Back Cover Description: Erik Holland has a background in physiology and graduated from the University of Florida. He has authored www.amazinginfoonhomosexuals.com and is interested in unusual human behaviors and how they influence society. Holland has worked on this book for a little over three and a half years.

Note: amazinginfoonhomosexuals.com is the former name of this site.

What got me interested in homosexuality? Like most people, I had hardly any interest in homosexuality and was only somewhat curious as to what turns some people into homosexuals or bisexuals. This curiosity would not by itself prompt me to research homosexual issues, but things changed in 1999, when my ex-roommate, a sociology major, who was working on a paper on homosexuality, asked me to look up some papers on homosexuality because he was not familiar with the biological sciences. I looked up some papers on homosexuality and came across some intriguing information, which prompted me to seek additional papers for further information. None of the papers that I sought explained the origin of homosexuality. I recall having several lively debates with my ex-roommate as to what caused homosexuality. Before I was prompted by my ex-roommate to look up several papers on homosexuality, I had assumed that homosexuals are likely born that way, but my ex-roommate believed that homosexuality is socially acquired. Hardly knowing much about homosexuality, I nevertheless defended my assumption that homosexuals are likely born that way, although I am not sure why I did so...perhaps it was because, given my background in biology, I would consider it bad design to leave the development of one's erotic interests to highly variable influences such as social influences in a species that can normally only reproduce sexually. Of course, I was at a loss to explain that if homosexuality was prenatal in origin and persisted across generations, then how was this being achieved.

Within a few months of my ex-roommate stimulating my interest in homosexuality, my understanding of homosexuality was shaped as follows. Firstly, confronted by several correlates of homosexuality that did not appear to be conceivably explicable within the "born that way" paradigm, I came to believe that homosexuality is partly innate and partly socially acquired, i.e., various social circumstances make people predisposed toward homosexuality homosexual. Secondly, partly as a result of the influence of my ex-roommate above, who harbored and still harbors a negative view of homosexuality, and partly as a result of the information that I had come across, I came to acquire a negative view of several but not all homosexuals. More specifically, it appeared to me that the social influences that turned those predisposed toward homosexuality into homosexuals were often negative.

What made me write a book on homosexuality? In the fall of 2000, I attempted to defend the Boy Scouts' policy of excluding homosexuals in a local newspaper that catered to the campus community. The article that I wrote portrayed homosexuality in an unflattering light; it outraged the homosexual and homophile community in town, although several others had a good laugh out of it. It didn't help that the editors had excised some passages from the article, thereby making it look absurd, and as would be expected in similar cases, I didn't get any chance to mention the omission or to rebut my critics in the newspaper.

Some people asked me for references as to what I had written and I set out to gather them. I had expected this to be a fairly straightforward process, but I came across some very confusing information, something that I just had to make sense of. It took me a few weeks of additional reading to make sense of the confusing information on homosexuality, and when I was done, I ended up reevaluating my stance on the origin of homosexuality. Hereafter, I would no longer make some of the arguments that I made in the article that got me in trouble, but I had gotten many things in the article right. I figured that it would take a lengthy argument to convince others of the interesting picture of homosexuality that had emerged from my readings...a book-length treatment perhaps, and this is how it occurred to me that I should write a book on homosexuality. When I began working on the book, it appeared that the book would serve several purposes: trivial issues such as helping me back up several (though not all) statements that I had made in the article that got me in trouble and providing a rebuttal to the counter-arguments of my critics, and important issues such as satisfying the curiosity of several people about the origin of homosexuality and also helping people resolve several issues related to the demands of homosexual activists. Several years later, this book is finally ready for the public.

Homosexuality is a fascinating subject on its own and it touches several other phenomena that do not initially appear to have anything to do with homosexuality, i.e., an examination of homosexuality also helps us better understand human nature, something that I think several readers of my book will appreciate.