MALES’ SEXUAL PREFERENCE: OUTSIDE THE FAMILY CIRCLE
Feeling different
As noted earlier, some theorists have suggested that homosexuality stems from profound feelings of alienation from other males. According to this line of thought, boys who are well accepted by their peers are likely to feel “part of the gang.” This status presumably encourages the development of a strong masculine identity and eventually the development of a fascination with and attraction to females, who are perceived as being basically different from oneself. On the other hand, boys who feel alienated from their peers—who feel different, odd, distant — are thought to be more likely to become homosexual. In this view, their attraction toward members of their own sex reflects the estrangement they feel and an effort, perhaps unconscious, to make contact with other males.
Labeling
Additional considerations regarding the development of homosexuality stem from sociology’s “labeling theory.” Built on the notion that people continually categorize one another, this model suggests that both people’s self-images and their behaviors may be organized around the labels others have imputed to them. While labels may be applied by family members, sociologists have tended to emphasize the role of people outside the family circle in the labeling process. With regard to male homosexuality, one writer suggests:
Labelling . . . may have manifest consequences for an individual’s self-conception. A child who is constantly being told that he is “not like other children,” … or a boy accused of being a “sissy” or a “mother’s boy” may subsequently incorporate these . . . reactions into his own self-conception. Not only may he be given a notion of being “queer”—he may also be provided with a full-blown stereotyped imagery.
In this line of reasoning, boys who have been labeled sexually different (e.g., “sissy” or “queer”) would be more likely than other boys ultimately to develop a sexual orientation consistent with that label, even if they did not originally have any special proclivity toward homosexuality.
Those who take exception to this view maintain that a young person is likely to consider himself “homosexual” before others label him as such, and that their labeling amounts to little more than a confirmation of what he already believes about himself.
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