Android App Reveals: Is Your Son Gay?

For tech-savvy, worried parents, a new Android app promises an answer to what some may see as a crucial question: Is sonny boy gay?

The app poses a series of 20 questions about junior. After all the questions have been answered, the app tabulates the result, not unlike a quiz from a magazine, and spits out one of three answers that might be just at home in a Magic 8 Ball as a high-tech device, reported Online Dish, a feature at 39 Online, the website for a CW-affiliated Houston, Texas news channel KIAH-TV.

The app asks about the lad's grooming ("Does it take him a long time to do his hair?") and wardrobe ("Does your son dress up nicely?") as well as his tastes and interests ("Is he a fan of divas [Madonna, Britney Spears?]").

The app also asks overtly Freudian questions about the father's level of participation in the family, and asks about the son's propensity for fighting.

Depending on the answers it receives, the app might tell an anxious mother, "You do not have to worry, your son is not gay," the article reported. "So there are chances for you to be grandmother with all the joys it brings."

Or, parents wondering about their prospects for grandkids might read that their son, while potentially a dabbler in gay sex, is essentially straight:

"Your son is a normal young man: modern and concerned about taking care of himself assuming some feminine habits while maintaining his attraction to girls," another of the app's responses reads. "However, he may have already had some homosexual experiences with his best friend. These things happen.

"It is more and more usual in these times to maximize pleasures without taboo," the app's middle-of-the-road adds.

But for some, the news is bound to be downright gay-tastic, and the app doesn't mince words:

"No need to look the other way!" the app's celebratory gay positive announcement reads. "He is gay!"

For parents unsure of what to do at that point, the app includes a handy pointer.

"ACCEPT IT!"

"The controversial app was created by French developers 'Emmene Moi,' " the 39 Online article says. "The English version of the app is a direct translation of the French one, 'Mon Fils Est-Il Gay.' "

But there's no cause for cheers or sighs of despair, whatever result parents might have been hoping for. The app is meant for fun, not for diagnostic purposes, its creators say.

"This app was conceived with a playful approach," they acknowledged in a statement, the Huffington Post reported on Sept. 26. "It is not based at all on scientific research."

At least one mental health provider agrees that the app is not scientific, but she fails to see the humor, reported Washington, D.C. radio station WTOP-FM.

"It's not by any means any kind of standardized test that's going to give you any real results," said Melody Brooke, a therapist. "It's not based on any scientific data. It's just somebody's stereotypical view of what it means to be gay."

Brooke denounced the app as "foolish and dangerous," WTOP reported.

GLBT equality advocates have come down on the app, calling for its deletion.

"Socially responsible companies should have standards that prevent such offensive and derogatory content," the interim head of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Mike Thompson, declared. "The 'Is My Son Gay?' app promotes inaccurate stereotypes about gay people and should be removed immediately."

Several apps decried as anti-gay have been protested by gays, gay supporters, and GLBT groups over the course of the last year, including an iPhone app based on the anti-gay "Manhattan Declaration" and an app for Catholics that helps them tally up their sins prior to going to confession. The latter app helped jog the memories of penitents by asking whether they had had any gay sex since their last confession.

The Manhattan Declaration runs to 4,700 words, and was presented at a media conference on Nov. 20, 2009. The document purports to trace a Christian tradition of defending "the sanctity of life" and "traditional marriage" through the ages, and makes the claim that Christianity laid the groundwork for democracy and equality for all before the law. Anti-gay groups such as Focus on the Family embraced the manifesto and encouraged their adherents to put their names to it.

But the declaration also raised hackles. The text claims that the push for equal marriage rights for gay and lesbian families is nothing more than an attempt to "redefine" marriage to suit "fashionable ideologies," and "affirm[s]... marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society."

Community Response

An online petition organized late last year by Change.org gathered thousands of signatures within a week. Though Apple had initially approved the app in October 2010, the outcry from gay organizations led to its removal the following month. The app offered a quiz that rewarded conservative, "right" responses to questions about homosexuality and abortion, and allowed users to add their name to the Manhattan Declaration.

GLBT equality group the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) noted that the app went beyond an implicit assumption that same-sex families were somehow undeserving of the "dignity" that the Manhattan Declaration indicated should be reserved solely for mixed-gender couples.

"The app features an electronic version of a declaration, through which users can pledge to make whatever sacrifices are required' to oppose marriage equality, even, presumably, if that means breaking the law" in asking users not to "bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth," a Dec. 15, 2010, GLAAD release said.

"The 'Manhattan Declaration' calls gay and lesbian couples 'immoral,' it calls the recognition of their relationships 'false and destructive,' and claims that allowing them to be married will lead to 'genuine social harms,' " the GLAAD release noted. "The original application also contained a quiz in which the 'right' answers were those that oppose equality for gay and lesbian people.

"This application fuels a climate in which gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are put in harm's way," the GLAAD release went on. "Apple did the right thing in recognizing that this application violates the company's guidelines."

Developers behind the app revised and resubmitted it, but Apple rejected the app once again.

Noting that the quiz had been stripped out of the revised app that was re-submitted to Apple for approval, GLAAD went on to say, "[S]imply removing the quiz does nothing to address the underlying problem, which is that this application tells people to pledge to oppose equality for gay and lesbian couples."

The app's backers attempted yet again to resubmit the app, but Apple declined yet again in late December, 2010, on the grounds that it was "objectionable and potentially harmful to others."

Less than two months later, Apple struck the iPhone app for Catholics, "Confession," after complaints about the app's anti-gay content.

"Confession" set off GLBT advocates, who said that it was "promoting anti-gay spiritual abuse" by directing users to ask themselves, "Have I been guilty of any homosexual activity?"

LGBTQNation reported on Feb. 10 that the app was the product of three designers in Indiana who had worked with two socially conservative priests. Lawmakers in Indiana had recently advanced a resolution to amend the state's constitution in a way that would ban both marriage equality and civil unions.

The notion of "guilt" and "sin" in connection with same-sex intimacy prompted Wayne Besen, head of the American anti-"ex-gay" group Truth Wins Out, to say that the app promoted not virtue, but rather "neurosis."

"This is cyber spiritual abuse that promotes backward ideas in a modern package," Besen charged. "Gay Catholics don't need to confess, they need to come out of the closet and challenge anti-gay dogma."

Saying that the application was "helping to create neurotic individuals who are ashamed of who they are," Besen slammed the very notion of homosexuality as being inherently sinful. "The false idea that being gay is something to be ashamed of has destroyed too many lives," Besen asserted. "This iPhone app is facilitating and furthering the harm."

In March, yet another iPhone app, affiliated with "ex-gay" group Exodus International, was removed from iPhone's menu. Exodus International claims that gays and lesbians can be "cured" and live as heterosexuals.

GLBT equality advocates accused Exodus promoting a hateful message, and noted that The Exodus application did not ask the user to verify that he or she is legally an adult, a fact that critics said made the app dangerously available to minors already under stress regarding their sexuality. But a spokesperson for the group, Jeff Buchanan, told Christian broadcaster CBN that their outreach was an act of love for gays.

"There are a lot of misconceptions about who we are and what our message is, and those misconceptions continue to be reiterated," Buchanan said. "What we're wanting is simply the right and the opportunity to be able to have a diverse voice or have equal representation on the iTunes platform within Apple, to represent our message of a Biblical worldview of sexuality."

Buchanan went on to say that "every one of those allegations and every one of those statements" made at Change.org about his group "are not true. We love those who struggle with same-sex attraction or who are gay, and we're simply wanting to communicate the message of Jesus and the message of Christ to them, and help the church to become equipped in order to know how to redemptively respond to this issue."