The following is a full transcript of Richard Teerlink's June 14, 2001 presentation to Humanists of Utah general meeting on the subject of homosexuality.

It is an honor to make this presentation this evening. Attitudes about homosexuality have greatly polarized the Utah community, and so in that context this discussion is timely. As a gay man, I have always felt at home among the humanists, and I am confident to say that gay people are welcome here. Our purpose tonight is to provide you with information that I hope will be useful as we struggle together in the cultural war over homosexuality.

I believe that hearing and reading personal stories of gay and lesbian people is one of the most powerful tools in dealing with anti-gay prejudice. Many people who hold a strong bias against gay people have never had a conversation of depth with a gay person. Telling my story is difficult because I have been hiding this information for most of my life. This hiding served a purpose. Because of the stigmatization of homosexuals, I could have lost my job as a public high school teacher, or have been thoroughly rejected by my Mormon family and church.

You are going to hear the "Readers Digest" version of my story. I have written an unexpurgated autobiographical sketch.

I labeled myself homosexual when I was 19 and a freshman in college. I remember that moment with great vividness. As I look back, the evidence that I was gay was abundant and present through, and before, the age of puberty. Perhaps my naivete about myself was due to being a teenager in the 50's when homosexuality was not in the news everyday as it is now. The realization that I was homosexual was disturbing and perplexing beyond words. I had no idea of what this meant for my life or what to do about it. By the next day, this new and disquieting awareness had vanished. Deep denial is not surprising since I had been raised in a devoutly Mormon family, and all forms of sexuality were forbidden to an unmarried young man.

I was called on a Mormon mission at age 20, and my homosexual feelings came into overpowering consciousness when I fell in love with my mission companion, who was a very attractive, intelligent and caring young man. As a kind of reality test, I decided to tell my companion about my same sex attraction. My straight companion was as puzzled and confused about it as I was. So off we went to the Mission President for advice.

My mission president dealt with it in a matter of fact way as if this might be an everyday occurrence. He told me that this is the way Satan would tempt me the rest of my life and that my eternal salvation depended on my ability to withstand this temptation. He asked me if I could get an erection and I answered yes. He then explained that that made me eligible for marriage which was also required for salvation. He then listed how I was to deal with this.

1. Never tell another person about my same sex attraction.
2. Never seek the company of other homosexuals.
3. Never read any of the psychological literature about homosexuality, because all of it was of the Devil.
4. Never seek counsel from a counselor or therapist, because their work was also of the Devil. If ever I needed counseling, I was seek out a general authority.

I was a conscientious and earnest missionary, and successfully finished my mission. But even in that time when my commitment to Mormonism was at its peak, I had doubts. In a moment of deep reflection I could see two roads that beckoned to me that I dared not travel. Both could lead me out of Mormonism. The first I labeled intellectual apostasy and the second I labeled homosexuality.

After my mission I returned to the University of Utah, and broke one of the directives given by my mission president: I visited a non-LDS Counselor. The therapy was Rogerian, self-directed counseling. I presented myself as a devout Mormon, and my concern was whether heterosexual marriage was an obtainable goal for me. I came away from therapy having learned these important things:

1. I was not a bad person because I experienced same sex attraction.
2. Marriage was possible though it would be less satisfying because of my orientation.
3. Homosexuality is not a disease and that trying to change my orientation would be chasing an illusion.
4. That being homosexual did not disqualify me from my chosen career of high school science teacher.

That I never expected to change my orientation saved me a great deal pain and suffering. I have met many gay men who had their self-esteem demolished because reparative therapy utterly failed. This should not be surprising when you know that the motivations and methods used in reparative therapy are primarily religious in nature.

In time I met my future wife and my counselor guided me through the courtship. I discussed with my counselor the ethics of concealing my sexual orientation from my future wife. He made it very clear that if I told her, the marriage would probably not work. And so it was that I was required to keep a monstrous secret from my soul mate.

The first major crisis in my marriage came when my faith in Mormonism collapsed. My parents blamed my University of Utah education. I was excommunicated from the Mormon Church for apostasy, which brought alienation from family and friends, but the marriage survived. The second major crisis occurred when my wife found out about my sexual orientation. I can not begin to describe how profoundly that discovery hurt her. The marriage then began a slow, but inevitable, decline which ended in divorce. When my siblings learned the reason the marriage failed, the alienation from them became nearly total. Fortunately I still have a relationship with my two daughters.

Three years after the divorce I met my partner Paul, and we have had a very satisfying relationship together since that time.

Through my entire career I never divulged my sexual orientation to my students, and so I don't know how it feels personally to be an out teacher. Since then Wendy Weaver won her case in court, and was not fired because she was a lesbian; a small number of courageous teachers have stepped out of the closet. I have personally heard their stories. You have to be very brave to do this in Utah because of public opposition.

Changing directions now, I wish to spend the rest of my time this evening answering two questions: What causes a person to be gay, straight or bisexual and are gay people born that way or did they choose their orientation? I personally think these are important questions, because surveys indicate that when people become informed about the biology of sexual orientation, their opinions about gay people often change. My presentation will deal primarily with MALE HOMOSEXUALITY.

We can do a simple inquiry along these lines right here and now. I am going to ask you a question that gay people are asked all the time. That non-gay people seldom ask themselves this question is quite reveling in itself. Take a moment to reflect about when you personally discovered your own sexual orientation. More importantly did you make a conscious choice about it? It seems reasonable to me that if sexual orientation is a choice, we should all have recollections of having made that choice. How many days or weeks did you deliberate on "should I choose gay or straight?" I invite you to reflect and ponder how your own sexuality came into conscious awareness. My experience, and that of male homosexuals that I have spoken to, suggests that most human beings gradually awaken to their sexuality and that it is not a matter of choice.

Let's do another simple inquiry. How many of you are left handed? Please raise your hand and let's take note of the numbers here. How many are right-handed? Now, did you choose to be left or right-handed? How many of you believe that this trait is biologically determined? I maintain that there is a strong parallel between sexual orientation and handedness.

I would now like to explore what we know about the causes of sexual orientation.

A great deal of experimentation on rats and other laboratory animals has been done that illuminates the process that determines sexual orientation. Of course people are not rats and so we must be cautious in making generalizations that include humans. The evidence suggests that a brain structure called the hypothalamus is sexualized before birth and that this process usually produces individuals with heterosexual orientation. In a minority of cases this process is altered producing homosexual orientation.

It is widely known that the hypothalamus is the part of the brain where the sex drive is located. Simon Le Vay is particularly well known for his 1991 report in Science, which described a difference in the structure of the hypothalamus between gay and heterosexual men. He found that male homosexuals and females had a similar structure. Other researchers have not as yet duplicated his observations. His work has been criticized because all of the homosexual males in his sample had died of AIDS, and some believe that the difference in brain structure could have been the result of disease.

Dean Hamer and a team of scientists selected a group of 114 gay men in which 40 of the men had brothers that were also gay. Hammers team found an unexpectedly high rate of homosexuality among men on the mother's side of the family. This pattern was consistent with the transmission of a gene carried on the X chromosome through the mother. A sophisticated genetic analysis showed that 33 out of 40 pairs of gay brothers shared DNA markers labeled Xq28 from one small region of the X chromosome, a far higher number than chance alone would predict. Although Hamer and his colleagues haven't yet found the actual gay gene, they uncovered compelling evidence for its existence. This discovery inspired T-shirts sold in gay bookstores: Xq28 - Thanks for the genes mom. Other scientists have tried to replicate this experiment and have had poor success suggesting that the high correlation my have been true for Hamer's sample, but not for subsequent samples.

It is becoming increasingly clear that sexual orientations correlates with birth order. A man with one or more elder brothers is more likely to be gay than a man with no siblings, only younger siblings, or with one or more elder sisters. This birth order effect is so strong that each additional elder brother increases the probability by roughly one third in that particular family. This translates to an increase of roughly 1% for each additional older male sibling when calculated to the population as a whole. The effect has now been reported in Britain, the Netherlands, Canada and the United States, and in many different samples of people.

An important clue lies in the fact that there is no such birth-order effect for lesbians. There is something specific to occupying a womb that has already held other males, which increases the probability of homosexuality. The best explanation concerns a set of three active genes on the Y chromosome called the H - Y minor histocompatibility antigens. Ray Blanchard, one of those who studies the birth-order effect, argues that the H - Y antigens' job is to switch on other genes in certain brain tissues thus sexualizing the brain. The problem is that the mother's immune system can make antibodies that can destroy the antigens, and each additional male embryo increases the probability that her immune system will produce the destructive antibodies. This mechanism has been confirmed in mice and fruit flies, but not in humans.

So what causes a person to become gay, straight, or bisexual? At this point, the most widely held opinion among researchers in this field is that multiple causes such as genetic, hormonal, psychological and social are at work. In the last decade there has been a definite shift toward genetic and biological causes. Do we have an airtight case for this? NO. There is much scientific work yet to be done. I predict data produced by the human genome project will add new discoveries, because already many links between genes and behavior has already been found. In reality very little scientific research into homosexuality has been done. Many researchers don't want to go anywhere near this topic, because their work automatically becomes contested, and their reputation becomes suspect because this topic is so controversial.

Switching now from biology to psychology I wish to mention an important study carried out by Richard Green at UCLA. Other investigators have obtained similar results. This study has become famously known as "The Sissy Boys" study. He found that there was a strong association between childhood gender nonconformity behavior and adult homosexuality. He identified 7 gender-differentiated traits such as does not engage in rough-and-tumble sports to having the social reputation of being a sissy. With the help of parents, teachers and pediatricians he identified a large group of these "sissy boys." The remarkable thing is that over 80% of these boys self identified as being gay when they reached age 18, and it is probable that even more will self identify when they are age 30. There are very few childhood behaviors that predict adult outcome this well. It suggests that these behaviors develop early and have life long stability and immutability.

Ultimately the causes of homosexuality are irrelevant to the question of whether homosexuality is moral or immoral. From a humanist point of view as long as the participants are consenting adults that cause to harm to each other or to society, their sexual preferences are exactly that: their sexual preferences.

--Richard Teerlink