I'm not all that sure that you do have more information, GfS, and most certainly not more compassion.

Most of the "cures for homosexuality" usually include a heavy dose of fundamentalist religion, involving "accepting Christ as one's Savior" and deliberately choosing a life of denial. More often than not, the participants in these programs either "lapse" after a brief time, or become sexually inactive altogether.

Another characteristic of gays or lesbians who have been "cured" by one method or another are frequent bouts of depression and anxiety.

Robert Spitzer of Columbia University claimed to have developed a "cure" for homosexuality through therapy he had devised, and published a study on his results. He called it "reparation therapy" and claimed that it worked successfully, thereby proving that gender orientation is not "hard wired." However, a follow-up study by John Bancroft of the Kinsey Institute a few years later found that

Only six of the 202 "gay" men and lesbians who had been through counseling reported changing their sexual preference to heterosexuality. According to the interviews, 178 failed to change their orientation and 18 reported adopting celibacy or becoming conflicted about sex.

What's more, the majority of subjects were left with a mistrust for mental health professionals and had to relearn how to form intimate relationships. Many said they were misled by counselors into thinking homosexuality was caused by child abuse, bad parenting, or an unspecified "psychological disorder."

Other methods of "treating" homosexuality involved so-called "aversion therapy." These treatments involved tactics such as pairing homosexual imagery with electric shocks to induce feelings of revulsion.

So much for the claimed "cures."

The brain research that led to the discovery of the differences in the hypothalamus of heterosexuals and homosexuals definitely establishes that there is a physical component. The question raised is "are these differences the cause or the result of a particular gender orientation?" This question has yet to be answered, but researchers are still working on it.

There is also the discovery—in identical twins, who should be genetically identical—that occasionally one will be heterosexual and the other will be homosexual. Rather than supporting the idea that gender orientation is a matter of choice, this unexpected phenomenon has been traced to imbalances in the infusion of hormones in utero during a crucial stage in the development of the fetuses.

So—no matter how you slice it, there is every reason (supported by physical evidence) to believe that gender orientation is "hard-wired" one way or another, and not a matter of choice.

Also there is the phenomenon of very young children behaving like, even wanting to dress like, the other gender. These children almost invariable become homosexual when they sexually mature.

Don Firth