I always seem to get into trouble with this sort of question but here goes. What makes a person gay or straight? Is it feelings or actions. I grew up thinking it was actions and have had a hard time getting past that. You're either sleeping with another guy or your not. Seems pretty straightforward. On the flip side you can approach it from a feelings perspective. Your attracted to other males. I can see the argument but a bank robber that hasn't robbed a bank isn't a bank robber in my book. That's why I have a hard time painting someone a homosexual until they've done the deed. In that sense I'd say it was choosing to follow your emotions/desires. As far as action goes, it's a choice. That said, emotions are powerful and we each follow our own path through life - each with our own unique circumstances. Most of us will become straight, some of us homosexual. In the course of our childhoods we see things differently and develop our own distinct set of likes and dislikes. For me it was heterosexuality. I have no interest in men. I in no way look down on someone who doesn't share my sexuality. That's their own thing. Emotions aren't voluntary.

It's natural.. There's a time in puberty where you'd think to what gender you're attracted to..

Here's another thing most people don't understand: We don't need to discover the genes to know that you don't "choose" your sexual orientation any more than we need to find eye-color genes to know you don't "choose" your eye color. We're closing in on the genes that make us heterosexual or homosexual. Geneticists, using the clinician's research, have begun to look for the underlying biological determinants of heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality. In ten, twenty, or thirty years, we'll probably have figured it out. We've got the basics already. In early 2005 in the highly-respected biomedical journal Human Genetics, the team of Dr. Brian Mustanski of the University of Illinois at Chicago identified three chromosomal regions linked to sexual orientation in men: 7q36, 8p12, and 10q26. Which is very interesting on a biological level—and it's interesting on a political level in that with only a little more research we may be able to start testing fetuses in utero for their sexual orientation—but it's completely irrelevant to the questions of choice, pathology, distribution in populations, etc. No one questions that blue eyes occur more frequently in Caucasians than in Asians, but we don't know this by finding the genes for eye color; we know it by clinical observation of the distribution of eye color in people all over the world. No one questions that about 7.8% of all human beings are left-handed, but we don't get that information from genes—in fact, as of yet, we have no idea where the genes for handedness are—we get it, again, from clinical observation. The Catholic Church's position is the empirically correct position—the Catholic Church holds that homosexual orientation is an "innate instinct," not a choice or a "lifestyle," and the Church didn't need genes to come to that conclusion; it used empirical observation. We don't need to find the genes for sexual orientation to know that people don't "choose" to be heterosexual any more than we need to find genes for handedness to know that people don't "choose" to be right-handed. Among scientists, this is as obvious as the sky being blue. It is odd to move from this data, which has been accepted by scientists as an unremarkable given for years now, to the highly emotional reactions of those whose preconceptions are contradicted by the facts. The emotional pain is as strong as the conceptual upheaval, and the conceptual upheaval is total: The clinical data demand a change in the most basic terms in which the debate is carried out. The most basic, and yet for lots of people the most difficult, fact to understand about sexual orientation is ridiculously simple: Behavior is not sexual orientation. When you understand that the human trait left-handedness is pretty much identical to homosexuality, you understand that a closeted gay man who, hiding from the world, marries a woman and secretly has sex with men isn't "bisexual"; he's homosexual and closeted and living in a society that pressures him into lying to this woman, to his co-workers, and to his family to camouflage his true nature. He's engaging in heterosexual behavior in order to fool the outside, but he's not heterosexual in any way. Behavior isn't sexual orientation, and the difference between behavior and orientation is as obvious as lying: When you tell a lie, you know perfectly well what the truth is inside; if you felt you were able to tell the truth you'd behave differently and say different things. The scientific facts show how many people are incapable of even the most basic discussion of homosexuality. They refer to it as a "sexual preference" or a "lifestyle," though both these terms are as nonsensical as saying that a person has a "handedness preference" or that someone is leading the "left-handed lifestyle." If you can't comprehend the difference between a "lifestyle" and a sexual orientation, you'll never come out with the correct solution to the question of gay rights. And for those people who can't comprehend sexual orientation, who think sexual orientation is somehow weirdly "chosen," who are terrified of the empirical, clinical fact that homosexuals and left-handed people simply have biological givens, the impact of this research is, unfortunately, terrifying. It renders ideologues on both sides of the political aisle apoplectic and irrational. The socially conservative far Right is so terrified of gay rights that it clings desperately to a demonstrable falsehood. The ideological Left is so deeply attached to the false Marxist dogma that biology can determine nothing about the character, thinking, and instincts of human beings (to the Left, we are all created entirely by social forces, which is why certain social programs are crucial) that it argues, as anti-scientifically as the Right, that the gay gene cannot exist. And it then argues that research into the gay gene shouldn't be done because it might be used to biologically eliminate gay people—which exactly contradicts its first contention that there is no gay gene. But for those who are not on the fanatic Right or Left, for those able to consider facts over fear, facts are never scary. They simply are. And they are accepted and dealt with calmly. Years ago, an English politician, faced with new information, changed his position on an important policy. When an opponent rose to criticize him, he looked at him and said, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do?" In this world, there are many who cling to mistaken ideas and old notions that comfort them, bring order to the chaos of life, and reassure them, and when these ideas are proven wrong, these people flounder helplessly. Science has never been easy. In 1859, an English naturalist named Charles Darwin published a book called The Origin of the Species. People forget that both Right and Left erupted in screams. The Conservatives assaulted Darwinism for threatening their creationist view of the human species. And Darwinism equally threatened the Leftists' view of human nature that believed in a mythical utopian, perfectible mankind. Leftists feared and despised a Darwinist human nature that hardwired human instincts to selfishness, sexual desire, greed, violence, intelligence, social hierarchy, and gender. And, we now discover, sexual orientation. The majority orientation, heterosexuality. And the minority orientation, homosexuality. Both running in families, both un-chosen, non-pathological, and immutable. Just like left-handedness.

I consider not only "homosexuality" but all sexuality to be genetic. Maybe it's not as simple as a single genetic trigger expressed in one gene. But I believe it's "genetic," none the less. Signs of one's orientation are detectable very early in children, often, researchers have established, by age two or three. And one's orientation probably has been defined at the latest by age two, and quite possibly before birth.

Uh well i am pretty sure it either "Your gay or your not" kinda thing, I am bisexual. And I hate it when people will be like "oh im bi" date one person of the same sex then be like NEVER MIND! It's annoying. Come out if you are, but only if you're sure. It took me 3 years of debating to figure out if i was bisexual or not.

I don't remember ever making a consious choice.. i had my first crush on a girl when i was about 5 so i dont see myself having the 'am i gay or not?' question pop through my mind at such a young age