Are gay people more likely to be the youngest in the family?

I guess it would depend on whether homosexuality is “caused” by nature or nuture. Believing birth order plays a role sounds like you believe that nuture is the “culprit”. I think most gay folks would tell you that they are gay because they are gay, not for an environmental cause. If there is a study that found birth order actually was a factor I think we all would have heard about it.

But your jumping ahead… Maybe its one of natures ways of population control? Who knows? I have no agenda… just have noticed this among my friends over the last 15 years.

I just read an article a couple weeks ago that gave statistics about this and it said that, yes, younger siblings are more likely to be gay. I think I remember it saying that the chance of a boy being gay something close to doubles with each older brother he has. I can’t find it at the moment but I’ll bookmark this question google around for the article when I have a little more time than I do at the moment!

@MacBean, I saw a similar story a while back, but here is an interesting twist to it. The story I saw said that if the younger brother is left handed the chances of him being homosexual go back down to average. Seriously! That’s what they said. How odd is that? I am going to do some hunting also to see if I can find the story.

I did one hear about a study that did propose that theory but I don’t know who did it or what the outcome was.

yes. a male child with older brothers is more likely to be gay. one theory for this is that when a woman has a male child, her body builds up antibodies against the increased testosterone floating around in her system. When the next boy comes along, those same antibodies decrease the amount of testosterone available for the developing fetus. this is a loose paraphrase of some scientific research, but essentially the gist of this article i read.

my next door neighbor has 3 out of 4 gay kids. I wonder what happened there?

@loser – Is the oldest child gay?

oldest and then the youngest and next to the youngest.

i’m gay and the oldest in my family of 3. My dad’s parents had 7 children, the oldest of which is gay. Guess it’s just the opposite of this theory in my family.