Is there a gay gene?

Submitted by Anon on 13 January, 1998 - 12:46

Is there a ‘gay gene’? Does it matter? Evidence has been building that there is a genetic basis, on some level, to sexual orientation. Chandler Burr’s well-researched, readable book* goes through this evidence in detail, and looks with commendable fair-mindedness at both sides of the debate.

At root, the questions raised by research into sexual orientation are about the world in which we are starting to live — a world of ever-increasing genetic knowledge and capacity for genetic engineering. Scientists constantly make bigger and bigger claims for what genetics can or soon will tell us about our lives (and deaths). These are not only interesting issues, they are essential ones for socialists to confront.

There are three main pieces of research which, allegedly, show genetic differences between homosexual and heterosexual men (little has been done on lesbians).
Simon LeVay’s 1991 study claimed that a part of the brain, the hypothalamus, includes a section which is different (smaller) in gay men than in straight men. The part in question is called the INAH-3, a tiny cluster of cells thought to have something to do with gender differentiation.

A couple of years later Dean Hamer and Angela Pattatucci claimed to have found the ‘gay gene’ (or rather the genetic marker for homosexuality in males) — which is Xq28, which means it is inherited through the X chromosome, therefore from your mother.
From Burr’s account, the Hamer/Pattatucci research sounds more convincing, if only because LeVay’s was carried out on the brains of dead people, whose sexuality, one assumes, would be hard to confirm (it has been contested on this basis, along with others: the people died of AIDS, so all manner of things might account for a smaller INAH-3).

Collecting information by interview from 114 families, Hamer and his team eventually found evidence that there was a genetic correspondence for sexual orientation, and that it was passed down on the maternal side. This led them to look at the X chromosome, and eventually find the gene they think is in some way responsible, at least in many cases.
Another study, published shortly after LeVay’s in 1991, contains the most compelling evidence of all. Bailey and Pillard researched groups of brothers — fifty six monozygotic twins (identical and from a single egg), fifty-four dizygotic (non-identical) twins, and fifty seven non-genetically related adopted brothers. 52% of the monozygotic twins were both homosexual — far above the average (11% for the adopted brothers). Identical twins are five times as likely as adopted brothers brought up by the same parents to both be gay.

Later, Bailey and Pillard, who are psychologists, did a similar study of lesbians, and got more or less the same results.(1)

Burr outlines many of the reservations scientists have about these claims — including among those who are championing them. Neither LeVay’s hypothalamus clusters nor Hamer’s Xq28 are claimed to be uniquely responsible for homosexuality. Indeed one of the strengths of Burr’s book is that he explains clearly how certain things don’t mean for scientists what they mean for the media. He quotes Angela Pattatucci: “We can all be taken to task for not making the disclaimer that we in no way are attempting to reduce an individual’s experience to a molecule... We’re trying to ask how a molecule contributes to a person’s experience.” (p384).

As well as these main areas of research, Burr recounts a large number of theories (including one, ‘off the record’, that homosexuality might be a bacterial infection), dealing especially with hormones.

For example, apparently women are the ‘default’ sex. To become male, a foetus with XY chromosomes needs not only testosterone to masculinise, but something else, called MIH (Mullerian Inhibiting Hormone), to ‘defeminise’. Without this extra hormone, even with both X and Y chromosomes and a healthy dose of testosterone, a foetus will grow into a human being which looks, at least externally, female. Some theorists have had a high old time with this fact (although, as one of them notes, if it helps explain anything it’s more likely transsexualism than homosexuality).

The same is true of many of the other interesting experiments which have been done with, for example, rats. Fiddling around with rat hormones can make male rats behave, sexually, like females (i.e. offer themselves to be mounted). The same sort of thing has been observed in fruit flies.

Burr quotes scientists dismissing this stuff, largely on the grounds that hormonal reactions are so widely different even between closely related species that conclusions for human beings are impossible to reach. This is an important point, but rather less so, I feel, than noting that gay human sexuality is not even vaguely similar to a rat offering its anus to any old male who enters its cage.

There are other interesting case studies from nature, again more to do with gender than sexual orientation. One species of wasp has no males. The females of one kind of hyena have penises, or what look like penises.

There are objections — discussed in the book — to doing this research at all, which I will turn to later. What are the objections to the findings themselves?
Burr relates a number of the scientific-methodological ones (some scientists dispute the existence of an INAH-3, never mind LeVay’s claims). But ultimately, all objections come down to political and conceptual ones. Burr does his best, but plainly doesn’t understand these objections enough to do them justice.

We know from a huge amount of sociological, anthropological and psychological research that sexual behaviour is vastly more complex than the labels ‘homosexual,’ ‘heterosexual’ or ‘bisexual’ would allow, and that notions of human sexuality vary enormously across cultures and periods of history. The question ‘Do you regard yourself as homosexual?’ (which is the kind of question Hamer and Pattatucci asked) would be meaningless to most people in most societies in most periods of world history. The concept of homosexuality — or certainly of ‘a homosexual’ as a type of person, rather than a type of sexual behaviour — is very recent and confined, basically, to advanced or relatively advanced capitalist societies, and ‘advanced’ Stalinism.

Pattatucci in particular is not insensitive to this issue. She doesn’t confront it directly, but she and Hamer et al offer two theoretical suggestions which address it indirectly. One is to distinguish between ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘sexuality’. The other is to insist that sexual orientation is a kind of real essence (my phrase, not theirs) underlying this or that sexual behaviour. (It is worth noting in this context that Hamer et al consider genuine bisexuals to be extremely rare, contrary to most research since Kinsey).

‘Sexuality’, they agree, is immensely complex, and not reducible to any gene or group of genes (or unlikely to be), because sexuality is about the precise details of whom we desire, what we like to do, etc etc. ‘Sexual orientation’, however, is quite simple and is just about whether we find men or women sexually, and therefore romantically, attractive. This they can look for a gene for.(2)

And this ‘sexual orientation’ is deeper than mere sexual behaviour (especially in men, they think). A person might have only heterosexual experiences for his or her entire life, yet know deep down that they are not heterosexual. Changing patterns of sexual behaviour have no impact on fundamental orientation.

The anthropology and so on I have mentioned seems to suggest this ‘essentialist’ (for want of a better word) account of sexual orientation is false. To take only the most obvious and well-known example, the ancient Greeks appear to have had different ideas about sexual orientation to us (as I understand it there were considerable differences between city states: Thebes and Sparta had a lot of what we would call homosexuality, i.e. between adult men; in Athens it was older men and pubescent boys, what we would call paedophilia).

Other societies suggest that where ‘homosexuality’ is not (or is less) stigmatised, there is a lot more open bisexual activity.

If there is hetero- or homo-sexual essence beneath this appearance, it is impossible to measure. It remains, whatever circumstantial evidence, not much more than an assertion which falls very far short of being proven.

The Hamer/Pattatucci evidence that few men are bisexual is based entirely on how men answer their questions. Many of us know from personal experience how unreliable heterosexual men’s fervent denial of any homoerotic feelings can be. It’s like the joke: What’s the difference between a straight man and a bisexual? About four pints of lager.
On the other hand... I can remember directly facing the fact that I might be ‘one of those homosexuals’ when I was eleven, and by then had already had sexual experiences with boys, and knew I preferred boys to girls. The idea that I have an essential homosexuality to some degree fits with my experience. Certainly, it’s hard to see how accepting I was gay was in any real sense ‘forcing myself’ into a category. Many gay men who have had sex with women do not claim the experience was bad in any way — it might even have been pretty fantastic, but it doesn’t change the fact they’re homosexual; vice versa for some lesbians. ‘Bisexuality’ does not properly describe their experience (which is not to say it can’t describe some people’s experience). So the argument that behaviour is not equal to orientation has some legs to it.

You could go further. Just because societies have no concept of homosexuality doesn’t mean there aren’t homosexuals-in-waiting, so to speak. Sexuality isn’t all ‘discourse’, all culturally-specific.

Arab societies, for example, have as yet very little of a Western concept of homosexuality, yet homosexual behaviour is very common. You can read this as proof of the cultural specificity of the Western concept of homosexuality. But as capitalism develops, perhaps it will bring with it precisely that Western concept (as it has everywhere else), because there are thousands of people in Arab societies who currently lack a concept to describe them. They don’t suddenly spring into existence once a word has been invented; they were there all along. In this perspective, what capitalism has done is partially liberate people we now call homosexual by identifying them, and creating a space for a cultural phenomenon. And if ‘homosexuals’ are a real phenomenon, not just some discourse or other, a materialist account of them might at least include biology. Then, on the other hand...

There are certainly issues here which are not merely empirical, scientific ones. They are conceptual. It seems to me that even if there can meaningfully be said to be some ‘essential’ sexual orientation in each of us, the research described in Burr’s book is conceptually dodgy. The researchers take too much for granted, ask too few questions of their basic assumptions, base too much on the unproven assertion that an essential sexual orientation exists. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be intimidated by specialist scientists: their training might leave them insensitive to methodological considerations which are perfectly obvious to someone trained as, say, an anthropologist (or to a Marxist).

Nevertheless: if you concede that there could be some ‘essential’ sexual orientation in each of us, you are conceding the possibility of a genetic component to it.

Burr’s book is American, and so, interestingly, largely (not entirely) assumes that the enemies of the gay gene argument are reactionary, i.e., if such a gene exists it is an argument for equal rights. Basically, the argument runs that if it’s biological it’s natural, so homosexuals shouldn’t be discriminated against. Burr points out that this is misfounded: the gay gene logically threatens the liberal outlook and vindicates a conservative one. (It’s also, as a couple of his interviewees point out, based on a peculiar notion of ‘natural’ equals ‘good’: cancer is perfectly natural.)

Underlying the argument is a generalised genetic reductionism — genes for gender behaviour, intelligence, violence, and so on. (By ‘reductionism’ I mean an argument which thinks genetics provide a complete, finished explanation, that everything complex in life is straightforwardly accounted for by genes). The scientists he talks to think all these things (maybe not intelligence, but certainly violence) have identifiable genetic causes which are within our grasp to find — and, of course, alter.

Burr discusses the political objections to carrying out this research at all, quoting quite extensively scientists who oppose it. There are two big fears. One, that if there is a ‘gay gene’, foetuses could be tested for it and aborted. (Apparently, in America sections of the Right are suddenly implicitly pro-choice on abortion, at least on this question). The other is that in the future there could be ‘genetic surgery’ to make people straight.
Burr quotes one of LeVay’s assistants who chooses to remain anonymous. “I disagree with Simon that this work is good for gay people politically, and I think all of us working in this field have delusions of grandeur in thinking that we will have any control. If we find a gene linked to sexual orientation, there will be a test for it. That is a fact... [This] knowledge... can and will be abused.” (p389)

Burr clearly comes down on the other side of this debate, that knowledge is intrinsically good, and if we are always afraid of the consequences of knowledge we will never learn anything.

On one level he’s right, obviously. But disingenuous. It is naive to complain, as some critics have done, that nobody does research into the genetic origins of, say, liking ice-cream — sexual orientation is more important, and more interesting, than that. But scientific research has to be paid for, and the question of why do this research rather than that is not a spurious or intellectually-Luddite one. This kind of research is not motivated by the thirst for pure knowledge. One way or another it depends upon ideological choices (even if the choices are on the face of it honourable, as LeVay’s seem to have been).

One other thing needs to be said about the fears expressed towards the political implications of the ‘gay gene’, however, which is not said in this book. The idea that selective abortions or even genetic surgery would eliminate homosexuality is ridiculous. It sums up the poverty of genetic reductionism.(3)

But perhaps genetic reductionism is a soft target. Few if any of the scientists involved in this research claim genes will explain or determine everything. And at the end of the day, we can’t argue against genetic explanations of personality simply on the grounds that we don’t want them to be true. Geneticists are finding out more and more. Everybody accepts genetic accounts of physical characteristics, and left or right handedness (one of Burr’s favourite examples). Where do we draw the line? We can’t draw the line just by political sensibility.

Burr’s book, despite his efforts to the contrary, illustrates part of the problem here. After pages of explanation of what ‘genetic’ means and doesn’t mean, reassurance about what is and isn’t entailed by this or that scientific finding, the book gradually abandons its early even-handedness, and becomes more and more crudely reductionist. He starts off carefully delimiting what a ‘gay gene’ might be (including the observation that it might only secondarily affect sexual orientation), and ends up talking about genetic explanations as if they require no qualifications, have no limits. The effort to avoid reductionism disintegrates, and then collapses.

By the end of the book he is approvingly quoting Laurence Frank (the man who’s researched the weird hyenas): “Trying to deal with human behaviour... like criminality or domestic violence or aggressiveness or racism while pretending that evolutionary and biological reasons for them don’t exist is like attempting to cure a disease without dealing with bacteria and viruses.”

This is as straightforward a reductionist case as you could make. Viruses cause diseases. To suggest, as this does, that there is a genetic cause of criminality in an even slightly comparable sense is to abandon all qualification, all sense of complexity and mediation, and render talk about how little it really means to say something is ‘genetic’ (to which a whole chapter is devoted) so much soft-soaping.

‘Genetic’, therefore has what you might call a weak sense (stressed, in fact, by all the researchers into sexual orientation, as well as their critics, quoted in this book), and a strong sense. The strong sense is the frightening, reactionary reductionism expressed by Frank. In its weak — apparently, its accurate — sense, though, it need not entail such frightening conclusions. If you have the ‘gay gene’ (Xq28 — or whatever other genes later research might identify), it may only predispose you to homosexuality, given other, for example environmental factors. For example, I am diabetic. One of my parents’ families must have carried the genes which ‘made me’ diabetic. Something external appears to have ‘triggered’ the diabetes, however (it might have been a dose of Hep B). But neither of my parents, nor my sister are diabetic. It’s rather like the argument among Marxists about whether economics ‘determine’ or ‘condition’ politics.

Yet this makes the argument seem like a lot of fuss about nothing, and I think quite a lot more is at stake — more than Chandler Burr understands.

If an important factor in sexual orientation is genetic, this strongly suggests that most people are and always will be heterosexual. It suggests that sexuality is less fluid or varied or whatever than many of us like to think. For most of my politically awake adulthood I have believed that a significant part of the socialism I am fighting for includes a fundamental change in the ways people relate to each other erotically, the ‘liberation of human sexuality’, the transcendence of the limited categories ‘gay’ ‘straight’ etc. An implied proposition in this ‘programmatic’ idea is that most people who consider themselves exclusively heterosexual are wrong, and that it is just society which has fucked them up.

Linked to this — and to the argument about genetics — is the idea that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are culturally and hostorically constructed to a very high degree, and that in the socialist future men and women will behave differently in all sorts of ways.
The ‘gay gene’ if it exists, and all the other genes which might also therefore exist, could mean, logically or implicitly, that this is all a load of nonsense.

But think of groups of ‘lads’, pissed, say on holiday in a Club Med resort — you’ve seen them on TV if not in the flesh. They spend half their time pantomiming sex with each other. I would not wish to argue that they are all secretly gay. But that there is sublimated homoeroticism throughout their behaviour seems to me pretty incontestable. The way many men adapt to sex in all-male environments for long periods; or how in societies which severely oppress women homosexual behaviour among men can become quite normal (including emotional attachments, it’s not all alternative orifices) — all these so strongly suggest that more is involved than genes, and that there is a powerful and purely psychological dynamic to sexuality, that abandoning our aim of sexual liberation seems premature. This is just in reference to men. Hamer and Pattatucci acknowledge a greater fluidity in women’s sexuality, and this again suggests something more interesting than genetic predisposition is happening in people’s psychologcal make-up.

Burr is ignorant and abusive about psychoanalysis. But a broadly psychoanalytic, or at least Freudian-inspired, account of sexuality has, it seems to me, much to teach us. In particular, it might help us understand the neurotic fear many heterosexuals (especially men) seem to feel about homosexuality. It is very hard to believe that this fear (homophobia is, I think, the right term) is not to do with repressed homoerotic desire. The theory that queerbashers are repressed queers is as old as the hills; but it strikes me as basically right. Why else bash someone, if they do not represent something you fear in yourself? And queerbashing is only the most violent expression of homophobia.

An account of sexual orientation based purely, or mainly, on genetics would not — or anyway not very convincingly — explain homophobia. An explanation based on psychological processes stands a much better chance of it.(4)

Perhaps the way to think about all this is in terms of a theory of ‘personality’. Genetic reductionism seeks to explain everything biologically. How far can this go?
The differences between each person’s personality are infinite. How much could biology conceivably explain? Each of us has ambitions, aspirations — are these genetic? Take someone who decides to be an actor. Was it a burning ambition from their earliest memory, or did they realise relatively late that this is what they wanted to do? Are they any good at it? What type of actor are they, what style of acting appeals to them (‘method’, classical...?)

Maybe genes play a part in deciding the answers to these questions. It certainly seems to me relatively inoffensive to suggest that if an actor, for example, has talent, the raw material for this might be genetic. They may squander their talent; another actor might, with perseverance and training, give better performances, but there is a bedrock on which their skill is built.

In Peter Shaffer’s play (and Milos Forman’s film) Amadeus, the composer Salieri immediately recognises that Mozart is the genius he will never be. Is it possible to doubt that Mozart’s superiority over Salieri was both real and genetic?
If genes can explain that, why not — to the same degree, with the same qualifications — sexual orientation?

I hope genes have nothing to do with sexuality, because I hope people prove to be more interesting than that. Maybe the research will prove beyond any reasonable doubt, and beyond whatever conceptual and methodological problems, that there is a genetic element to sexual orientation, in the same way as there might (if not must) be to other aspects of personality, like Mozart’s genius.

But it seems to me quite out of the question that it is genes and genes alone which explain sexual orientation. Whom we desire is, after all, not limited to observing which sexual organs they possess. Nobody finds all women, or all men, attractive, and usually there are particular ‘types’ we like. Do our genes determine — or even condition — whether we tend to go for blond(e)s or Mediterraneans, black or white people, older or younger, short or tall, fleshy or skinny...? These are aspects also of sexual orientation, if on the face of it less fundamental. Desire is a complex thing. It is not a matter of saying our ‘environment’ shapes our desire. But it’s hard to imagine that we were simply born with it.

1. I have my doubts about the logic of some of these results, but since I don’t even have physics O Level, I wouldn’t like to stake money on my doubts. For what it’s worth: for the LeVay theory to hold, surely logically it needs to be true not only that most gay men have smaller INAH-3s than straight men, but that most men with smaller INAH-3s are gay. This appears not to have been established at all. Similarly, the Bailey study, as described by Burr, seems to state not only that if you are gay and have a twin, that twin is more likely also to be gay if he (or she) is an identical twin, but that identical twins have a much higher chance of being gay than the rest of the population. I’m not sure that’s what it’s supposed to state, but that’s how Burr’s account of it reads (see fn4, below)

2. By looking for a gene the scientists already assume homosexuality is a genetically-determined or conditioned trait; otherwise there would be no point looking for it. Burr treats this as an example of how scientists and the media misunderstand each other: the media question Does This Prove Homosexuality Is Not A Choice? is meaningless to a geneticist. You might ask, though, if it isn’t making self-fulfilling prophecies.

3. It may be that the ability of people in same-sex environments to experience homoerotic arousal doesn’t mean they aren’t fundamentally either hetero- or homosexual. But it proves that homoerotic arousal is part of the range of individual sexual experience. Genetic engineering plainly can’t eliminate it on this level. And if not on this level, then surely, fundamentally, not at all. If homosexuality will always be a possible type of sexual expression, there are likely to be people who prefer it. The genetic-essentialist case would be convincing only if heterosexuals were incapable of homoerotic arousal.

4. The most compelling evidence, referred to above (about which Burr tells us a lot less), about monozygotic twins, is also the easiest to suggest an alternative explanation for. If I understand the research findings, an unusually high percentage of identical twins were both gay — 52%. A stab at a psychological explanation might have something to do with Narcissism. Certainly, it does not seem to me that psychological processes are irrelevant if we are discussing twins, or that the triumph of genetics is quite as resounding and unanswerable as it first looks.

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