Amar B Shrestha

Kathmandu:

Whether homosexuality is a deviation of normal behaviour or borne out of natural instinct has been debated for some time. The question, ‘Is there a gay gene?’ if answered conclusively, would put the issue to rest and then would certainly begin another, and more cantankerous, debate about new legislation regarding homosexuality. However, if unanswered, as seems to be the possibility taking into account the fierce criticism to the pioneering (but supposedly, falsified) work of Dr Hamer and his team at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), USA, published in the American journal ‘Science’, in July, 1993 and titled, “A Linkage Between DNA Markers on the X Chromosome and Male Sexual Orientation.” Hamer reported that the linkage translated to a “99.5 per cent certainty that there is a gene (or genes) in this area of the X chromosome that predisposes a male to become a heterosexual”. These findings were reported by the Wall Street Journal under the heading, “Research points towards a gay gene” but the New York Times added that other researchers warned against overinterpreting the work. Newsweek added to the furore by its “Gay Gene?” cover report. However, it was actually in 1991, that Simon Le Vay, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, found slight differences in the post-mortem brains of heterosexual and homosexual men. A cluster of neurons was reduced in size in homosexual men, much to the same degree that the same group of neurons is reduced in women. This region of the hypothalamus was commonly thought to influence male-typical sexual behavior.

There was a strong lobby against the idea that homosexuality was a normal variation in humankind. But psychologist Chandler Burr stated a more liberal view, “Ever since homosexuality became an issue in the United States 30 years ago or so, there have been three competing positions on it: (a) Homosexuality is a chosen “lifestyle,” (b) Homosexuality is a disease, (c) Homosexuality is a biological orientation. Chandler compares inherited sexual orientation to handedness, which is also genetically defined and states that 92 per cent of the population has the majority orientation of right-handedness, 80 per cent has left handed orientation. Similarly, heterosexuality accounts for roughly 95 per cent while homosexuality accounts for 5 per cent. Chandler further confided, “The NIH team is now in the process of pinpointing the gene itself, which has already been registered by the name Gay 1.” But Jeffrey B Satinover, MD, in his “The Gay Gene”, blamed media hype for influencing public opinion to believe that the “gay gene” existed. About a National Public Radio debate on “gay genes,” he pointed out that at the end of the debate, “certain necessary caveats were fleetingly added. But that the research actually showed nothing whatever in the way of what was being discussed.” He disputed the methods and conclusions of both Le Vay’s and Hamer’s works. Satinover made efforts to simplify matters by concluding:

(a)All the research was selectively trumpeted through the press. The research itself means almost nothing.

(b)The research projects that would truly mean something are scarcely being done because they would all lead to one conclusion: homosexuality per se is not inherited.

(c)Most of the research has been hastily and often sloppily done.

(d) To whatever extent this research has been good enough to generate valid conclusions at all, these conclusions are precisely the opposite of what is claimed in the press.

Little progress has been made after the initial findings. Some studies are in progress as evidenced by requests for volunteer ‘Gay and Lesbian identical twins (18 and older) needed for an anthropological study” by the Temple University Department of Anthropology, USA, and by National Institute of Mental Health calling for “Volunteers for NIH Genetic Study of Sexual Orientation. Gay men with one or more gay brothers and their families are invited to participate.”

“In the end, I suspect that objective studies of homosexuality will not be fully possible until the ideological war is over. Until then, scepticism is the name of the game.” (Kevyn Jacobs, Kansas State Collegian, April 3, 1995). And, “even if a gay gene were found, this would not grant homosexuality morally and socially acceptable. Racism has not diminished because we know that blackness or whiteness is genetic. Sexism exists even though we know that sex is genetic.” Since finding a gay gene will neither make homosexuality morally or socially acceptable, it is clearly the wrong place to be looking at. A reputed professor comments, “A team of Swedish scientists scanned people’s brains as they smelled a testosterone derivative found in men’s sweat and an oestrogen-like compound found in women’s urine. In heterosexual men, a part of the hypothalamus responded to the female compound but not the male one; in heterosexual women and homosexual men, it was the other way around.”