Very Feminine Boys Are Likely To Be Gay Adults, Study Concludes

NEW YORK - Playing with dolls doesn't cause homosexuality, but it's a possible early sign, researcher J. Michael Bailey says.

"If you have a very feminine boy, one so feminine that he's constantly wanting to dress up as a girl and wants to be a girl, chances are he's going to be a gay man," said Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University.

The chance is probably about 75 percent for these boys, who also generally prefer playing with girls and taking the female role in games like "house," he said.

For a very masculine girl, Bailey guessed the chance of becoming a lesbian adult is 10 percent. He said that compares with a general chance for a girl of 1 percent or less.

Bailey doubted that parents can do anything to change a child's chance of becoming a homosexual adult.

Very feminine boys are probably rare, Bailey said. While they run the highest chance of becoming gay men, less feminine boys can also have a higher chance than a masculine boy does, he said.

But that doesn't apply to a boy who "plays with female dolls every now and then, but who enjoys boys as playmates or who doesn't say he's unhappy about being a boy," said study co-author Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto.

Bailey and Zucker reported their findings in this month's issue of the journal Developmental Psychology. The report is a review of prior research.

Dr. Margery Sved, president of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists, called the work a "very fair" description of existing research.

The report reviewed two kinds of research. One kind began with very feminine boys and studied them again in adulthood. Bailey said that this approach produced his 75 percent estimate, and that no such studies have been done for girls.

The other kind of research had adults recall their childhoods. The new analysis included 41 of these studies done in the United States, Canada and Australia.