What was going on when I was born?

A major new study of homosexual men and women by the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research has found little or no support for most of the traditional theories about the origins of homosexuality. In particular, the study of nearly 1,500 people indicates that the parents' role in a child's sexual orientation has been ''grossly exaggerated,'' as have theories that homosexuality results from a lack of heterosexual opportunities or from traumatic heterosexual experiences. Rather, the researchers conclude that a homosexual orientation usually seems to emerge from a fundamental predisposition, possibly biological in origin, that first appears as a failure to conform to society's stereotype of what it means to be a boy or a girl. Research Method an Issue The report, to be published as a book, is likely to arouse controversy not only because of its findings, which the authors expect to anger both the psychoanalytic and the homosexual communities, but also because it relies on the memories of those interviewed and on a statistical technique called path analysis that is subject to misuse and can only explore existing notions, not create new ones.

Rick Reuschel, the portly starter who looked like one of the oldtimers in the New York clubhouse, and George Frazier, the gangly reliever who has not allowed a run since joining the Yankees, teamed up yesterday in a 5-0 victory over the Kansas City Royals. After three starts in which he was foiled by errors and misplays, Reuschel earned his first victory since the Yankees acquired him from the Chicago Cubs June 11, the day before the baseball strike began. The Yankees committed two errors after Reuschel left the game after six innings for Rudy May and Frazier, but they played flawlessly for the 32-year-old right-hander who gave up four hits and walked none. Reuschel's teammates also gave him unusual offensive support, getting 11 hits, including a two-run homer by Bucky Dent in the second inning, a single and double by Aurelio Rodriquez, and three hits by Jerry Mumphrey, one of which was a run-scoring triple in the seventh. On Friday night, when Larry Gura shut out the Yankees, they managed only four hits.

Reagan's Taxing Problem Unless President Reagan expects a significant easing in monetary policy, the $75 billion in additional cuts that the Administration contends will produce a balanced budget by 1984 may not be enough, some private economists say. Estimates of the deficit for the coming fiscal year run as much as $75 billion to $100 billion. Lawrence Chimerine, chief economist for Chase Econometrics, expects lackluster economic growth and high interest payments on existing debt to force the Administration to look for new sources of revenue within the next 12 months. It is at least conceivable that the Administration might be forced to take back some of the tax cuts it has just given out. But the political repercussions would be severe - so damaging that such a step is unlikely, Mr. Chimerine says. New sorts of taxation are another matter, however. A levy on fringe benefits, a tax on value added, and faster deregulation of natural gas prices, coupled with a windfall profits tax to recoup profits falling to energy companies, are all possibilities.

SOUTH ORANGE TWO months after being appointed president of Seton Hall University, Dr. Edward R. D'Alessio is busy planning ''an active involvement for every segment of this university - the eighth-largest Catholic university in the country - in the celebration of its 125th year, which begins in September.'' There is, however, more than just planning for a celebration going on at the 56-acre campus here. The university's Faculty Council has filed a complaint with the State Board of Mediation in Newark challenging the appointment of Dr. D'Alessio. ''It's a very small controversy,'' said Dr. D'Alessio, the 17th president of the university and the first Italian-American to hold the position. ''I went through the same selective process as everyone else, and I was appointed president because of my experience and reputation.''

AFTER the voters pick a Governor this year, they will be asked to elect a United States Senator and 14 members of Congress in 1982. Since there are now 15 members of the state's Congressional delegation, somebody has to go. The loss of a seat in Congress was dictated by the 1980 census, which recorded a slight rise in the state's population, but not enough to keep pace with the national growth. The Legislature or, more specifically, the Democrats in the State Assembly, led by Speaker Christopher J. Jackman of West New York, will have the most to say about the shape of the redistricting plan that will be adopted and - if history repeats itself - that will be challenged in court.

ORANGE FOR most of the members of Eagle Flight Post 290, ''getting high'' used to mean drugs - if not for them, then for many of their friends and neighbors in this Essex County city. But the word has a different meaning for them now. The post, an Explorer Scout troop, offers them a chance to fly, literally, and a good shot at someday finding a career in aviation. Formed in 1976, the post, affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America, has 35 members 14 to 18 years old from a community that is a mixture of well-kept Victorian homes and slums. It also provides its members - many of them from single-parent homes - with social interaction. ''This is a preventative program and also oriented toward economic development,'' said the Rev. Russ White, leader of the troop and pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church on Wallace Street, which sponsors it.

Tall, thin towers, often with only one apartment on a floor, are going up in many residential neighborhoods in Manhattan. Some of the sliver-like buildings are being squeezed into slots between high-rise apartment buildings on major cross streets; others loom over their low-rise neighbors on side streets. Some of those recently completed are modest in appearance while others, in various stages of planning, are very elaborate. For the developers, they are the logical products of the inflated luxury apartment market, and the difficulty today in assembling larger sites. But for some planners and residential community groups, they are jarring and disruptive, even though most fall within existing zoning regulations. ''Generically, they are a new building type,'' said David Kenneth Specter, an architect. Kenneth Levien, a member of a group that recently purchased a three-story, 22-foot-wide property at 14 East 96th Street with the intention of developing a sliver building, said that the buildings offered shorter elevator waits than large high-rises and, usually, more views.

THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE By Tracy Kidder. 293 pp. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown. $13.95. FROM mid-1978 to early 1980, a group of engineers at Data General Corporation developed a new super-mini computer. In ''The Soul of a New Machine,'' Tracy Kidder provides a factual accounting of this achievement, and anyone interested in the annals of American industry will find the story absorbing. But Mr. Kidder, a freelance journalist and the author of ''The Road to Yuba City,'' has endowed the tale with such pace, texture and poetic implication that he has elevated it to a high level of narrative art. In ''Literature and Science,'' a slim book published almost 20 years ago, Aldous Huxley tried to discern ways in which literary artists might come to grips with the accelerating scientific and technological revolution. Contemporary writers, he observed, have shown little enthusiasm for science, and less for engineering. Although they have been concerned with ''the social and psychological consequences of advancing technology,'' they have been very little interested in technology itself. The making of machinery has not aroused - in either writers or readers - the ''passionate interest'' that lies at the heart of creative literature.

''A FORMER treasurer of Harvard once told me that he had two golden rules for managing the Harvard portfolio,'' Paul A. Samuelson, Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said. ''One: Never consult the Economics Department. Two: Never consult the business school.''

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio Under the shade of the trees at the first tee of the Shaker Heights Country Club here, Donna Caponi, driver in hand and wearing a quiet, canary-yellow dress, waited for the gentlemen in blue blazer and baritone to finish reciting her credit to the gallery. This was Thursday afternoon just before she began her first round of the world championship of women's golf - in which 12 of the best golfers are competing for $50,000, the richest first prize ever for a Ladies Professional Golf Association event. ''Winner of the 1981 L.P.G.A. championship in June,'' the man declared, ''Donna is currently ranked second on the L.P.G.A. money list with five tournament victories this year - the most of anyone on the tour ... She is 36 years old and has been playing professionally since 1965. She has a career total of 25 tournament victories and is second on the all-time money-winning list $982,521.''

-------------------------------------------------------------------- ERIC W. JOHNSON is a writer who lives in Philadelphia. By ERIC W. JOHNSON Had anyone told me last year I would experience a reflex of pleasure as I lay my head down on a short, narrow bunk and got a faint whiff of horse dung from the pillow, I would have said he or she was crazy. But that was before my wife, Gay, and I spent a week on intimate terms with an Irish horse. Last summer, at Clonakilty, West Cork, in the very south of Ireland, we spent seven days on a horse caravan (the Irish word for covered wagon) and traveled all of 52 1/2 miles, round trip. We passed through Pike's Bar, Owenahincha, Rosscarbery, Leap (pronounced lep), Skibbereen, Drimoleague and Ballina Carriga. We averaged 10 miles a day. But 10 miles of Irish countryside seen at three miles an hour - with midday stops at a pub between glimpses of multiflowered hedgerows, ruined castles, ancient houses, sea inlets and stretches of rolling fields punctuated with green crops as well as grazing cattle and horses -are 10 rich miles indeed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- By GEORGE COLT ''That's called bad luck,'' a voice yells from the sand trap. ''The ball wasn't heading for the tree - the tree just reached out and grabbed it.'' A click, a splash of sand, and a small white ball sails from the direction of the voice and rolls to within a foot of the pin. ''Once that ball leaves the club, you have no control over it,'' the voice mutters. Now a balding pate peers over the brow of the trap like a newly hatched bird, followed by a body, short and stocky, in a red Lacoste shirt turned maroon with sweat. A pair of clear blue eyes surveys the green: a growl slips into a smile. But Mickey Rooney never stops at a smile - he grins, he beams, he exults. ''Great shot,'' calls a friend, ''How d'ya do it?'' Rooney leans on his putter like a swashbuckler on his sword. ''How did I do it?'' he wonders. ''When you've been in the sand as often as I have, you learn how to do it!''