Evolution's Rainbow by Roughgarden Joan

Author:Roughgarden, Joan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520280458
Publisher: University of California Press

THE HAMER-PATTATUCCI STUDY AND THE QUESTION OF A GAY GENE

A milestone in the genetic analysis of gayness in males came in 1993 with the publication of a paper in the respected magazine Science by a team including a senior out gay scientist, Dean Hamer, and a young out lesbian scientist, Angela Pattatucci.16 This work (hereafter referred to as HP) has since become quite controversial and must be considered carefully.

The paper confirmed yet again the tendency for gay men to cluster in families. The brother of a gay man had a 13.5 percent of being gay, whereas the brother of a straight man had only the baseline chance of being gay, which in this study was estimated at about 2 percent.

The researchers’ distribution of men into the categories of straight and gay was claimed to be nearly absolute—bisexuals were almost completely absent. HP concluded that “it was appropriate to treat sexual orientation as a dimorphic rather than as a continuously variable trait.” Although some other studies also report such a bimodal distribution (e.g., the 1986 and 1991 studies mentioned above), this claim has been seriously disputed.17 In most cultures, same-sex sexuality is intermixed with between-sex sexuality. One anthropological study tabulates same-sex sexual practices from twenty-one cultures, and in fifteen of these homosexual practice was concurrent with heterosexual practice.18

The sorting into distinct categories is partly an artifact of present-day social pressures within the gay and straight communities. HP’s subjects were self-acknowledged homosexual men recruited through outpatient HIV clinics in the Washington, D.C., area, and through local homophile organizations. The participants were 92 percent white non-Hispanic, 4 percent African American, and 1 percent Asian, with an average educational level of 3.5 years beyond high school and an average age of thirty-nine years. Among the gays, 90 percent said they were nearly exclusively homosexual, and 90 percent of the straight men said they were nearly exclusively straight, giving the impression of a clear-cut bi-modality. On reflection, though, bimodality emerges in such a sample as a result of social pressure and isn’t necessarily representative of the human population. A contemporary gay man can’t admit to being sexually interested in a woman any more than a present-day straight man can admit to being sexually interested in a man. The organizations and magazines that offer safe space for those who insist on a bisexual identity were not solicited.

The response of the investigators to this criticism has been evasive. Hamer states, “I didn’t tell these men to answer 0 or 6 [on a scale between heterosexual to homosexual], it’s just that almost all of them did. Am I supposed to pretend the trait is continuous?” He continues, “Well, how many truly bisexual men have you ever met? I have no theoretic argument with bisexuality. It’s just that before I started doing research, I’d never met any. Of the men we’ve interviewed, most identify themselves as either gay or straight. A handful identified themselves as bisexual, and we did not include them . . . for simplicity. But of

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