This Time for Sure! I Mean It! No, Really!

One story that got a lot of attention while I was getting ready to travel was an announcement of the latest "gay gene" study.  I first learned about it from a Queerty story linked on Facebook by several queer friends: "Researchers Say They May Have Found the Gay Gene For Real This Time."

The story, apparently drawn from a report at NBC News,  was about a study led by Tuck C. Ngun at "the David Geffen School of Medicine of the University of California, Los Angeles" (really! seriously! this story did not come from The Onion!), which was announced at a genetics conference, and promptly went viral, as these things generally do.  It doesn't appear that Ngun actually claimed to have put salt on the tail of the gay gene, as Queerty and other media said.  What Ngun actually said was something along the lines of "a predictive model for sexual orientation based on molecular markers."  Close enough, I guess.

On the other hand, the announcement drew a lot of criticism.  Even the Queerty article quoted some scientific critics.  Very soon a full demolition appeared at the Atlantic.  Ngun's study used a very small sample, then split that sample, and

As far as could be judged from the unpublished results presented in the talk, the team used their training set to build several models for classifying their twins, and eventually chose the one with the greatest accuracy when applied to the testing set. That’s a problem because in research like this, there has to be a strict firewall between the training and testing sets; the team broke that firewall by essentially using the testing set to optimize their algorithms.

... Ngun admitted that the study was underpowered. “The reality is that we had basically no funding,” he said. “The sample size was not what we wanted. But do I hold out for some impossible ideal or do I work with what I have? I chose the latter.” He also told Nature News that he plans to “replicate the study in a different group of twins and also determine whether the same marks are more common in gay men than in straight men in a large and diverse population.”

Great. Replication and verification are the cornerstones of science. But to replicate and verify, you need a sturdy preliminary finding upon which to build and expand—and that’s not the case here. It may seem like the noble choice to work with what you’ve got. But when what you’ve got are the makings of a fatally weak study, of the kind well known to cause problems in a field, it really is an option—perhaps the best option—to not do it at all. (The same could be said for journalists outside the conference choosing to cover the study based on a press release.)

Now, now -- expecting journalists to actually wait for research to be published, and to examine it critically, would spell the death of modern science journalism in the mass media, as we know it today.

I was amused by Ngun's protest -- better to do badly designed research than to do none at all!  It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that going public with such poor work would hurt his chances of doing the bigger study he hopes to do in the future.  Maybe he should bypass all the grinches among his colleagues who picked his baby to pieces, and try crowdfunding the next one.  GLBTQ media like Queerty would be glad to help.  The comments under that article are appalling; but then so are many of the comments under the Atlantic article, including a batch by a minister who asserts that sexual orientation is "as immutable as eye color and hand dominance," without any evidence to support that claim.

One other curious thing about the Queerty article, though.

Interestingly, after making the findings, Ngun, who is openly gay, decided to abandon the research out of fear that, if developed further, it could be used to screen fetuses or punish or persecute gay people.

“I just left the lab last week,” he said. “I don’t believe in the censoring of knowledge, but given the potential for misuse of the information, it just didn’t sit well with me.”

No link, no source given at all.  It's not mentioned in the NBC article that Queerty linked to.  So, did Ngun leave the lab before or after he announced his findings to the American Society of Human Genetics?  Before or after he defended his inadequate work against criticism?  Why did he only consider the "potential for misuse of the information" after he'd done the study?  It's not as if those concerns haven't been raised often before.

I found a probable source for the quotation from Ngun in a New Scientist article.  Another NS article pooh-poohed the concerns in equally familiar ways: Mankind must not be left ignorant of trivial and unnecessary matters, no matter what the human cost.

Then I found another article at the right-wing Daily Wire, written in a language I believe the author thinks to be English, which announced that

Not only had the study been misrepresented in a way that led many publications to announce that a "gay gene" had been found, it was done so all without the necessary authorization of the senior author and principal investigator of the research, Dr. Eric Vilain. What is more shocking is that the scientist who presented the research, Dr. Tuck Ngun, who is openly gay, was offended by his own research and decided to completely abandon the lab a week before the conference for fear of it shedding a negative light on homosexuality.

This, along with the rest of the piece, is fatuous.   No amount of care in presentation could prevent "many publications" from interpreting the study as evidence of a gay gene; the mass media, straight and gay, are extremely fond of biological determinism and will impose it on any story they cover.

In fact, the study was proving the opposite of what the public was led to believe: that there is no gay gene. Unfortunately, that reality was too harsh for the politically correct to accept, because that would mean that little boys who wear makeup are not genetically gay; they are still just little boys wearing makeup. It would diminish the need for a 'gay community' and threaten the validity of many males who claim that they are gay. 

I can't find any support for the claim that Eric Vilain had any objections to Ngun's presentation, but it appears that he too favors a genetic explanation for homosexuality: "The twin studies do not show that it is 100% genetic. They just demonstrate that there is a genetic influence."  So Vilain is also one of the "politically correct" that the Daily Wire denounces.  And the claim that Ngun's flawed research can already "predict" someone's sexual orientation is still being trumpeted, despite his critics.

Didn't I Say That on the Other Side of the Record?

The advice columnist Dan Savage "called out" antigay bigot Ben Carson last week for saying on CNN that being gay was a "choice."  Carson had pointed to people who "go into prison straight and come out gay."  Savage challenged Carson to prove his claim by choosing to become gay himself, by sucking Savage's dick.

I've said before that one reason I'm finding it hard to write this blog is that I feel like I'm repeating myself.  But then, so is Dan Savage: he said the same thing to another antigay bigot a few years ago, and I can't add much to what I wrote about him at the time.  Since then, however, he's shown his moral superiority to bigots by calling some high school students "pansy-assed" because they walked out on one of his personal appearances, using a homophobic epithet to try to shame them; and by saying that he sometimes thinks about "fucking the shit out" of the antigay bigot Rick Santorum, again using the homophobic trope that fucking another man degrades him.  As I wrote of Savage's remarks about Santorum, Savage is indulging in homophobic abuse that no one should be allowed to get away with, using sex as a metaphor for debasement and humiliation. He's tapping into the same reservoir of male violence that drives queerbashers and rapists.  And, of course, he's also revealing his own hangups about being gay himself.  So why listen to Ben Carson when you can get your daily dose of antigay bigotry from Dan Savage?

Carson backed down and apologized, but also "criticized CNN for airing the comments he'd made in an interview and said he won't be addressing gay rights issues for the duration of his presidential campaign."  Hahahahah, I'm sure he won't.  If he's going to be a presidential candidate, he'd better get used to the comments he makes during interviews (!) being aired and otherwise published.  I doubt his candidacy will get very far, though, since like other Republican hopefuls he's prone to making stupid gaffes that will entertain his hardcore supporters but put off everybody else.

On the other hand, Carson said something true: that "up until this point there have been no definitive studies that people are born into a specific sexuality."  Maybe his medical training has paid off after all!  But if he really cared about factual accuracy, he wouldn't make any statements at all about the etiology of sexual orientation, and he certainly wouldn't have said what he said about the effects of prison on sexual orientation.  Nor would he claim, as he continues to do, that homosexuality is a choice.  But he seems to be driven to make a fool of himself, so even in the apology he posted on Facebook he said that "we are always born male and female", which as a scientist he should know is oversimple, and that he thinks "marriage is a religious institution"; if he really believed that, he'd reject civil marriage, the interference of the State in a religious institution.

It's interesting how far Carson (like other religious bigots) has surrendered to the Politically Correct Gay Agenda.  Does he want homosexuals to be executed, as Scripture commands?  Does he want to reinstate sodomy laws, or Don't Ask Don't Tell?  Does he want same-sex couples to be outside of all legal recognition and protection?  No, he does not:

I support human rights and Constitutional protections for gay people, and I have done so for many years. I support civil unions for gay couples, and I have done so for many years. I support the right of individual states to sanction gay marriage, and I support the right of individual states to deny gay marriage in their respective jurisdictions.

That's not a Bible-believing Christian talking, not one who stands firm against the moral erosion of American society.  That's a flaming liberal.  Even when he says that marriage should be restricted to one man and one woman, he's agreeing with the liberals that polygamy -- a Biblical and traditional value, mind you -- is wrong.  Someone really should ask him, though: since he thinks marriage should be defined and sanctioned by states rather than the Federal government, does he think that Loving v. Virginia, which overturned state laws against "interracial" marriage, should be overturned?  And if he really believes that permitting legal same-sex marriage is an illegitimate redefinition of marriage, why is he willing to let states do it?

"I am not a politician," Carson concluded.  As a presidential hopeful, he is a politician.  But he won't be one for long, the way he's going.

Ah there, you see?  I've said all this before, though sometimes about different people.

Model Dressed as Scientist Inappropriately Touching DNA Molecule

 

One reason I've been feeling blocked lately is that so much of what I see these days is stuff I've written about before.  When I think I should write about it, I remember I've written about it before, so why bother?  But I know that's no excuse, if only because it's normal practice; and if the same themes keep turning up in the media, they also need to be addressed anew.  (Another possibility is that I should try harder to read about different things.)

Anyway, a friend of mine linked today to an article that The Raw Story recycled from The Guardian, about allegedly new research allegedly showing a genetic factor in homosexuality.  Her comment was "Who cares?"  Many people do, alas.  And, as noted, I've written about this subject before, in posts that I think hold up quite well.

Perhaps because of this, I did a bad thing: I reacted to the article in comments to my friend's link before I'd actually read it.  Then I began reading the article and added some postscripts to my first reaction.  On the other hand, the comments to the article at Raw Story are even less well-informed than mine on Facebook.  The comments at the Guardian are not much better.  But let me say some things about the article itself.

The study in question is a followup to Dean Hamer's research from the 1990s, as the article mentions.  The relationship of Michael Bailey (who did the presentation) to this new study is not made clear.  And it manages to get some things right about Hamer's work.  Among other things:

The gene or genes in the Xq28 region that influence sexual orientation have a limited and variable impact. Not all of the gay men in Bailey’s study inherited the same Xq28 region. The genes were neither sufficient, nor necessary, to make any of the men gay.

This was true of Hamer's original work too.  What it means is that some straight men had this genetic marker, and some gay men did not.  Nor did the work establish how many gay men had the marker, or how this "gene or genes ... influence sexual orientation."  Until those questions, among others, are answered, it seems to me extremely premature to trumpet research like this as establishing anything at all -- especially since, as the article notes, it raises

the more dubious prospect of a prenatal test for sexual orientation. The Daily Mail headlined the story “Abortion hope after ‘gay genes findings’ ”. Hamer warned that any attempt to develop a test for homosexuality would be “wrong, unethical and a terrible abuse of research”.

I'm going to be harsh but not, I think, unfair: this was a tremendously stupid thing for Hamer to say.  Scientists like to claim that they're not responsible for the uses to which their work may be put, and perhaps they aren't.  But to whine, when confronted with a very likely consequence of one's work, that it would be "a terrible abuse of research," to be shocked! shocked! that it could be so used, is to reveal a detachment from reality that deserves derision at best.  Knowing what we know about the consequences of detecting a fetus's sex for sex-selective abortion, it's naive to think that being able to detect a fetus's sexual orientation would have no consequences.  (On the other hand, even on the most charitable evaluation of Hamer's research, it doesn't promise to determine sexual orientation at all, before or after birth.)  It would be less embarrassing if Hamer had simply tried to maintain a pose of Olympian detachment.  I believe (I'll try to find some citations) that Hamer has even hoped piously that born-gay research would somehow help the quest for gay and lesbian equality, probably because it would show that we didn't choose to be this way, as if that made a difference.  As I've also argued before, the moral acceptability of homosexuality, or its legal status, has little or nothing to do with its etiology, and numerous 'lifestyle choices' are protected explicitly by American civil rights law.  Hamer is evidently a very good geneticist, but when it comes to interpreting his data or thinking about social dimensions of human sexuality, he's a bit slow.

The article goes on to quote some other researchers on "the biology of sexual orientation."

Qazi Rahman, a psychologist at King’s College London, said the results were valuable for further understanding the biology of sexual orientation. “This is not controversial or surprising and is nothing people should worry about. All human psychological traits are heritable, that is, they have a genetic component,” he said. “Genetic factors explain 30 to 40% of the variation between people’s sexual orientation. However, we don’t know where these genetic factors are located in the genome. So we need to do ‘gene finding’ studies, like this one by Sanders, Bailey and others, to have a better idea where potential genes for sexual orientation may lie.”

I don't doubt that sexual orientation has a biology, just as language does.  But while biology can shed some light on the mechanisms that govern the production of language in general, it has nothing to do with languages: that I speak English instead of French or Japanese is not the result of biological differences between English speakers and Japanese speakers, but of historical and cultural differences.  One could point to some meaningless correlations, such as that Japanese speakers are more likely to have black hair and brown eyes than English speakers (though the percentages are changing as English has become a world language), but these do not indicate that black hair and brown eyes somehow produce the Japanese language.  Analogously, it's clear that human beings form preferences for sexual partners and sexual practices, but so far I have not seen any reason to believe that these preferences have any basis in biological variation.  As you can see if you read this article or most writing on "the biology of sexual orientation," these scientists have not been able to discover how these genetic markers or other factors produce a partiality for male or female partners -- because they are generally unaware of such partiality as a psychological factor, and assume that biological femaleness (for example) automatically produces a desire to be penetrated in both males and females.

Rahman also makes a very elementary mistake in his quoted remarks: the degree of "heritability" of a trait does not necessarily say anything about the mechanism of heritability involved.  Heritability is a complex factor that I don't pretend to understand, but then it's not my profession to understand it.  Different scientists differ on what the concept even means, and the terminology itself leads to confusion, as numerous scientists have pointed out -- Richard C. Lewontin, for instance, in his review of Evelyn Keller's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture:

A major problem in understanding what geneticists have found out about the relation between genes and manifest characteristics of organisms is an overly flexible use of language that creates ambiguities of meaning. In particular, their use of the terms “heritable” and “heritability” is so confusing that an attempt at its clarification occupies the last two chapters of The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture. When a biological characteristic is said to be “heritable,” it means that it is capable of being transmitted from parents to offspring, just as money may be inherited, although neither is inevitable. In contrast, “heritability” is a statistical concept, the proportion of variation of a characteristic in a population that is attributable to genetic variation among individuals. The implication of “heritability” is that some proportion of the next generation will possess it.

 Back at the Guardian, Qazi Rahman continues:

Rahman rejected the idea that genetics research could be used to discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual orientation. “I don’t see how genetics would contribute more to the persecution, discrimination and stigmatisation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people any more than social, cultural or learning explanations. Historically, the persecution and awful treatment of LGBT groups has been because politicians, religious leaders and societies have viewed sexual orientation as ‘choice’ or due to poor upbringing.”

Rahman is even more embarrassing than Hamer.  Of course genetics research could be used to discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual orientation.  Such research has already been used to justify discrimination against people on the basis of their sex, skin color, class, level of intelligence, and other traits; why should sexual orientation be any different?  Rahman is historically ignorant, and probably dishonest to boot -- it's hard to believe that any educated person nowadays could be completely unaware of the twentieth-century history that belies his claim.  But hey, The Two Cultures and all.  His second quoted sentence supports my suspicion of dishonesty, in the way that scientists often try to pretend that their work has no social consequences because they're ignorant of those consequences and prefer not to think about them.  This reminds me of Noam Chomsky's criticism of scientists who try to brush aside questions about the social consequences of their research:

Similarly, imagine a psychologist in Hitler's Germany who thought he could show that Jews had a genetically determined tendency towards usury (like squirrels bred to collect too many nuts) or a drive towards antisocial conspiracy and domination, and so on. If he were criticized for even undertaking these studies, could he merely respond that “a neutral commentator ... would have to say that the case is simply not settled” and that the “fundamental issue” is “whether inquiry shall (again) be shut off because someone thinks society is best left in ignorance”? I think not. Rather, I think that such a response would have been met with justifiable contempt. At best, he could claim that he is faced with a conflict of values. On the one hand, there is the alleged scientific importance of determining whether in fact Jews have a genetically determined tendency towards usury and domination (an empirical question, no doubt). On the other, there is the likelihood that even opening this question and regarding it as a subject for scientific inquiry would provide ammunition for Goebbels and Rosenberg and their henchmen. Were this hypothetical psychologist to disregard the likely social consequences of his research (or even his undertaking of research) under existing social conditions, he would fully deserve the contempt of decent people. Of course, scientific curiosity should be encouraged (though fallacious argument and investigation of silly questions should not), but it is not an absolute value ["Psychology and Ideology", in For Reasons of State (Random House, 1973), 360].

So what is the scientific significance of discovering that homosexuality is correlated with finger length?  As Chomsky says of racial science, one would like to see an argument.

One other thing I should point out: the study mentioned in the Guardian/Raw Story article has not yet been published, which I take to mean it has not even passed peer review yet.  Why should it be touted in major media at all, when it's not even certain that it will stand up to this most basic scrutiny?  This is an unfortunately common tendency in mass-media science reporting, where the presentation (in this case by a notoriously publicity-hungry academic of doubtful ethics, Michael Bailey) makes grandiose claims that mysteriously vanish by the time the study sees print -- if it ever does.  But it's the initial headline that will be remembered and passed along, not the later correction.

You Take the Low Road, and I'll Take the Low Road

I've disagreed with the lesbian writer E. J. Graff in the past, but I agree with a lot of what she wrote in a fairly disorganized piece at The Nation last week.  "What's Wrong with Choosing to Be Gay?" is the title, and of course it set off a shitstorm of enraged comments that didn't address anything she said.  (There were about 300 of them by the time I read the article myself on Friday, and there were about fifty more when I looked again today.)  Going by many commenters' behavior elsewhere on the Internet, I think it's a safe bet that they didn't read past the title before freaking out and entering their comments.

So let me try to engage with what Graff actually wrote.  She begins by objecting to "the party line," the "orthodoxy" that gay people are born this way.  I agree with her there, of course, though I notice that she doesn't actually give a reason for objecting to that belief.  (And I'm not happy with her deployment of such terms; "gay marriage," or "marriage equality" as the party line has it, is just as much gay-movement "orthodoxy" as that we're born this way.)  She says that it's "often gay men who are more insistent on the innateness of sexuality, whereas many lesbian and bisexual women have pushed back at this argument, since we’ve often (not always) had different experiences with sexuality."  This also appears to be true; those interested could begin by consulting Vera Whisman's Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity (Routledge, 1995).  (It also appears to be mostly gay men who erupted into fury in the comments to Graff's article.)  Then she cites a recent article from The New Republic, "a challenge to that orthodoxy" by Brandon Ambrosino, which of course is "getting corrected by the LGBT thought police," among these "a writer I respect enormously," Gilbert Arana.

Ambrosino writes:

Whenever someone accepts me merely because she feels obligated to do so by my genetic code, I feel degraded rather than empowered. It's like saying, “You can’t help it, sugar. You were born this way. Me? I was born with astigmatism and a wonky knee. We can’t change our limitations even if we wanted to.” (As if homosexuality was taken out of the DSM only to be written into the ADA.) In a way, this sentiment of obligation comes through in Macklemore’s "Same Love," a song I enjoy nonetheless. And insofar as it encourages many straight and gay people alike to be open to nontraditional forms of love, I hope he keeps singing it for many years to come.

I agree with this too, on the whole.  (Though I disagree that same-sex love is a "nontraditional form of love."  It's too old, widespread, and well-documented for that.)  I've argued the same point, perhaps more strongly: that gay people who say they can't help it, they were born this way, are conveying the message that they hate being gay and agree with bigots that they shouldn't be That Way.  I've told before the story of a gay graduate student whom I asked what he'd do if it were definitively proven that homosexuality was a choice.  After trying to dodge the question a moment, he said that in that case someone would make a lot of money helping him reverse the choice.  I'm not sure I quite believe him, since even in the days when neo-Freudian orthodoxy (ignoring Freud's own position, by the way) held that homosexuality could be "cured," very few homosexuals showed any interest in being changed; but I think his answer was revealing.

Graff goes on to discuss what is usually called sexual "fluidity" nowadays -- the fact that many people have erotic experience in various degrees with people of both sexes, even when they think of themselves as comfortably monosexual.  And she cautions:

No one this side of the rainbow flag is arguing that people choose the direction of their romantic and sexual desires in the way that someone might, say, choose between different brands of toothpaste. Desire happens unbidden.

Most of Graff's ensuing discussion is rather garbled.  She talks about "hijra" and "two spirit" as if they were more or less conscious strategies for dealing with the discovery of one's homosexual desires in other cultures, for example; and evidently buys the notion that homosexuality is a "gender deviation," which at best is an oversimplification.  And then she writes:

Gay isn’t the desire; it’s the social identity we layer on top of the desire—and it’s only yours if you claim it. Even men who have sex with men (MSMs, in the lingo) are not gay unless they say so.

This is arguable, at best a matter of definition.  I disagree, however, because it overlooks a key factor like stigma that explains why many homosexually active people deny fiercely that they're Like That.  And among gay people ourselves, as Graff surely knows, it is conventionally assumed that we can label other people as gay based on what we think we know of them, regardless of they say about their identities.  A closet case is the folk term for those who (according to the folk) are gay, and they know it, even if they pretend otherwise.  And it can hardly be denied that there are many people who are gay and know it but pretend otherwise, to themselves and to others.  Was Ellen DeGeneres gay before she came out publicly?  Of course she was.  Was Rock Hudson gay even though he denied it publicly?  Of course he was.  As for MSMs, the term was invented in the early years of the AIDS epidemic specifically as a way for such men to evade the stigma of homosexuality in order to make them accessible to safer-sex education and practice: it's a euphemism, and as such it may be useful in some cases, but it doesn't prove anything about the person or how he sees himself and his sexual activity.  As one black AIDS activist said of "MSM":

Quite frankly it was a phrase that was created by black gay men, and we created it because we knew that the CDC would not fund black gay men.  So we wanted to create a phrase that was palatable to them.  In the beginning we created it out of the air.  There was no statistical work to quantify the magnitude of this population of black men who were having sex with other men but didn't identify.  Now intuitively we knew that they were engaged in homosexual behavior.  However, the way the behavior manifested itself was not, or did not mirror the way it manifested itself in white gay men. But now the implication that there are no black gay men out there who identify as gay is absurd.  And so there for the longest time all the programs were, like, targeted to this group of folks who may or may not be gay.  And I used to say, what are we doing?  We're marching over the dead bodies in hopes of finding a people who may not be there.  And how many dead bodies do we have to march over looking for this theoretical body?  Besides who are these men who have sex with men fucking anyway?  They are fucking men who identify with being gay, that's who they are fucking.  How else do they connect?  Somebody has to have a clue about what is going on [Phil Wilson, quoted in Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness (Chicago, 1999), 107-8].

But all of this has little to do with the use of the word "choice" or "lifestyle choice" in the culture war over homosexuality.  If "gay" is an identity, then of course it is chosen, not inborn.  But if it refers -- and it does, much of the time -- to people who relate erotically and romantically to people of their own sex, regardless of what they think about it or how they label themselves, then we're back to square one, and where those desires came from.  The choice of the identity almost always is made after one has plenty of experience with same-sex desire, and often with overt erotic interaction.  This, I think, is the point Graff is aiming for.  She's correct, as far as I'm concerned, to argue that it wouldn't matter if we did choose to desire and fall in love and have sex with people of our own sex.  I believe we, as activists and citizens, should work from this position.  If most of us don't, I think it's just as clearly because we agree with our opponents that it does matter why we're gay.

In any case, as Graff continues:

You can be born lots of ways that society demands you suppress. If someone could prove that being a child molester or serial rapist or homicidal sociopath were genetically predetermined, would we welcome those desires into our public square? Hardly. They fail the “I’m not hurting anyone” test. Which means the argument is really “I’m born that way and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

I agree with this too, and have said so before.  As I've indicated, though, I think that the reason gay people find it difficult (impossible?) to say "I'm born that way and there's nothing wrong with that" is that they don't believe there's nothing wrong with being gay.  If they had been lucky enough to be born straight, they'd be throwing stones at queers too.  Maybe I'm wrong about this.  Give me some reasons to change my mind.

The resistance to acknowledging our own agency and choices is so strong that many gay people are trying to claim that their identity is inborn rather than chosen.  I think that's obviously ridiculous, but there it is.  It may be partly due to the confusion that reigns over what "identity" is; it's widely conflated with "sexual orientation."  We're not automatically smarter than our enemies; after all, we grew up in the same society they did.

Another problem is that, no less than "identity," "choice" is an unclear word.  Saying that homosexuality is a choice doesn't make much sense.  I've asked some people who tend to think of homosexuality in terms of a "choice" what kind of choice they have in mind.  I can't remember one who could explain it without prompting, and I tried to avoid leading questions, but when I asked, they generally agreed that they thought that gay people had been heterosexual before but decided, mysteriously, to pursue relationships with their own sex.  Why?  They have no idea.  That, surely, is the general antigay assumption: we are all naturally heterosexual, but some individuals choose to engage in unnatural perversion with their own sex.  I'd call this "folk psychology," if so many educated and more or less sophisticated people didn't believe in some version of it.  (It's not even a Biblical theory, since the closest thing to an explanation of homosexuality in the Bible is Paul's assertion in the first chapter of Romans that male homosexual desire/lust is God's punishment for idolatry.  The "choice," if there were one, would lie in being a pagan.)

Then Graff mounts the pulpit:

Because this one is the best argument we have: “Love makes a family.” That’s been our movement’s real contribution to the social discussion—that insistence that the building blocks of love needn’t be confined by sex or gender or reproduction, that how we care for each other is more important that who. And we’re winning on that one too, whether the social conservatives like it or not.

Love doesn't make a family; if anything, choice does, the decision and commitment to take responsibility for other people in certain ways.  "Love" is another propaganda word (well, so is "family"), meant to get the hearer to shut off his or her mind and subside into a big puddle of warm fuzzies.  But for all that, I agree that we're winning on more open, flexible concepts of family, because heterosexuals' families are more open and flexible too, and always have been.  If anything, the same-sex marriage movement is a reaction against such openness, intended to canonize only marriage as the sole definer of family, and to relegate other configurations to second-class status.

She concludes:

Our society protects chosen identities. One’s being a Seventh-Day Adventist, Sufi Muslim or Hasidic Jew may be strongly influenced by the culture one is born into—but it’s not genetic. People convert in and out, in a way that involves new conceptions of their core identity. In some parts of the world, and in large swaths of Western history, choosing the “wrong” religion can be a death-penalty offense. But in our era we protect your freedom of religion. It’s time to be neutral about orientation in just the same way, protecting personal freedom of choice. Because really, who cares?

Again, I agree, and have argued the point at length in the past.

None of the commenters under Graff's article addressed what she actually said.  Some asserted the certainty that we're born this way, usually without citing any evidence.  One person made claims about "hormones" as a factor, though that explanation has severe failings and doesn't really work;* another cited the work of a psychologist who, in his retirement, has become very active on the Internet arguing that our hormones did it, along with Biblical misinformation and other fun stuff.  One person dragged in social construction without really understanding the concept.

Graff hadn't addressed the question of cause; she was basically talking about the right approach to take in advocacy. So was Brandon Ambrosino, though like Graff he's confused about choice as a concept.  It appears, for example, that he accepts that the only alternative to "born gay" is "choice"; it's not.  And so was Ambrosino's critic Gilbert Arana, who wrote angrily that Ambrosino's

line of reasoning has a hip, "post-gay" appeal, but it is eye-rollingly naïve, a starry-eyed view you might expect from a college student who's just taken their first queer-theory class. From a political standpoint, it matters a great deal whether sexual orientation is inborn or a choice. Rightly or wrongly, social conservatives object to homosexuality on the grounds that it is a lifestyle choice.

I think Arana is ignorant historically, but the validity (or not) of Ambrosino's argument has nothing to do with whether it's "post-gay."  Myself, I'm not convinced that social conservatives object to homosexuality because they believe that it is a lifestyle choice.  I think it's the reverse: they assume that it's a choice because they object to it, as people also do with fat people or depressed people or others they disapprove of.  Generally their objections are more gut-level, less rational than that.  They assume that gay people can change because homosexuality offends them, so we must be doing it on purpose -- "by choice" -- just to ruin their day.  "Natural" and "unnatural" aren't truth statements, they're emotive terms of approval and disapproval.  That's why gay people want to believe that we're "natural."  Natural is good.  Except when it's not.

And as Arana admits, the born-gay claim isn't all that effective on our opponents: "Social conservatives dismiss outright the idea that homosexuality is inborn. They insist it is a choice.  From their point of view, biology is destiny."  But here the gay movement agrees with them: homosexuality is biology, so it's destiny, even if it dooms us to a life of misery and persecution.  As Graff says, though, just because our opponents say we chose to be gay, there's no reason to let them set the terms of the argument.

Then Arana falls flat on his face:

Those of us who support LGBT rights are committed to the "born this way" narrative not as a civil-rights strategy, but for the simple reason that it's true. The main problem with Ambrosino's argument is that he is conflating concepts like sexual orientation, identity, behavior, and expression. It is true that I have chosen to identify as gay, that I express myself in a way that makes it clear I am gay, and that I have gay sex. All of these are a matter of choice. But my sexual orientation—my underlying attraction for men—is beyond my control.

It's actually Arana who's conflating concepts like sexual orientation, identity, etc.  That he (and to be fair, I) do not experience my "underlying attraction for men" as something I can turn on and off voluntarily does not prove that I was "born this way."  That is, as I understand it, the whole point of social construction theory: that people experience as "natural" practices and institutions which are not built into our biology, but were invented by people.  (One analogous case is one I've been meaning to write about here: language.  As shown by the hysteria over Coca Cola's Superbowl commercial last week, many people experience their native language as natural, built-in -- and when they hear a familiar song [partially] translated into other languages, they experience that as unnatural, a violation of the nature of the song itself, which just naturally is in English.  English is in its DNA.  God made "America the Beautiful" that way, and he doesn't make trash, okay?)

Arana is simply wrong when he jumps from asserting his experience of his sexual nature to asserting that this experience is the true explanation of his desires.  The scientific evidence, such as it is, doesn't support the claim: the research which purports to show that homosexuality is inborn is at best problematic, and at worst thoroughly misconceived.  (Arana admits this, with some of the usual handwaving: we don't know where homosexuality comes from, we just know that it's Not. A. Choice.)  For that matter, gay people were claiming dogmatically that they were born gay long before this research was done, indeed before any halfway methodical research on the question had been done -- just as men claimed that women were biologically unfit for higher education, or whites made similar claims about blacks or Jews: conclusion first, evidence later if ever.  And after all, when social conservatives assert that homosexuality is unnatural, they're asserting their own equally strong subjective conviction that it's wrong.  Why does Arana's subjective belief trump theirs?  Of course theirs doesn't trump his either.  The question must be settled in other ways.

The title of Arana's article declares that "being gay isn't a choice, it's a civil rights issue", which besides being a false dichotomy, changes the terms of the argument.  And as Graff notes correctly, Civil Rights law protects certain lifestyle choices as well as inborn conditions: religious affiliation as well as "race" and "sex."  Even a lifestyle choice like interracial marriage, though not covered by the Civil Rights Act as far as I know, is protected by the Constitution according to the US Supreme Court.

And there's another issue, as far as I'm concerned.  I agree that "social conservatives" are wrong to assert dogmatically that homosexuality is a choice, whatever "choice" means -- both in fact and in terms of US law, it's false and irrelevant.  But what does it say about the US gay rights movement that it answers its opponents' irrelevant falsehoods with irrelevant falsehoods (e.g, that we're born this way) of its own?  Maybe it's politically necessary, but it's not the moral high road: it's more like sinking to our opponents' level.  And why not?  Is not one man as good as another?

---------------
*I've explained why it doesn't work at length before, but briefly, the hormonal theory -- that homosexuality is caused by overexposure to female hormones of the male fetus in utero, or to male hormones of the female fetus -- even if it turns out to have some validity, models "the homosexual" as "the invert," a feminized male or a masculinized female.  This might explain why, for instance, some men want to be penetrated by other males, but it doesn't explain why some males want to penetrate other males.  It's a theory of sex/gender, not of sexual orientation, and it is based on a reductive and impoverished model of human sexuality.  And whether sex hormones are a factor in homosexuality has still not been settled; like virtually every other scientific claim about homosexuality, it is still controversial.

The Demons Also Believe, and Tremble

I've gotten bogged down in a post that's turning out to be longer and more complicated than I expected, so let me interrupt myself and talk about something that I hope is simpler and more manageable.

Recently I was one of a GLB panel speaking to a university class on human sexuality, and the perennial "Do you think you were born that way?" question was asked.  The other speakers said that they aren't much concerned with why they are gay, and I've noticed that increasing numbers of our volunteers seem to be taking that position of late.  (Without pressure from me, I should mention: none of the speakers that day had spoken with me before, and we disagree on some other points.)  I spoke critically of the scientific research that has been adduced in support of the "born that way" position, and the instructor (a graduate student, and one of our volunteers) said something wryly about Simon LeVay having been "demonized" for arguing that homosexuality is innate and inborn.  I don't remember now whether he said this directly or reported LeVay's own complaint of having been demonized, but it doesn't make much difference: what matters here is the accusation that LeVay has been demonized for his work.

I disagreed, first of all because while LeVay has certainly been criticized, most gay people as far as I know, and many if not most of his scientific colleagues have lionized him.  His work is still widely cited as evidence that homosexuality is biologically determined, despite its known flaws and the fact that it hasn't been replicated.  (I mentioned this in class, and the instructor didn't disagree.)   Biological determinism is still trendy, and its adherents love to cast themselves as modern-day Galileos, persecuted for fearlessly following the truth wherever it leads -- even though none have been shown the instruments of torture that will be used on them if they don't recant, and most seem to be enjoying unimpeded scientific and academic careers.

It may be that LeVay has been demonized by antigay bigots who reject efforts to establish homosexuality as an involuntary condition like, say, spina bifida rather than a rebellion against Yahweh.  This religious writer declares what I suspect is a false equivalence, urging that "People on both sides of the debate need to make strenuous efforts to defuse their hostility and to demythologize their understanding of each other as 'hate-filled bigots.'"  ("Demythologize"?)  If so, LeVay shouldn't take it personally; I don't.  Religious reactionaries demonize everybody; it's part of their toolkit.

But I doubt that the instructor, or LeVay, had such people primarily in mind.  Standard operating procedure in the Science Wars is for biological determinists to evade scientific criticism of their work by accusing their critics of being anti-science, blank-slate, hysterical Marxists and/or feminists.  Critics of born-gay theories are accused of believing that homosexuality is a choice, which is presumably meant to smear the critics by association with religious bigots; social constructionism is also routinely assumed to declare homosexuality a choice.  Whatever the motivation, the accusation is false.  It's interesting, when you consider scientific apologists stress science's supposed sensitivity to falsification and correction, that it nevertheless continues to be used so often.  It's not a fringe tactic either, but quite mainstream.

I agree, of course, that demonizing people whose positions one disagrees with is bad form.  And while it's generally a good idea to moderate one's rhetoric as much as possible in debate, I don't agree that calling someone a bigot is necessarily demonizing them, especially when they set the tone with immoderate language themselves.  It's perfectly legitimate to call someone a bigot after you've refuted their arguments and established that whatever motivates them, it isn't reason or evidence.  But if we're going to use immoderate rhetoric, we'd better be able to take it as well as dish it out.  We expect our opponents to do the same, after all.

Understand, I'm not accusing the instructor of being mean.  Quite the contrary: he let me and the other panelists have our say, and none of us took the born-gay position.  I'm just a bit perplexed by his remark: it wasn't mean, it just seemed irrelevant.

Everything Else Being Equal

There's just too much going on to write about, and besides I've been spending too much time writing comments elsewhere instead of tending my own garden. In fact, I'm cannibalizing most of this post from a comment I wrote on a post at Emptywheel that celebrated today's Ninth Court decision overturning the anti-same-sex marriage amendment Proposition 8. As usual, bmaz did a fine job, clearly explaining the legal issues involved in the decision. It's good to see that the Ninth ruled that Judge Vaughan Walker was qualified to sit as the trial judge in Perry v. Brown, even though Walker is gay. The people who'd argue otherwise don't seem to realize what a can of worms they're opening: if a gay judge is (supposedly) biased to rule in a case involving gay people and the law, then so is a heterosexual judge, and that would mean that such a case could never go to court; for that matter, N. Randy Smith, the sole dissenter in today's ruling, is a Mormon, and should have recused himself given the Mormons' role in the passage of Proposition 8.

I'm glad to see Proposition 8 go down, just because (as I've said before), it's not a good thing to have discrimination of any kind enshrined in a state constitution. But I'm still uneasy about same-sex marriage and its rationales, as exemplified by some remarks in today's decision. Hence my comment, pasted in below with some modifications and additions.

This is probably a foolish question that has been asked and answered before, but I'm going to ask it anyway. It has to do with something in one of this quotation from today's decision:

Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those opposite-sex couples.

No doubt because I'm an old gay liberationist, I'm worried about the way the gay movement has hitched its (and our) wagon to the idea of sexual orientation as a "status" -- that we are biologically different from straights, and deserve to be equal because we can't help ourselves, we were born this way -- and that we should be allowed to marry each other because we are incapable of marrying someone of the opposite sex. It has always seemed to me dangerous (politically, if not legally) to base our claims for "equality" on what has always been known to be very shaky science, to put it charitably. I recall seeing a passage from a Canadian ruling on same-sex marriage which justified letting gays marry on just those biological grounds. But what happens if that bad science is ever definitively disproved? Will we lose our rights? One mark of how perilous these claims are is the hysteria and waves of personal attacks that result whenever someone (Cynthia Nixon, most recently) challenges these claims and the notion that people have no right to make sexual choices; if everybody doesn't agree that GLBTQQA people are born that way, then They can change us skree skree skree!

As far as I know, Loving v. Virginia was not decided on the ground that the Lovings were born with "racial orientations" that rendered them incapable of marrying a person of the same race. Nor does religious freedom mean that God made me a Methodist or a Quaker or a Papist and God doesn't make trash. Nor did the unquestioned fact that women and people of color are Born That Way ever do them any good against bigots who saw them as less than full citizens; on the contrary, biological determinism was used to argue that they were inferior breeds. I really believe that the born-gay claim has dug us into a deep and scary hole.

Same-sex marriage is not a matter of status, it's a matter of structure. If it means that gays/lesbians can marry other gays/lesbians, it does something strange. It even supports the bigots' derisory claim that homosexuals can marry, as long as they marry a homosexual of the other sex, which would be a "gay" marriage because neither partner would be heterosexual. And where do bisexuals fit in here? If two bisexuals marry, is that a bisexual marriage? Can it be argued that only 'pure' homosexuals can avail themselves of same-sex marriage, since bisexuals could marry heterosexually if they 'chose'? Will people seeking same-sex marriage be required to prove themselves Kinsey Sixes to avoid letting people of the wrong status game the system? To paraphrase Mr. Justice Stewart's concurring opinion in Loving v. Virginia, the case is not the sexual orientation of the actors -- it's about their sex. Fixating on sexual orientation as status simply confuses the issue.

This is also why the term "marriage equality" makes me nervous. The function and effect of marriage is precisely to designate some relationships as inferior to others: unmarried couples don't have the same status or dignity as married ones, no matter how much they love each other or how long they've been together. (And I've seen enough "marriage equality" proponents fume about heterosexuals who don't want to sanctify their coupledom with marriage to be wary of their openness and tolerance, however much they demand them for themselves.) But then, the inclusion of 'marital status' in antidiscrimination statutes isn't meant to imply that married couples shouldn't be granted special privileges and benefits that unmarried couples can't access; generalized, that could complicate things drastically. As IOZ once asked, not so rhetorically, if health care is a human right, why should you have to get married to get it?

My question, in the end, is why the question of same-sex marriage got tied to our "status" as gay people. It's not logically necessary -- compare Loving v. Virginia, or other areas of non-discrimination -- and it makes assumptions about the people involved that probably aren't true. While I'm perfectly happy to see Proposition 8 be overturned, I think that the reasoning is important, and bmaz' post shows that to be true in at least certain respects. It seems that it's because so many gay people are obsessed with the idea that we have a different nature than straight people do, while being not different at the same time. They're two contradictory claims, and that can't be good for the politics, or even for our own self-image.

The Right to Choose

Dan Savage's latest column (via) contains what I can only call a tantrum, a Rumplestiltskin-style stamping of his foot in a two-year-old's fury. Which is nothing new, of course, for Savage. But as I read his outburst, I began wondering just why he was so angry.

The occasion of his tantrum was another antigay bigot saying that homosexuality is a "conscious choice." Savage challenged the bigot to prove that homosexuality is a conscious choice by sucking his (that is, Savage's) dick. No doubt the homophobic force behind one man's telling another man to suck his dick made Savage feel ultra-manly, and will allow many of his readers to feel ultra-manly by proxy. (Just as Rush Limbaugh's fans participate vicariously in his obnoxiousness: Yeah, man, what he said! Ditto, ditto, megadittoes.) But aside from that, what's the point?

First, a thought experiment. Suppose, just for the sake of figuring this out, that the bigot accepted Savage's challenge, knelt down before him in front of a large audience and video cameras, and orally received Savage's manhood, even unto completion. Would the bigot thereby become gay? Does having carnal knowledge of a person of the other sex (as many homosexual people have done) turn one into a heterosexual? Of course not: it's a virtual cliche that one homosexual experience doesn't turn you gay, or mean that you're gay -- unless it does, because the fact that you were even willing to try it proves that deep down inside you are really, truly, essentially gay, and wanted it all along. One of the benefits of relying on folklore is that it lets you have things both ways.

Where do you draw the line, though? Think of an actor like Ewan MacGregor, who has often played gay characters, kissing other men and even simulating sexual acts with them very convincingly. Does that mean he's really gay? Secretly gay? He once said in an interview that he found it easier to do sex scenes with men than with women, because there was no sexual tension with men. Whether or not he was telling the truth, this made sense to me, because I could imagine myself in the reverse situation. (Again, folklore comes in here: many people, gay and straight, still assume that anyone who plays a gay character must be gay. But as Lily Tomlin said of playing heterosexuals on one of her comedy records, "You don't have to be one to play one.") What about heterosexual people who've done homosexual sex work -- not just men who allow queers to pay for the privilege of bringing them to orgasm, but men who allow themselves to be penetrated orally or anally for pay?

It seems that some people are able to perform sexual acts with partners who aren't their first choice (oops) without revulsion -- even sometimes with pleasure -- for various reasons. It might be something that most people are able to do, depending on the act, the partner, and the reason. But then consider someone like Andrew Tobias, who wrote a memoir, The Best Little Boy in the World, under a pseudonym in the 1970s. It has been a long time since I read it, but Tobias went on working the same themes, sometimes under his own name, into at least the 90s. As I remember it, Tobias's coming out as a gay man was problematic because of his phobic reaction to intimate contact with other males. "Cowboys don't kiss" was his rationale for not be able to bring himself to kiss another man, and I remember a scene in the book where he tried to make a boyfriend's penis more orally appealing by covering it with syrup. (It didn't work: the gag reflex won out.) This raises all kinds of intriguing questions about what sex is, how people decide what to do sexually and so on, but the point is that just because you find a particular sex act repugnant, it doesn't prove anything about your sexual orientation or its origin.

If Savage's bigot were to accept his challenge, then, what would it prove? The Born-gay theories have always left room for people who engaged in same-sex eroticism only because they were in single-sex environments (boarding schools, prison, ships at sea, the army), distinguishing from those who did so of their (our) own free will, because we were inverts, constitutional homosexuals, whatever the current jargon was. (What is the Homosexual Constitution? Is it the charter of the Gay Agenda?) And I can't help noting that antigay bigots have shown an entertaining tendency to be hiding gay desires and practices. If this bigot were to chow down on Savage's manhood, it could at least be interpreted as a triumph of the gay gene.

I'm not sure, because Savage's fury renders him so incoherent, but I think he meant something like this: If a bigot finds the idea of sucking a cock repugnant, it's because he's right. Sucking a cock is inherently so disgusting that only a mutant could find it (barely) tolerable. This is why gay homosexuals should be regarded with pity, not contempt: because our genes drive us to submit to the disgusting, degrading, emasculating penetration of our bodies by other males. Except, of course, that as Andrew Tobias's experience shows, a good many gay men are just as revolted by the idea of being penetrated as any straight homophobe; and many straight men aren't revolted by it and can do it, even enjoy it, if they have reason to.

Another problem with Savage's diatribe is that he seems to be agreeing that choices are trivial, even whimsical. A good many gay people react to the "choice" line by denying that they just woke up one morning and decided to be gay. No doubt they're telling the truth, but that's not how most choices are made. Choosing a college, choosing a career, getting married, changing one's religion -- people don't wake up one morning and whimsically decide such things out of the blue. If homosexuality were a choice, people would have some kind of reason for choosing it. A challenge from an advice columnist to fellate him isn't a good reason. "If being gay is a choice, choose it," Savage taunted his subject. "Show us how it’s done. Suck my dick." I wouldn't do it, and I'm gay. (Should I claim that my genes forbid me?) If the bigot chose to fellate Savage, it would prove that he's a pervert, but it wouldn't make him gay.

Which brings me to my other big question about Savage's column. Why does the claim that homosexuality is chosen make him, and so many other gay people, so angry? Savage ranted that those who make the claim "would appear to be just another group of deranged conspiracy theorists who can’t be dissuaded by science or evidence or facts." Let him who's without sin cast the first stone, Dan: the born-gay science doesn't hold up, and has been refuted (often by gay scientists) many times. (In fact the whole nurture/nature divide is invalid, but that's another big topic in itself.) "Choice" is not the opposite of "born this way," and science has nothing to say about choice: it can't prove that anything is or is not a choice.

Granted, people do get worked up over differences of opinion and matters of fact, but you can usually find reasons why they're doing it. Many people are offended by evolutionary theory because they think it means they were descended from monkeys, and while I consider them foolish, I understand some of the deep-rooted feelings that such a scenario invokes. Many other people are offended by those who reject evolutionary theory; they seem to take the rejection personally, and while I consider them foolish, I also understand their feelings. And so on.

I suppose Savage would say that he's so enraged because of the destructive consequences of antigay bigotry. But Savage doesn't feel that way about the destructive consequences of US foreign policy in the Middle East, for example: if our support for dictators made many Muslims "irrational" and commit acts of "terror," then the US has an obligation to invade, kill a few (or many) thousands more, and make things right in some vague fashion. Another invasion will make them rational and peaceably inclined towards America, just as 9/11 made Americans rational and peaceably inclined toward Muslims. Or if it doesn't make them peaceably inclined toward America, at least the violence and oppression we visit on them will convince them not to fuck with us, as it did before 9/11. No, rationality is not one of Dan Savage's strong points.

So what's going on in this case? As I've indicated, I suspect that many gay people still feel very bad about being gay, and can only make peace with their bad feelings by thinking of homosexuality as something that was forced on them by their genes, that they can't help, something that they'd reject if they could, and that they would never have chosen. For men especially I believe that this is connected to the stigma of being a faggot, with all its degrading associations.

Savage fastened onto his target's argument to "a radio interviewer that gay people shouldn’t be covered by the [British Columbia] Human Rights Act because being gay is 'a conscious choice.'" Why counter his falsehood with another falsehood (that is, that we didn't choose to be gay, our genes made us do it)? In the first place, no one ever doubted that women and "racial" minorities are born that way, but it didn't shield them from discrimination; the same lousy science that is used to claim that homosexuality is inborn was also used to claim that women and "racial" minorities were incapable of functioning as full citizens. In the second place, why not point out that the BC Human Rights Act also forbids discrimination based on religion, which is surely a conscious choice? To say nothing of marital status, political belief, lawful source of income, criminal or summary convictions, and other conditions that are either chosen or the result of choice. If the law protects someone who consciously chose to become a Christian, why shouldn't it protect someone who chose to become gay?

I think this is a stronger argument. I don't know how effective it would be in affecting people's opinions, since bigotry is not based (as some people seem to believe) on mistaken assumptions: the mistaken assumptions are based on the bigotry. But I think it should be tried, if only because it happens to be true.

Majority Rules!

I stumbled on this today while looking for something else. The Advocate ran a review of Edward Stein's The Mismeasure of Desire (Oxford, 1999) in February 2000, and ran two letters commenting on the review a month later. It was the second one that caught my attention. It read:

Stein's theory that gay sexual orientation is probably not biologically determined is not supported by most gays. A 1995 poll of Advocate readers revealed that three quarters of the respondents are convinced that their sexual orientation is indeed determined by genetics. Who is Stein to say these lesbians and gay men do not know the reality of their own existence?

Three quarters of Americans believe that they are above average, but that doesn't mean they are. According to this site, 69 percent of American men believe that they are physically fit, while only 13 actually are. For that matter, six out of ten Americans reject Darwin's theory of evolution; who am I to say that these people do not know the reality of their own existence? (No monkey ancestors for them!)

No amount of introspection can tell you that anything about you is "determined by genetics." That's something that can only be settled by research into genes and what they do. At present, it is pretty clear that homosexuality is not determined by our genes; if there is any genetic influence at all, no one knows what it is. But whatever may eventually be discovered, it won't be settled by opinion polling.

I Was a Teenage Closet Case

Another good bit from Alan Sinfield's Cultural Politics - Queer Reading on gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay:

The drawback is illustrated in an exchange between LeVay and his father -- who is entirely persuaded by his son's work. So how does LeVay senior see gay men now? He says he regards Simon as he would a child born with spina bifida, a hare lip, or some other developmental deficit. LeVay finds this "pretty humiliating" -- though I don't see why he should, since it is a logical consequence of his theory. Indeed, the attraction of stigmatization is depressingly apparent; people with spina bifida may well feel their civil rights are violated when they are appropriated as the awful other by LeVay, senior and junior [70].

The exchange between the LeVays comes from a documentary, Born That Way?, which I haven't been able to track down. As Sinfield says, his father's attitude is perfectly reasonable. All that you establish if you prove that homosexuality is inborn is that homosexuals are not morally responsible for our condition: you haven't begun to touch the question of its moral status. And even that is doubtful, since human beings have so often managed to pass moral judgment on inborn conditions. Dark skin, for example, like other "racial" markers, has been read as the visible mark -- the stigma -- of inner wickedness. Most adults, at least, who throw around the word "retarded" as an insult are aware that mental retardation is a congenital condition, not a moral choice, but that knowledge hasn't had any evident effect on the word's popularity among our culturally-sensitive elites. For that matter, the word "sick" itself is commonly used as a moral cussword: just imagine someone spitting it out with ripe disgust.

LeVay, like many born-gay advocates, thinks that if homosexuality is somehow caused by the environment, if it's an acquired rather than an inborn condition, then it can be reversed by therapy. For born-gay advocates, the failure of change therapy is itself evidence, indeed proof, that homosexuality must be inborn. That doesn't follow either: psychiatry has a very poor track record in most cases. And even religious conversion is notoriously hard to undo, though it's a choice if anything is.

Also assumed is that if we can be changed, we must be changed, partly because who would reject the chance to be normal, to be spared the misery and persecution of gay life? I feel a terrible sadness when gay people talk like this. I don't feel that I'm missing out on anything by not being heterosexual, anymore than I feel I'm missing out by being an atheist. Maybe Homo-Americans don't really believe that desiring their own sex is being stuck with second-best -- which doesn't even make sense, when you think about it, since it would mean that heterosexuality was also settling for second-best. (If men are second-best, then straight women are stuck with second-best, and should turn to other women -- but wait! then they'd be lesbians, and stuck with second-best, just like straight men are, so they should turn to other men, but wait!...)

Even when I was a teenage closet case, gulled by heterosexual-supremacist propaganda, I knew that other males were what I wanted; and a crucial turning point in my coming out was the day I realized (admitted to myself?) that if I never got to touch a woman's body intimately, I wouldn't feel I'd missed anything, but if I never got to touch a man, I'd be haunted by the loss forever. The next crucial turning point was when it dawned on me that there was no reason why I shouldn't want to touch a man's body, and why I shouldn't do so if I could find a man who wanted me to touch him. The reason I'm gay is that the beauty of men takes my breath away -- not all men, but many men. Since the "science" of "sexual orientation" doesn't address that fact, which may be just as well (it's actually a mechanical theory of insertors and receptors), it's simply irrelevant.

I Don't Know How You Were Inverted

But back to Thomas Serwatka's Queer Questions, Clear Answers, as I promised. I read it all the way through, though I admit to skimming at times. I had to keep reminding myself that although most of what Serwatka writes is familiar to me, it won't be familiar to some (most?) of his other readers, who may not have read a book on this subject before. But that makes Serwatka's errors and misrepresentations all the more harmful.

As you'd expect in a book like this, Serwatka devotes quite a bit of space to the question of cause: why are some people drawn erotically to persons of their own sex, and others not? It's a very popular question among both straights and gays nowadays, and it might be worth mentioning that it wasn't always. During the 1970s, in the circles I moved in, it wasn't on our radar. The dominant theory at the time was the psychiatric absent-father / dominant mother theory of the neo-Freudians, and I already knew that it was largely discredited even before the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was not (no longer?) a disorder. (They didn't address the question of cause, however.) Alfred Kinsey was the scientific figure who loomed large for us then, and he hadn't concerned himself with causes.

Still, we weren't the only homosexuals in the world, and what didn't matter to us mattered to others. It must have been during my first year at IU, working in a branch university library, that I found a clipping that quoted a gay or pro-gay minister to the effect that homosexuals are born homosexual. That startled me, because I knew about the 19th century third-sex theories about the (male) homosexual as the soul of a woman in the body of a man, but I thought that those theories had also been discredited. The clipping was brief and didn't point to any support for the claim. Still, that was the last I heard of the "born-this-way" theory for several years. It made its big comeback in the 1990s, with the work of Simon LeVay, Dean Hamer, and Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard. I associate it with the Gay Rights Movement (as opposed to Gay Liberation) and the gay churches, where it's a pillar of their position, though there are plenty of apolitical and non-religious gays who agree with it. As Serwatka's exposition shows, it's also associated with the professional / therapeutic wing of gay male life.

Serwatka sums up the controversy as follows, in terms of a "summer flick":

There is a band of nomadic queer theorists ("you can't oppress me through your manmade heterosexist labels") shooting flaming arrows at the Brotherhood of Gay Essentialist [sic] (the "it's biology" group), while a clan of lesbian deconstructionists ("I will not be confined by society's expectations; I am free to create new categories") are hurling spears everywhere, tragically and unintentionally wounding a butch dyke ("I am what I am"). To make the battle even more chaotic, we add in bands of marauding conservative Jews, Christians, and Muslims ("It's a sin against Yahweh or the Trinity or Allah") railing against each other and everyone else on the field, including the moderately religious who are praying for peace and consensus as well as everyone's soul [34].

I've already mentioned Serwatka's "hearty, preacher's chalk-talk style," and I bet you can guess which group represents Serwatka in this scenario!* Not to belabor an already overdone caricature, the queer theorists I'm aware of are not "nomadic" but well-ensconced in the Master's House (Queer Theory arose in the academy); the Brotherhood of Gay Essentialists works in university counseling departments as well as freelancing as therapists, and plays in the Radical Faerie movement (a reminder that Essentialists can be assimilationist and anti-assimilationist). The same is true of lesbians: surely some "butch dykes" are also deconstructionists. And of course no conservative Jew would ever pronounce the name of Yahweh, and I've never heard any Christian call homosexuality a sin against the Trinity. Someone got a little carried away with his rhetoric here, and things never get much better.

Instead of traveling the earth looking for pages from an ancient text, our scientists are studying ancient and contemporary civilizations, using technologies to decipher parts of the human genome, and employing a host of research models to discover the secrets of our origins written into the earth's past and into our cells. And their hard work is yielding results, albeit still preliminary results. And all of this is going on while we are subjected to a cacophony of differing voices, each vying to win the public relations war over how sexual orientation should be viewed and "handled" in the culture [34-5].

That's right, those results are "preliminary," but they are publicized as if they were final, and many gay people point to them as though they had settled the question for once and all, and only irrational anti-scientific Christians could reject them. (It seems to me that a prudent gay movement wouldn't want to hitch its wagon to merely "preliminary" results that might be demolished later -- and, in fact, have been.) As I pointed at the end of my previous post on this book, the gay and lesbian scientists who have criticized the born-gay research are absent from Serwatka's tale. They do so, not because they are nomadic queer theorists, but because they are scientists criticizing other scientists' flawed work. But acknowledging that would complicate the simple good guys / bad guys story Serwatka wants to tell.

It's easier for Serwatka to focus on another group:

In the 1990s, queer theorists told us that there were no homosexuals; at least there were none until we labeled them as such in the 1890s. Strongly influenced by philosopher Michel Foucault, lesbian feminism, and the social constructionist movement, queer theory proposed that before we created the label there were no homosexuals; all we had were people who engaged in different forms of same-sex behaviors. In some societies these behaviors were condemned and punished; in some societies these behaviors were accepted and even honored. But in both sets of societies, the actions didn't define the person. People weren't divided into homosexuals and heterosexuals or into homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals. They were just people who did or did not engage in specific behaviors [49-50].

Now, I have my own disagreements with queer theorists and social constructionists (is "movement" the right word for them, though?) and many of them get things as wrong as Serwatka does: in general, their tendency to treat Foucault's writings as a kind of scripture, to be harvested for prooftexts rather than as a goad to further thought of their own; their confusion of terminology with the reality to which it refers; their misuse of the social constructionist model to draw invidious distinctions between the present and the past, or between "The West" and other cultures; or confusing social construction with cultural determinism, the belief that human beings are blank slates on which their culture writes. In particular, I should point out that social constructionism has nothing to say about the cause question. No one, as far as I know, doubts that the anatomical signs of "race" (skin color, eye color, hair texture, etc.) have biological roots, but there is a large literature on the social construction of race. In the US, for example, a white woman can give birth to a black child, but a black woman can't give birth to a white one; but in other countries it can be the other way around. So even if it were proven -- and it hasn't been -- that homosexuality is genetically determined, that would not prove that it isn't socially constructed.

What bothered me first about Serwatka's discussion is that he kept using the term "sexual orientation" as if he knew what a sexual orientation is, and especially as if he knew that it is some kind of biological mechanism in our body that directs us to male or female erotic partners. This is just what no one knows. "Orientation" doesn't necessarily imply an inherent, unchangeable state; the compass-point orientation of a building, though it can be difficult to change after it is completed, is a choice, decided by its planners. The orientation of a parked car can be changed much more easily, as can my own spatial orientation as I write this. I wasn't born facing north, but even if I was, that doesn't doom me to face north forever, and I have faced in many different directions during my lifetime. It's true, when people speak of "sexual orientation" they're not thinking of such examples, but they're usually assuming what they need to prove: that "sexual orientation" is inborn and unchangeable. I've encountered numerous people who argue the point in circles: it's an orientation because it's inborn, and we know it's inborn because it's an orientation, and orientations are inborn ... I think that's what Thomas Serwatka is doing, though he may not be aware of it.

Still, Serwatka knows he needs some evidence, so he points to the past two decades' worth of research on the origin of sexual orientation. Numerous scientists and other critics, some of them gay or lesbian, have pointed to the flaws in this research, which has led to severe qualification of the born-gay advocates' claims, though they usually revert to certainty as soon as the critics have left the room. From triumphant cries of "We now know we're born gay!" they had to retreat to, "Well, at least we know there's a genetic predisposition to be gay," and Serwatka's own grudging "Is lifelong homosexuality biological? Yes, at least in part. How much of the biology is genetics and how much is hormonal is still to be determined, but there is definitely a genetic component, and most likely, both play a role" (65).

(Those interested in the question should look at Anne Fausto-Sterling's Myths of Gender [Harper, 1992]; Edward Stein's The Mismeasure of Desire [Oxford, 1999]; Roger Lancaster's The Trouble with Nature [California, 2003]; and now Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Difference [Harvard, 2010]. Evelyn Fox Keller's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture [Duke, 2010] does a good job of showing what is wrong with the whole nature vs. nurture debate; it's a short book though admittedly fairly technical. But if I could get through all these, surely my readers can!)

But even Serwatka's even-handed conclusion is wrong. The fact that he declines to consider scientific (as opposed to queer-theoretical) objections to the research he describes doesn't help. He likes the research on "finger-length ratio" so much, for example, that he gives it a text box of its own:

One of the physical traits that has been linked to difference in sexual orientation among women is finger-length ratio for the index (D2) and ring (D4) fingers. When D2 and D4 are similar in length, it is more likely that a woman will be heterosexual, whereas homosexual women's index fingers tend to be shorter than their ring fingers, as are men's. Studying this phenomenon, Lynn Hall and Craig Love ... found that when monozygotic twins were discordant for sexual orientation, the heterosexual and the homosexual twin would have different finger-length ratios, with the heterosexual sister having little to no difference in the length of the two fingers, their finger-length ratios were also concordant [60].

Serwatka couldn't have read Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's new book Brain Storm, which has just been published, but she surveys research that he could have examined:

There have been seven studies comparing 2D:4D in gay and straight men, and the findings are all over the map. Three studies find higher (feminized) ratios in gay men ..., but two other studies found gay men to have lower (hypermasculinized) ratios ... and two found no difference in digit ratios between gay and straight men. ... Among women, two studies have found lesbians to have "masculinized" digit ratios ... , but one small study ... and the two largest studies ... found no difference compared with heterosexual women. Only one study has reported a link between 2D:4D and gender identity, and this found a "feminized" pattern in male-to-female transsexuals, but no difference between female-to-male transsexuals and other genetic females. ... In sum, if there is any link between digit ratio and sexual orientation or gender identity, it appears to be very small, and to be limited to (genetic) men. The evidence is similarly mixed for other indicators [101; italics in original].

To be fair, Jordan-Young doesn't discuss Hall and Love's study (though she cites a 2000 paper by Hall elsewhere), but judging by the rest of the research, it probably doesn't matter because the link between sexual orientation and finger length is so tenuous. Serwatka also declares that Simon LeVay's claims about homosexuality and the brain have been supported by "Animal studies comparing rams who displayed same-sex and opposite-sex attraction [!] found similar patterns in hypothalamic development in heterosexual and homosexual rams" (61). That's intriguing, but it's a big jump from rams to human beings. (What is a "homosexual ram," anyway? Does he adore Lady Gaga?  Does he make a perfect cocktail?  Does he dress up as a ewe now and then?)

But all of this really misses the point. As I've pointed out before, the contemporary research on the origins of sexual orientation is not about sexual orientation (or even sexual behavior) at all, but about gendered behavior and roles. It is based on the assumption that there is really only one "sexual orientation," namely heterosexuality. What seems to be a homosexual man is really a man with a little woman hidden in his brain, who is attracted to people with little men hidden in their brains. This is shown by the way these researchers jump to the conclusion, without any evidence, that "feminization" of males, either through brain fibers or hormones, equals male homosexuality; but they don't even ask who is having sex with those feminized males.

There is a great deal of folklore among gay men and lesbians which makes the same assumption: many gay men around the world are repulsed by the idea of having sex with other gay men, and liken the very idea to "lesbianism" or even "cannibalism." And who knows? They might be right. The point is that if they are right, then the educated and supposedly science-informed discourse about sexual orientation is wrong. Sexual orientation is not, as the American Psychological Association defines it,

... an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).

Nope; sexual orientation is really the desire some men have to stick their rear ends in the faces of other men, in hopes of being mounted by them; or the desire some women have to mount other women. Far from being "easily distinguished from other components of sexuality", in reality it is inseparable from them. In which case the whole public-relations project of the mainstream gay movement to distance us from "stereotypical" (that is, gender-nonconformist) queers who present themselves as the opposite sex is radically misconceived: we should rather embrace our inner drag queens/kings. At the very least, the mainstream gay movement will have to grapple with this problem a lot better than it has up till now.

The question of the cause of sexual orientation is a red herring, though, that has distracted gay people and our movement for too long now. Especially since, given the current state of the research, we cannot honestly claim that we were born gay. In the first place, it is false that there's an opposition between "biology" and "choice." As I've pointed out before, contemporary science and much philosophy take the position that there is no such thing as choice in human beings, but this leads to hopeless contradictions. Leaning on biological determinism not only deprives gay people of our choices, but our opponents as well: they are hostile to us, not because they are wicked, but because it's in their nature. And that leaves us nowhere.

Even if there were much better evidence that homosexuality was caused by our genes or hormones, it wouldn't settle the dispute we're engaged in. Inborn conditions aren't necessarily good: we don't think that people born with genetic conditions like sickle-cell anemia should be left to suffer because Mother Nature made them that way and She doesn't make trash. Genetic determinism has been used (and still is) to deny the humanity and limit the options of people with differing skin color, or differing reproductive organs. The Civil Rights movement didn't argue that it was wrong to discriminate against the Negro because Negritude was in his genes; nor did the women's movement take such a line. Nor did the US Supreme Court overturn state laws against "interracial" marriage in 1967 because Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving suffered from (or boasted) a genetic condition that forced them to marry someone of a different race -- it affirmed that people have the right to choose their partners.

We need to start challenging our opponents about it: If being gay is a choice, so what? But many gay people don't want to, because they believe they can only defend their sexual orientation if it's something they are stuck with, one of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I once asked another speaker on a GLB panel what he would do if it were proven, scientifically and unquestionably, that he had chosen to be gay. He thought for a moment, then said that in that case, some psychiatrist would make a lot of money helping him undo that choice. I was stunned, not least because earlier he had been talking about how he'd helped younger gay kids come out and feel good about being gay; yet he himself clearly felt quite bad about it. He was also wrong in assuming that all choices can be reversed. This doesn't mean he is a bad person; it does show how deeply miserable and wrong many of us have been made to feel about ourselves, our desires, and our loves. "Would someone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated, persecuted, and called a sinner?" -- it's amazing how many of us and our allies think that rhetorical question constitutes a defense. It's not. It's almost an altar call, the kind of cry one makes just before throwing one's sinful self into the arms of the Lord. And I'd be the last person to tell such gay people that they're wrong to hate themselves and to despise and dishonor their loves, but their attitude is not a great foundation on which to build a movement.

I haven't worked out myself how best to realize a position of proud choice for the gay movement. It would need to be done gradually, in response to the way our enemies try to exploit it. But it would start with the declaration that if homosexuality is a choice, so is heterosexuality, so is Christianity (whether pro- or antigay), and a fortiori being antigay is a choice. And go from there.

More on Queer Questions, Clear Answers later.

*You peeked. Serwatka is presumably one of "the moderately religious who are praying for peace and consensus as well as everyone's soul." Evidently those "moderately religious" are working through the state universities to further their theological agenda.