I couldn't have said it better. This is from
a professional journalist at the respected newspaper--The Los Angeles
Times. The incredible thing is that he even used some of the same
words that I used when debating this topic. Perhaps it means that
I should be spending more time on my book instead of seeing patients?
Dan Neil: Times Staff Writer
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Ii didn't decide to be straight, never came to a sexually orienting
fork in the road to choose the road more traveled. I was never
indoctrinated by anyone advancing a heterosexual agenda. Talk about
coals to Newcastle.
And it's the same for every gay person I've ever talked to. From the
earliest stirrings of sexual proclivity, they were somehow aware that
they belonged in the same-sex sandbox. This was the case with Brad, one
of my best friends. But perhaps, I ventured, something environmental,
something learned, accounted for his sexual orientation? "Yeah, right,"
he said, "I read a book on it when I was 3 years old."
Just in time for Gay Pride Month?and in time to be
rushed to the battlefields of the culture wars?comes "When I Knew,"
edited by fashion photographer Robert Trachtenberg, a collection of
stories from gays and lesbians, famous and not so famous, describing
their Eureka! moments. Of course, writes contributor Brian Leitch, you
know, then you know-know, then you really,
really know. 'Nuf said.
This is a funny, sad, wonderful little book, full of mordant vignettes
of self-discovery and disclosure. When comic Michele Balan told her
grandmother that she was a lesbian, her grandmother replied: "No you're
not, you're Romanian. On your father's side!" For political fundraiser
Barry Karas, it happened when he was 8 years old. After watching the
boy skip around, playing hopscotch, a family friend leaned over to
Karas' father and said, "Ben, I think you got a problem."
These
childhood annunciations occur in strange ways. Makeup artist Jeff Judd
remembers edging under the TV to look up the loincloth of Ron Ely, who
played Tarzan. Composer Marc Shaiman had a crush on Dick Gautier, who
played Hymie the robot on "Get Smart." As a child, "Will & Grace"
producer Jon Kinnally became obsessed with the man's naked back on a
box of Doan's pills.
What is striking is that they had such
revelations to begin with. It never dawned on me that I was straight. I
just was. For gays and lesbians, it seems, there is always a moment
when they realize that what they want isn't officially sanctioned. A
cognitive moment that marks a cleaving away from the larger
heterosexual world, the opening of an otherness, like jets peeling off
in the missing-man formation.
Also conveniently timed, a June 3
article in the biology journal Cell that describes a gene-modifying
experiment in which scientists switched fruit flies' sexual orientation
from straight to gay. In the words of the study's authors: "The
splicing of a single neuronal gene thus specifies essentially all
aspects of a complex innate behavior." At least for
Drosophila melanogaster, sexual orientation is genetic.
A month ago, researchers in Sweden released the results of a
brain-scanning study suggesting the existence of human pheromones?scent
chemicals that govern sexual behavior in many species?and demonstrating
that gay males react to male sweat pheromones the same way heterosexual
women do. There was no mention of socks.
Sexuality is
bewildering and complex and fantastically varied?on this, I think, all
sides agree?and yet there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that
sexual orientation has a biological foundation, and that homosexuality
is not "unnatural" in the sense of not occurring in nature. Biologist
Bruce Bagemihl's book "Biological Exuberance" (1999) documents hundreds
of examples of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom.
The
common shorthand for all this is the "gay gene," a term popularized by
geneticist Dean Hamer and journalist Peter Copeland's book "The Science
of Desire" (1994).
The notion of a gay gene, or anything like
it, is anathema to organizations such as the rabidly anti-gay Focus on
the Family. If homosexuality is a natural variation in the human
genome, homosexuals are not guilty of anything except being human. If
it is established that homosexuality is genetically, or at least
biologically, rooted?regardless of how such feelings are behaviorally
shaded?then the campaign to marginalize and criminalize gays is
revealed as the bigoted pogrom that it is.
How bad do Christian
fundamentalists want to refute this idea? Watergate con and prison
minister Charles Colson, in a piece last month responding to a New York
Times op-ed article by Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker,
argues that "of course" homosexuality is "evolutionarily maladaptive,"
according to the tenets of natural selection. It took homophobia to
rehabilitate Darwin in the eyes of fundamentalists.
In the long
run, this is a fight homophobes cannot hope to win, simply because the
fear they traffic in?that somehow America's children will be seduced
into the homosexual lifestyle?is so at odds with common experience.
Most people know, at the core of their self-conception, that they were
born straight or gay, and no amount of indoctrinating, no agenda from
either side, could change that.
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"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." -- Toulouse-Lautre, Moulin Rouge
