Written On The Body

I hated my body growing up. I was pear shaped, depressed, didn’t enjoy sports, and was lost in the experience of an alternative sexuality blooming in my awkward teenage body. (That story here.) As an adult things got better in my zesty 20s, but then cancers, a burst appendix, and a list of systemic health issues developed, many linked to the trauma of my upbringing. Life has forced me to learn more about the mind-body connection than I wanted to know.

I bring all that up because I am gay through some amalgam of body and soul. How much of my sexuality is from a “gay spirit” and how much was a biological destiny written on my bones, I don’t know, or really care. I am what I am, regardless of how I got here.

That said, it is still pretty fascinating to see the correlations between gay bodies and sexual attraction. Keeping it simple, we can look at what is physically different about gay bodies, and consider why these differences occur. The current list of variations we’ve discovered includes:

• Finger length
• Fingerprints
• Left or right handedness
• Inner ear clicks
• Eye blink reactions
• Bone length in the legs, arms, and hands
• Penis size
• Response to pheromones
• Response to sweat
• Brain structures
• …and hair swirls (oh. really? no? ok. um, not.)

For a list of all articles on gay bodies click here.