Day Eighty Two

Today in my Sexuality and Culture class, I learned about some new research that came out in December about the biology of homosexuality. Before I can get into what the new research says, I want to give you guys a little background on what the leading theories were before this research came out.

In the 1950's and all the way up through the 80's (and even by a few people today), homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Because of this, therapists and religious leaders sought ways to "cure" homosexuals. However, these early "therapies"were not "let's sit down and talk about your issue and maybe we can resolve it" kind of therapies. One method of therapy, called the aversion method. In the words of one article I read:

"It was thought that unethically administering drugs or placing patients in dirty, sickening surroundings while shown pin-up images of men, would cause them to form an association between the images and the negative effects. The aim was to make them nauseous when they saw men in a sexually attractive way and so would hopefully turn them ‘straight’."

Oh and guess what. Someone died from this. His name was Billy Clegg-Hill and he died in 1962 during medically-supervised therapy he was forced to take part in after his arrest for homosexual offenses. Since he was a captain in the Army, the real reason for his death was covered up and not exposed for another 34 years.

More recently, harsh methods of conversion therapy have been replaced with techniques more centered on figuring out the psychological root of the individual's homosexuality and trying to treat it from there.
Some examples of these kinds of treatments:

"In an April 2012 essay in The American Prospect, writer Gabriel Arana describes his "ex-gay" therapy experience. His therapist blamed his parents for Arana's homosexuality, and urged him to distance himself from his female best friends."

"Chaim Levin ... says that he quit conversion therapy after his therapist had him strip down and touch himself to 'reconnect with his masculinity.'"

Pause. Opinion break. I'm sorry, what?! How would being around females make Arana MORE gay? The influence of their femininity? The alternative to having female friends would be having male friends, and I don't think being around a bunch of guys is going to turn a gay guy un-gay. Is the solution then for him to have no friends? Yeah, that's real healthy. On to Arana - how would touching himself help cure his homosexuality when it's not the act itself that's important, it's what you're thinking about while you're doing the act. In Arana's case, if his touching himself is "successful," chances are he's not becoming less gay.

Pictured: How homosexuality doesn't work.

Let's get to some actual science. In 1991, Simon Le Vay conducted autopsies on 19 gay men and 16 straight men (don't worry, they were already dead) to see if homosexuality had anything to do with biology as opposed to psychology. To quote another article, "The cluster of neurons known as INAH 3 in the hypothalamus were 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 is also commonly thought of as participating in 'the regulation of male-typical sexual behavior.'" While his data didn't provide conclusive evidence in favor of biology (there was some controversy surrounding that fact that most of the homosexual men had died from AIDS and it was hypothesized that the disease could have caused these changes), his work was the first modern effort to really look at homosexuality in a strictly scientific way.

One of the main arguments used against homophobes and people that condemn homosexuality as abnormal or sinful is, "Homosexuality isn't a choice, it's genetic." The idea that homosexuality is something you're born with and is part of your DNA really kicked off with Dean Hamer and his study of the "gay gene."

Long study short, here's what you need to know:
Out of 40 pairs of brothers, 33 of them shared a set of chromosome markers on the X chromosome. (For those of you who don't remember biology class, males have XY and females have XX. If they're a male, they have to get the X from their mom since they can only get the Y from their dad and they need both.) This means that the "gay gene would need to come from their mother. Based on genetic data from homosexual siblings and their ancestry, he found that homosexual traits seemed to be linked to the mother's side of the family.

Here's the problem scientists see with the theory of a "gay gene": Why would a gene that keeps someone from having a child (as in reproduce, adoption doesn't count from an evolutionary standpoint) be passed down so frequently? Wouldn't it evolve out of our species since the whole point of existence (again, from an evolutionary perspective) is to survive long enough to reproduce?

Well now science has an answer for that too. It’s not genetics. It’s not DNA. It’s not pieces of DNA. It’s epigenetics,” says Sergey Gavrilets, who's an actual scientist. In other words, it's not what's IN your DNA, it's what happens to the epi-marks that rest on your DNA when you're in the womb. Um, what?

It all has to do with testosterone. It was already discovered that females with higher testosterone rates are more likely to be gay, just as males with low testosterone rates are more likely to be gay. The scientists working on this study argue that epi-marks help regulate testosterone in the womb - for a female fetus, they create a buffer between the fetus and the testosterone and for male fetuses, they help increase the amount of testosterone that the fetus's receptors bind with.

"Normally, these epi-marks are erased after they are activated, but if those marks are passed down to the next generation, the same epi-marks that protected a man in utero may cause oversensitivity to testosterone among his daughters, and the epi-marks that protected a woman in utero may lead to undersensitivity to testosterone among her sons."

 This fits with Hamer's idea that homosexuality in males is passed through the mother's side. My teacher also said in class today that environmental factors such as the mother's diet, mental state and overall health could affect the way epi-marks were expressed, adding another factor to this whole science-y mess.

What does this all mean though for society? More controversy! On the bright side, we can say that we're past trying to electrocute gay people into straightness. One the not-so-bright side, many people will take this study and say, "Well that means if you're gay, you're defective." First it was "deviant" then it was "neurotic" and now I fear it'll be "mutant."

Can't everyone just accept that people are going to love who they love and be attracted to what they're attracted to (expect pedophiles... that shit's not okay)? Do we need to have a "why" for everything?

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On a completely unrelated note, Sam passed his huge test today and is now a certified EMT :) Not only does this mean he's kicked ass with all the medical stuff he had to know, it means that he won't be as grumpy and stressed out - yay! In all serious though, I'm super proud of him because I know how tough the past 8 weeks have been for him in preparation for this test and I'm glad it's over with for his sake.

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Sources:
http://emconnolly.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/unethical-use-of-aversion-therapy-to-cure-homosexuality/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8251033.stm
http://www.livescience.com/25082-gay-conversion-therapy-facts.html
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/courses/genomics/2002/pierce/gaygene.htm
http://healthland.time.com/2012/12/13/new-insight-into-the-epigenetic-roots-of-homosexuality/