Both biomedical researchers and homosexual subjects have pursued theories of heredity regarding the etiology of homosexuality since the beginning of the scientific study of “Psychosexual inversion” in the nineteenth century. Genetic hypotheses fit with scientifically accepted Victorian models of hereditary degeneration and natural variation. Homosexual activists and informants also relied on hereditary models to argue that same sex attraction was biologically ingrained and therefore should not be the object of religious, legal, or psychoanalytic persecution. I examine the underlying existential experience of homosexual subjectivity revealed by historical homosexual informants as well as patients presented in Jack Drescher's study ofgay men. This has long been the strongest “evidence” to bolster hereditary theories of homosexuality and can be an important theme for exploration in psychoanalytic therapy with gay men.