Our next study will be on identical twin pairs discordant for sexual orientation. These are identical twin pairs in which one twin is straight and the other gay. Because these twins are virtually identical in their genetic make-up, the difference in their sexual orientation must be due to non-genetic factors. We want to study precisely how these twins differ and whether these differences were influenced by factors that happened early in development. Furthermore, we are also interested in how discordant identical twin pairs differ from other twin pairs, in which both twins are either both gay or both straight. (These latter pairs are called "concordant" pairs.) Specific differences we want to study include the twins' life styles, their movements, their voice patterns, their appearances, and of course, their attraction to men and women. If you want to learn more about the study or if you are an identical twin (with a gay or straight cotwin) and want to participate, please contact me at gerulf@northwestern.edu. The study involves several parts, including questionnaires, interviews, videotaping, and donating saliva for a genetic study. This will be a national study, and twins do not need to live in the same city or come to Chicago. This project will help us understand the development of sexual orientation and I believe that this is one of the hottest topics in science!

Currently I am doing a study on the childhood behavior of gay men and lesbians. Specifically, I am examining whether gay men were more feminine and lesbians were more masculine in their childhood, compared with children who became straight adults. Prior research suggested that gay people were generally more gender-nonconforming children than straight people. However, these studies relied on memories, which might be biased or otherwise unreliable. In my current research, we recruited gay and straight people who had home movies from their childhood. We then randomly selected clips from these movies and showed them to other people who had no explicit information on which child became gay or straight. The first results suggest that children who became gay adults were indeed rated as more gender-nonconforming. Furthermore, this difference is evident by age 3. These results add to other findings from our lab, which suggest that gay people are more gender-nonconforming adults, all in their movements, voice patterns, looks, and interests.

The first study I conducted in the Bailey lab examined sexual arousal patterns of straight, gay, and bisexual men. There has long been controversy about whether bisexual men are substantially sexually aroused by both sexes. We investigated genital and self-reported sexual arousal to videos of either naked men or naked women in 30 heterosexual, 33 bisexual, and 38 homosexual men. (Sexual orientation classification was by Kinsey attraction scores; so the 33 bisexual men claimed to be substantially attracted to both men and women.) In general, bisexual men did not have strong genital arousal to both sexual stimuli featuring only men and sexual stimuli featuring only women. Rather, most bisexual men had a sexual arousal pattern similar to that of gay men (i.e., they got much more aroused to male than to female stimuli), although a few others were more aroused to female stimuli (like straight men are). Interestingly, bisexual men's self-reported arousal to the stimuli was bisexual; that is, most bisexual men reported sexual arousal to both men and women. Male bisexuality appears primarily to represent a style of interpreting or reporting sexual arousal rather than a distinct pattern of genital sexual arousal.

Personal Information

I seem to be a person who likes to move, both geographically and research-wise. I started in Biology in Vienna then moved to Biological Anthropology in Zurich and now I am here at Northwestern in the Psychology Department.