The Nature of Homosexuality : Vindication for Homosexual Activists and the Religious Right

Rating:
Summary: Another condescending diatribe about homosexuality.
Review: Another attempt to explain away and condemn homosexuality without admitting to hatred and bigotry. Sure, gays are "natural" in that they have a biological disorder they can't help, but nope, they aren't meant to be here. The author's attempt to dismiss what he seems to think is "feminism" are particularly ham handed, if faintly amusing. Did you know, for example, that most feminists are "female homosexuals?" Oh, and did you know that fashion models are tall and scrawny because most fashion designers are gay and therefore like their models to look like boys? No? Well, now you do. Believe me, if you're looking to actually learn something about EITHER homosexuality OR the religious right, there are far more accredited scholarly books to read, and if you're looking for a fun story about being gay (or being a feminist or being a fashion designer or being a Christian -- or all four together in one happy, well adjusted human being), there are plenty of great reads out there that don't lead you through such tortured, hateful "logic."

Rating:
Summary: Amazing info on homosexuals for sure.
Review: [...] This book is exhaustively researched and despite my higher level education I've probably never read a book so pithy and thick with references and resource material per page. It is a stroke of scientific empirical mastery in so far as it is an incredible gathering of hundreds of peer review journals, foreign and domestic. The hard science is accounted for many times over and yet I find it refreshingly honest that Erik accounts for some seeming counter evidence of some specifics in his book, which he dispatches and demystifies well enough. So rare do you even find a book of science that so often offers the other viewpoint, and certainly his book, based on logic and well researched evidence, can't be classified into any exacting and expected cultural group's viewpoint. He really lets the science speak for itself and plugs in the results, letting all isms, religions, activists and the not so scientific views of homosexuality in society find themselves at odds and evens with the evidence, for and against.

The book isn't all just biology and statistics. It has specifics of homosexuality that you might only expect to find in pornography. Refreshing again to see such things in a scientific framework with all its accompanying disciplines as a kind of virtuous guideline with no social agenda. Yet Erik assigns the false nature of many arguments for and against homosexuals, based largely, if not exclusively, on science. And interestingly enough he assigns the truer nature of many arguments for and against homosexuals/homosexual origins along with the falseness of the same side, just like the curious subtitle of his book indicates. Great to see science cut through what I always suspected were exaggerated claims by either extreme.

Very interesting and whether gay or not you can find how much biology itself molds and shapes behavior much more than the usual superficial easy explanation given to arising homosexuality as socially constructed and environmentally instigated within human culture, such that reading this book gives yourself clues as to your own emerging sexual self by comparison to homosexuals and especially if you are one.