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Sep. 3rd, 2008 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
So I thought I'd cheer myself up by watching The Making of Me avec la Barrowman. There's lots of lols, but I defy you to watch the bit with Pete, who was subjected to the whole Clockwork Orange bit in an effort to torture teh ghey out of him, and not want to have a little cry. JB is appalled to learn that homosexuality was only decriminalised in Scotland in 1980. He wonders if, had he grown up there instead of Illinois (the first US state to drop its sodomy laws, in 1961), he might have been one of the many gay kids who take their own lives.
To balance that a bit, here are some cute dogs.
ETA: That reminds me -
murasaki_1966 pointed me to a New Scientist news item: Bisexuality passed on by 'hyper-heterosexuals'. "How can there be 'gay genes' given that gay sex doesn't lead to procreation? The answer is remarkably simple: the same gene that causes men to like men also causes women to like men, and as a result to have more children." Interesting... now do the same experiment with lesbians!
To balance that a bit, here are some cute dogs.
ETA: That reminds me -
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Date: 2008-09-03 07:05 pm (UTC)There might be a gay gene. Abnormal levels of testosterone in the womb might affect a child's sexuality in later life. A mother's immune response to carrying a male child might have a similar impact on later males foetuses. Matt Ridley, in his excellent book "Genome", mentions apart from rare cases, that no one thing has overall control of how a human body develops. Genes are expressed as a result of other genes, or hormonal shifts, and hormonal shifts can be brought about by genetic expression or environmental factors, and how we respond behaviourally to the environment can affect which genes get activated and our hormone levels. (Sadly, it was too long ago that I read the book to find the chapter. I remember that he likened trying to control a human body to trying to control an economy, though.)
So Mr Barrowman decided that he must be gay because he wasn't the first male foetus incubated by his mother? All well and good, except that I am an only child, and several of my partners have been either only children or sole or first-born sons. Where does that leave us? Faking it?
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Date: 2008-09-03 09:43 pm (UTC)Depressingly, that's the way they do *all* documemtaries over here now. Not just the "there must be one answer", but also the "I must travel from place to place, finding a new clue in each location taht eads me to the next place... (that I already had the flights booked to by the production asistant because she'd read the synopsis we worked up three months in advance of how we were going to structure the documentary). Oh, plus the "I must waste two minutes of screen time out of every five staring out of car/plane/train/apartment/office windows, so that my narrator can helpfully repeat everything we've covered thus far for the benefit of anyone with the attenstion span of a heavily concused goldfish (or who is trying to watch the show on an American commercial TV station, and has forgotten where we were sometime during the six week long ad break).
Even bloody *gardening* shows are doing it now! =:o{
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Date: 2008-09-03 11:09 pm (UTC)bitchguinea pigamusingly clueless celebrity presenter. :)no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 09:16 am (UTC)