Homosexuality has long been portrayed as a failure to solidify one’s gender identity. It has been posited, for example, that boys become heterosexual only if they are reasonably certain of their masculinity, and that, in turn, precludes any continuing sexual interest in other boys. A strong sense of masculinity is also thought to heighten boys’ interest in girls, to make them less fearful of being “feminized” by intimacy with girls, and indeed to seek such contact in order to round out their personal identities.
Accordingly, many writers have hypothesized that prehomosexual boys are less likely than preheterosexual boys to feel a strong sense of masculinity while they are growing up. In this view, homosexuality among men can be understood primarily as an attempt to bolster a tenuous masculine identity. The assumption is that in his sexual contacts, a homosexual man is trying to assure himself that he is not so different from other men and that he can find favor in their eyes.
Psychodynamic theory goes even further in suggesting that through physical contact, homosexual men try symbolically to incorporate the masculine characteristics of their partners. According to this view, people’s romantic attachments and sexual fantasies are most likely to involve those whom they experience as distant and/or different from themselves. Thus, the heterosexual interests of masculine men and the homosexual interests of effeminate men are believed to parallel each other, each reflecting a man’s need to complete his personal identity through intimacy with someone whose personal and social characteristics complement his own.
A number of studies using a variety of methods have found homosexual men to have more “feminine” gender identities than do heterosexual men. In several studies, for example, homosexual men scored in a more “feminine” direction than did heterosexual men on gender identification scales. Another study found that on Rorschach tests, homosexual men could be differentiated from heterosexual men in their degree of “feminine” identification. Two investigations, comparing homosexual male psychiatric patients with heterosexual males who were not patients, found less “masculine” vocabularies and personality configurations among the homosexual subjects.
It should be noted that almost all the research in this area has examined adult gender characteristics. Although it is generally assumed that a person’s gender identity is crystallized in childhood, the investigations reviewed above did not ask respondents about their childhood gender characteristics. One longitudinal study of gender characteristics in effeminate young boys, however, reported that of nine who had reached late adolescence, four had become homosexual and another was “probably” so.
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