Straight (13 page)

The history of biomedical research into sexual orientation suggests strongly that regardless of our lack of experience, we would do well to be very stingy and very skeptical with our trust. As a research paradigm, the search for biological markers of sexual orientation has yet to produce any sturdy positive results. Most of the results that have been produced in this search have been negative: given what we know so far, sexual orientation does
not
appear to be directly or causally connected to the physical body. The processes by which we have learned this have, however, not been benign.

In the early twentieth century, the newly discovered biochemicals called hormones and the endocrine glands that produced them were exciting new subjects for research. It was known that hormones, and particularly sex hormones, had a great influence on the body, and many doctors were experimenting with “glandular extracts,” sometimes taken from pigs and monkeys, as therapy for everything from impotence to aging. Austrian pathologist Eugen Steinach jumped aboard the hormone-therapy wagon with the contention that homosexuality was due to a sort of intersexual condition in which homosexuals had sex-hormone glands that were the “opposite” of what was biologically typical.

If Steinach had been correct about this, it would have been nothing short of revolutionary, because it would have meant that heterosexuality was created by a fairly straightforward organic mechanism. By extension, it would also suggest that homosexuality could be fairly simply converted into heterosexuality. Steinach and his followers tested their theory on humans, transplanting “normal-sexual” testicles into “invert” men. Clearly enamored of his own seductive theory, Steinach pronounced the procedures a success. Only later would he admit that the surgeries had been pointless, and that the transplants hadn't changed a thing.

This did not deter other researchers from pursuing the same line of research. Sex hormones can, after all, strongly influence and even alter patterns of sexual behavior in some, but not all, animals. Hormone therapy was a particularly popular line of inquiry during the Nazi regime, whose interest in eradicating homosexuality is well known. Danish physician Carl Vaernet, working for Heinrich Himmler,
conducted hormone-pellet implantation studies on homosexual men imprisoned at Buchenwald, hoping to transform them into heterosexuals. Like Steinach's surgeries, Vaernet's did not work, and for the same reason: there was nothing that his technique could fix. Hormonally speaking, men who desire men are no different from men who desire women. More importantly, human sexuality cannot be led by the hormonal nose. It is easy enough to make a male rat display female-typical mating behaviors by fiddling with its sex hormones, or a female rat display male-typical ones, but human sexuality, surprisingly enough, is more complex than a rat's. Not that it would necessarily tell us anything about the origins of homosexuality if one
could
substantially alter human sexual behavior via hormones. Just because a behavior can be compelled hormonally does not mean the same behavior might not exist for other reasons, without the hormonal trigger, as well.

Yet endocrinologists still have not stopped looking for a hormonal “inversion” explanation for homosexuality. The search has simply gotten narrower and more esoteric. Having gotten nowhere with adult hormone levels or gonad function, research now often focuses on potential links between prenatal hormone exposure and adult sexual orientation. Much of the physical and physiological sex differentiation that occurs when a fetus is developing happens as a result of its being exposed to hormones in the womb. Endocrinology researchers have postulated that homosexual men might become homosexual as a result of being exposed, as fetuses, either to particularly high levels of “female” hormones or else to conditions that compromise their bodies' ability to respond normally to “male” hormones. (In actuality there are no such things as “male” or “female” hormones. Hormones have no sex of their own, and all types of sex hormones are present in all human beings in varying amounts.) This hypothesis relies on the same old inversion paradigm: a gay male is gay because he is in some way(s) not male.

Anatomical research has similarly shrunk its scope and retreated into ever smaller and harder-to-see arenas. The currently popular body part in which to hunt for a biological token of gayness is the brain. Like endocrine research, brain research too has a grim history in terms of experimental “treatment” based on unproven scientific
conjecture. In the early 1970s, surgeons proceeding on the basis of theories espoused by leading German researcher Günter Dörner attempted to cure homosexuality in several men by burning out the alleged “sexual center” of the central hypothalamus. The surgeries caused severe personality disturbances, and were only halted because other leading researchers, like sexologist Volkmar Sigusch, publicly criticized their inhumanity. To the biomedical world's credit, such human experimentation is on the wane, but has not completely vanished.

There are many reasons that it can be difficult to trust, let alone defend, the ongoing search for a biology of sexual orientation. Perhaps the hardest pill to swallow, however, is that even if we did suddenly find ourselves with indisputable positive evidence of a link between the physical body and sexual orientation, it is likely that we would still lack the science to make sense of it. The leap from biology to behavior is a big one, and we simply do not know very much about how it works. If we found a “straight gene” tomorrow, we still wouldn't be able to explain how we get from the creation of specific proteins—which is all that DNA is capable of instructing the body to do—to a complicated, highly variable complex of behaviors like heterosexuality. At this stage, our science cannot even figure out what causes some people to be left-handed while others are right-handed, a much simpler characteristic than sexual orientation by far. Our hubris in thinking that we would be able to make sense of a physical telltale of sexual orientation if one were found is every bit as entrenched as our certainty that there must be such a thing as sexual orientation in the first place. This is, I submit, no coincidence.

LIFE SCIENCE

Why do researchers continue, despite so much negative evidence, to hunt for proof that sexual orientation has a material or physical component? For that matter, why do material and biological science continue to assert that heterosexuality and homosexuality are even subjects that are suited to being explored in material and bioscientific ways? One answer is
life.

The anthropic principle, one of science's foundational philosophical conceits, is the underlying theme that unifies the way science approaches heterosexuality and the subject of sexual orientation in general. In a nutshell, the anthropic principle maintains that since we
are alive and able to observe the natural universe, the natural universe must therefore be set up so that life can exist. This may seem to be just a casual tautology, but it also packs a strong hit of teleology: it implies that life is the purpose of the universe. If this is our starting point, in terms of studying the natural world, then whatever exists that does not appear to contribute directly to the existence or continuation of life requires some sort of explanation.

This plays out in science in any number of ways. We look, for example, for life-affirming rationales to justify the existence of things that seem hostile or dangerous. Nettles have stingers because it protects them from being eaten so they can live out their life cycles, forest fires help certain species of plants to propagate their seeds, and naturally occurring minerals that are lethal to us in quantity, like selenium or even common table salt, are also things our bodies require in tiny quantities or we become sick and die. In each case, we can find an anthropic rationale, and in each case we can reassure ourselves that these unpleasant and harmful things—nettle stings, forest fires, toxic minerals—are redeemed by having life-promoting qualities.

When Darwin's theories of natural and sexual selection exploded into the mid-nineteenth century, they intensified and lent justification to this feeling that life itself is, and indeed in a sense should be, the prime motivator behind nature's workings.
On The Origin of Species,
published in 1852, snapped the anthropic principle into a distinctively biological focus:

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection.[
17
]

At a stroke, any variance between one creature and its neighbor became
something that could spell success or failure in the all-important struggle. Darwin was careful to point out that evolution happened at the level of populations, not at the level of individuals, but the message the public took away was that individual traits and individual variation were directly, immediately responsible for the future of society.

Arriving at a time when Western culture was struggling hard with order and hierarchy, Darwinian ideas offered a psychological, emotional, and political compass with which to navigate the threateningly anarchic nineteenth century. Industrialism, urbanization, global expansion, and colonization all threatened to unseat the priorities of the status quo, and the rise of empirical science as an authority had undermined the notion of the Great Chain of Being. In its place, however, thinking men and women could place their trust in the anthropic principle and the Darwinian ascent of man: the goal of Creation was life, and the goal of life was to continually improve its survival and success.

In this brave new evolutionary world, anatomy, physiology, anthropology, and many other disciplines indulged in shameless social Darwinism. The darkest-skinned, least technological peoples were proposed as evolutionary “missing links.” African women's pelvises were compared, by anatomists, to those of gorillas and other apes.[
18
] Leading surgeon and early anthropologist Paul Broca not only claimed that black-skinned, wooly-haired people had never “spontaneously arrived at civilization” but warned that back home in the civilized world, women calling for more equal treatment should be carefully monitored, since disruption in the social order “necessarily induces a perturbation in the evolution of races.” [
19
] James Hunt, founder of the Anthropological Society of London, openly intended the work of his society to show “that human equality is one of the most unwarrantable assumptions ever invented by man.” Success in the Darwinian struggle, these authorities were quite clear, meant the bourgeois white Anglo-European status quo.

Heterosexuality was part of this status quo. Not only was it socially normative; it was biologically critical. Sexual activity between male and female partners is perhaps the easiest possible thing to explain by the lights of the anthropic principle. It has the potential to create life. This, in turn, is the process by which evolution is enabled,
and thus its importance is self-explanatory. It is no wonder that when a term came along that seemed to contain the whole dynamic process—“heterosexual”—it was accepted quickly, quietly, and completely. And it is even less of a wonder that, until very recently indeed, there seemed to be no reason to study the everyday couplings of men and women at all: their purpose was self-evident.

It was homosexuality, with its apparent disregard of the anthropic principle, that demanded scientific attention. How could it serve the continuance of life to have members of a species who are, as our culture asserts is true of homosexuals, generally disinclined to engage in potentially procreative sex? Even if we assume that homosexuals are the only humans who are inclined to engage in nonprocreative sex—a brash assumption!—this is a problematic question. Heterosexuality is not equal to conception; conception is not equal to life. Reproductively speaking, things fail to happen at least as often as they succeed. But the anthropic principle is powerful doxa and powerful dogma: life is
sacred.
Science, religion, and our own animal existence combine to encourage us to believe that life itself is its own raison d'être. Little wonder that we have customarily excused heterosexuality from its turn beneath the microscope.

The truth is that we still don't know whether “sexual orientation” and its subtypes can actually be said to exist from the perspective of science. As Wendell Ricketts wrote, “No one knows exactly why heterosexuals and homosexuals ought to be different, and the blatant tautology of the hypotheses appears to have escaped careful attention: heterosexuals and homosexuals are considered different because they can be divided into two groups on the basis of the belief that they can be divided into two groups.”[
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]

If we want to know why natural science has not told us more about heterosexuality, we need to ask whether natural science is actually capable of doing so. What scientific evidence we have been able to gather in regard to sexual orientation suggests that “heterosexual” and “homosexual” may simply not be qualities that exist in the realm of material phenomena occurring spontaneously in nature. This does not mean they don't exist. It just means that they may not exist as what are called “natural kinds,” the groups of things that equally and identically share particular physical attributes, and equally and identically
are affected by natural laws and are thus appropriate subjects for physical science: electrons, diamonds, quadrupeds, anaerobic bacteria, amputees.