were merely a habit, it should be possible to unlearn it.
If it were merely an addiction, one should be able to detox from it.
If it were an illness, it should be possible to cure it.
But if none of these explanations is sufficient, a much more uncomfortable possibility remains.
That sexual orientation is a dimension of human experience that we can try to understand, interpret culturally, and judge morally, but that we did not simply choose.
And at that point, the question changes.
It is no longer:
“How do we make it stop?”
It becomes:
“What do we do when the reality of human beings does not match what we would like them to be?”
Science can help us answer part of that question. But ultimately, it also concerns morality, religion, society, and individual freedom.
And perhaps that is precisely why, even today, it remains so difficult to confront without reaching for reassuring explanations.
