Throughout history, all sorts of “authorities” have tried to explain the origins of homosexuality as a subculture. Some supposedly authoritative experts once claimed, for instance, that sexual relationships between women were linked to masturbation, “masculine entertainment,” and an enlarged clitoris — a blatant act of vilification, if there ever was one. Setting aside the views of these self-styled “experts,” let’s look instead at some slightly more scientific theories of causation:

  1. The genetic theory. Kallmann argued that if one identical twin is gay, the other is gay with 100% certainty. A report published by an American cancer research team in Science in July 1993 revealed an unusually high rate of homosexuality among the male relatives of gay men, and that the pattern could always be traced back through the mother’s side. But subsequent researchers overturned this finding. A genome medicine research group under the Human Genome Project later proposed that homosexuality is linked to a recessive gene located in a particular region of a chromosome: when a man carries this recessive gene but his spouse does not, their children will not be gay, though they may be bisexual; if both partners carry the recessive gene, their children may be predisposed to homosexuality. Of course, this research has yet to be completed.

  2. The dysfunctional family theory. Bieber’s 1979 study found that the family pattern most common among gay men was a “domineering mother, weak father,” leading him to conclude that, as children, they came to identify with femininity and look down on masculinity, or developed an emotional fear of women. He also found that gay men tended to have spent at least some time in a rigid, restrictive environment, with little exposure to aggressive play. Some families even raised their sons explicitly as daughters — with predictable results.

  3. Brain and endocrine factors. Human sexual arousal and stimulation are mediated through the brain — stimuli from the sensory system trigger neural impulses, and producing the resulting impulse and desire requires the involvement of sex hormones, much the way anger requires adrenaline; without it, there would be no anger to speak of. The neuroscientist Simon LeVay dissected the brains of 41 male cadavers (19 of them gay) and found that the hypothalamus in gay men was smaller than in heterosexual men.

There are many other theories about the origins of homosexuality — birth order, for instance — but it bears emphasizing that none of them are conclusive. Historically, homosexuality was at one point brutally persecuted, before gradually being treated with more reason. Clinically, homosexuality has been divided into “true” homosexuality, bisexuality, and “false” homosexuality. To me, this kind of classification is meaningless — even those supposedly “false” homosexuals shaped by circumstance, such as certain individuals in prisons or the military, can hardly be said to be free of a genuinely homosexual inner nature.

Perhaps it’s precisely because of these blurry concepts that some gay people want, or are forced, to “cure” their sexual orientation — but what exactly does “cured” mean? Some might say “normal.” But that would be a serious mistake. When Alfred Kinsey once heard an assistant use the word “normal” during a survey, he flatly criticized it, insisting that there’s no such thing as normal or abnormal in sexuality. When we talk about “normal” versus “abnormal,” what we’re really using as a reference point is the common behavior of the majority — in other words, ethics and morality. Or we judge by statistical standards: when you don’t belong to the “majority,” you’re an outlier, abnormal. But that kind of judgment is simply the many bullying the few — it has nothing to do with science. Havelock Ellis, in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, also pointed out that everyone has their own mode of sexuality. Homosexuality, therefore, is not something inferior.

On another note, in 2014, China’s first conversion therapy lawsuit was decided by the courts, ruling that homosexuality “treatment” was entirely fraudulent. But then, what kind of homosexuality, if any, actually requires treatment? Before answering that, we should first talk about “harmony.” In psychotherapy, harmony refers to a congruence between body and mind — between what one thinks and what one does — without shame attached to it. In this heterosexual-dominated world, the relatively few who are gay differ from the mainstream, and if they themselves feel extreme distress and suffering because of it, then they are patients who need treatment. The third edition of China’s Chinese Classification and Diagnostic Criteria of Mental Disorders, published in 2001, classified homosexual behavior accompanied by anxiety, depression, or inner suffering as a mental disorder — while cases without these symptoms were, naturally, not considered pathological and required no treatment at all. From this we can see that those who genuinely need treatment are, first and foremost, people with a psychological condition. Their identity is first that of a patient, and only secondarily that of a homosexual. It’s a bit like a wealthy man with a mental illness being committed to a psychiatric hospital — we can only say that he, specifically, is unwell; it tells us nothing about other wealthy people.

As for the broader history of persecution against homosexuals, and the various absurd behaviorist “treatments” of the past, I’ll leave those aside for now.