By Rik Isensee, LCSW
We’ve all heard of the power of pheromones, those seductive hormones that waft in the wake of everyone who passes by, and how they influence mate selection. But I had always wondered whether these scents also capture the imagination (and sexual responsiveness!) of gay men.
A recent article in Psychology Today (February, 2008, p.73) describes an experiment by Charles Wisocki, a geneticist at U. Penn’s Chemical Senses Center. He had participants smell the sweat from the underarms of several different sources. Gay men preferred the scent from other gay men, lesbians from other lesbians, and heterosexual women preferred the scent of straight guys.
They also reported that researchers from Karolinska University in Sweden had found that brain areas that influence sexual behavior light up in gay men in response to androstenone, a male hormone secreted in sweat--but there was no corresponding response in heterosexual men.
These findings may strike you as no big surprise, but they’re very significant in terms of validating yet another biological marker for sexual orientation.
Nonetheless, it makes you kind of wonder about those seductive straight men--Sensitive New Age Guys (or
“SNUGs”) as a friend of mine likes to call them--are they really that straight, after all? What else might it be that we’re responding to, other than our own wishful thinking?
There were 16 guys on the second floor of my dorm at college--although unbeknownst to us at the time, four of us turned out to be gay (including my own roommate!). This was pre-Stonewall, but I wonder, aside from our own obliviousness, was there something else we were missing?
So I’d be very curious to hear about your own experience with gay “smelldar”--Have you ever noticed that you were put off by the smell of straight guys?
And have you ever been led astray by seductive straight men, only to discover later that they weren’t that straight, after all?
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