Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation 1st Edition

My favorite part of the book is Hamer (the geneticist who discovered Xq28--the GAY-1 gene, responsible for the gayness of 17% of the gay male population) saying"....you have to be sure first that the trait isn't chosen before you look for its gene." He pauses, incredulous, "Can you imagine any sane, reputable biologist spending years of their life and their resources looking through chromosomes for a gene for something that's CHOSEN? I suppose you could do it, but you'd have to be a complete idiot because it would be the equivalent of staking your entire scientific career and reputation on finding a gene for"--he searches for an example--"being a Methodist."

OR

"Personality has been uprooted, modified, ironed, tamed, altered. And through it all, no Prozac capsule, no psychopharmaceutical, no hormone, no drug, no surgical procedure* has ever changed anyone's sexual orientation. It seems, Weiss noted with a raised eyebrow, that our sexual orientation is an even more deeply rooted part of us than our personality."

Interesting, exciting, and sometimes really funny, the book is accessible to even those of us who had trouble with first year algebra and geometry...though an occasional chart or set of figures will give such people pause (don't give up! Go on to the next sentence...).

As far as being wide-ranging is concerned, I once read a short story in which a guest lecturer in a 10th grade high school science class based his entire lecture, and the following discussion, called "The Genetics of Baseball"(sic) on what he had learned from this book...

*see pages 124-125 for some of the horrors we learned from the Nazis and--used--in the 1950s.

He wrote in the first chapter of this 1996 book, "Something about the research of sexual orientation has gone almost universally unnoticed: We have assigned it an awesome significance that it does not possess. We have, by failing to note a simple, elementary principle governing the most basic principles of biological research, grossly overinterpreted what finding a gay gene, neuron, or hormone actually means. The research does not mean what we think it does. This book is about a biological investigation into a black box." (Pg. 4)

He strongly rejects the implication of a media commentator that "unless we locate a gene for homosexuality, unless we know where it is and how it works, then homosexuality is a choice... this is the equivalent of saying that since we haven't found the gene that governs left-handedness---and we haven't---then left-handed people choose to be left-handed..." (Pg. 9) He asks, "What would account for the baffling illogic of the media, the failure to grasp this elementary aspect of biological research?... We forget there are machines whose insides are at present far beyond our reach." (Pg. 9-10)

He summarizes his conclusions about research on sexual orientation: "It exists in the form of two basic internal, invisible orientations... Only a very small number of people are truly equally oriented both ways...The trait itself is not a `behavior.' It is the neurological orientation expressed, at times, behaviorally... Neither orientation is a disease or mental illness. Neither is pathological. .. Neither orientation is chosen... Signs of one's orientation are detectable very early in childhood... and quite possibly before birth." (Pg. 6-7)

Concerning Simon LeVay's study ], he quotes Harvard biologists Evan Balaban, who said, "'I don't mean to say Simon's study is worthless. Nissl is SOME kind of difference; we just don't know what, exactly. You know... it could be that all Simon is measuring is some effect from an anti-AIDS drug or the result of stress.' Indeed, if one had read LeVay's study carefully, the possibility that AIDS might have changed the tissue was clearly if subtly brought up. And after that, there was a question of cause and effect..." (Pg. 41)

He recounts that "In the 1950s, American scientists performed experiments on homosexuals... Based on false endocrinological theories such as the notion that homosexuality was caused by deficient levels of sex hormones... lesbians were made to undergo estrogen injections. None of these procedures ever altered the women's sexual orientations... Other gay people were forced to undergo aversion therapy... and electroshock... Despite this... the gay men's sexual orientation remained universally homosexual." (Pg. 124)

He quotes Dean Hamer, after a CNN interview about his supposed "gay gene" research: "The phenotypic fact that homosexuality is NOT chosen was one of the mandatory biological preconditions to concluding there was a gene for this trait... Can you imagine any sane, reputable biologist spending years of their life and their resources looking through chromosomes, for a gene for something that's CHOSEN? I suppose you could do it, but you'd have to be a complete idiot, because it would be the genetic equivalent of staking your entire scientific career and reputation on finding the gene for ... being a Methodist." (Pg. 205)

This book will be of great interest to anyone researching homosexuality, and related issues.

Chandler Burr's A Separate Creation is a journalistic report on the state of sexual orientation research, circa 1996. Now obviously outdated, it remains worth reading if one is interested in the various personalities who were involved in sexual orientation research in the 1990s, and the way their research was being presented to the American public at the time. Not that Burr should be relied upon where the science is concerned: his evaluation of it is a mixture of truth, half-truth, and outright fantasy. He correctly notes that the American media widely misrepresented the significance of possible genetic influences on homosexuality by implying that homosexuality must be a freely chosen condition if such influences do not exist. Burr notes, again quite correctly, that in order to try to answer questions such as "what causes homosexuality?" it is first necessary to answer more basic questions such as "what is homosexuality?" He pretends, however, that scientists understand perfectly what "homosexuality" and "sexual orientation" are. Only the very gullible or those who want to be misled will believe him. I have long suspected that scientists' views on these definitional questions are almost, if not quite entirely, worthless. Nothing in Burr's book made me change my mind.

Indeed, A Separate Creation reinforced my impression that sexual orientation researchers are being grossly irresponsible by claiming to know all kinds of things that they do not and perhaps cannot know. Burr claims, for example, that "sexual orientation" is established by the age of 2. This is said to be based upon sound scientific research by John Money and others, but I simply don't believe it. Other people may have had different experiences, but I had no conscious sexual attraction to anyone until the age of 12, and I find the suggestion that I had a "sexual orientation" prior to that time to be meaningless. Another of the dogmas Burr shares with most of the researchers whose work he discusses is that "sexual orientation" is entirely an "internal orientation", and that a person's behavior is thus irrelevant to deciding which "sexual orientation" they have. That is certainly one possible view of the matter, but anyone looking in Burr's book for an explanation of why it is better than other possible views will come away disappointed. On this question as on others, Burr's approach is to ridicule those who might dare to take a different view by implying that they are stupid or ignorant. Nowhere does he consider such issues in the patient, careful way that their complexity demands.

Though Burr considers the validity of "sexual orientation" as a concept beyond serious question, those who read him carefully will find sufficient evidence that it is anything but unquestionable. Burr states that contemporary research into "what sexual orientation is" began in the 1940s with the work of Alfred Kinsey. To my knowledge, Kinsey never used the actual expression "sexual orientation." I do not recall that it is used in either of the Kinsey Reports. It is not to be found, for example, in the chapter on homosexuality in either the report on the male or the report on the female, nor is it listed in the index of either book. Burr is guilty of projecting the ideas of 1990's era sex researchers back on to Kinsey, who had quite different views (he did not agree that people's sexual behavior is irrelevant to whether they are homosexual or not, for example).

The descriptions Burr offers of the scientists who became famous in the 1990s because of their roles in the debate over the development of "sexual orientation" - Simon LeVay, Dean Hamer, William Byne, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Laura Allen, and others - are deeply unattractive. They are all the more damning given that Burr probably intends them to be flattering. Burr says that the disagreements between these figures concern not the existence or the nature of "sexual orientation" but only how to research it. To a considerable extent, he appears to be correct: there are certain largely unquestioned assumptions about human psychology and behavior underlying the debates over "sexual orientation." Burr's account of the science nevertheless shows that the researchers are themselves confused about the nature of "sexual orientation." Hamer and his co-worker Angela Pattatucci at one point tried to measure sexual orientation using seven criteria: self-identification, sexual fantasy, sexual behavior, sexual attraction, romantic/emotional attraction, social attraction, and lifestyle. Eventually Hamer and Pattatucci decided that they needed only four criteria: self-identification, behavior, fantasy, and attraction. Oddly, Pattatucci is later quoted insisting that the "not behavior" view of "sexual orientation" is indeed correct. The fact that both of the approaches to defining "sexual orientation" she took with Hamer are incompatible with that understanding is not noted by Burr. Pattatucci asserts that though gay people may at times behave heterosexually, their "homosexual core" remains unchanged. She does not attempt to explain exactly what a "homosexual core" would consist in, if it cannot consist in behavior (it could consist in sexual fantasy, sexual attraction, romantic/emotional attraction, or some combination thereof).

These contradictions and unexplored questions make me suspect that Pattatucci's views are incoherent, though in fairness to her, they may have been misrepresented by Burr's reporting. Neither Burr, Hamer, or Pattatucci, asks the cruical question: How or why does it make sense to group different traits with each other as something called "sexual orientation"? The assumption seems to be that "sexual orientation" can be defined simply by making lists of various psychological or behavioral phenomena related to sex. The difficulty is partly that precisely which phenomena make their way onto any given list is arbitrary and depends on the personal attitudes of the researchers making the list, but more fundamentally that grouping things together on a list does nothing by itself to explain how any of them is connected with any of the others.

With no real explanation of "sexual orientation" as a concept, it is not clear how "sexual orientation" can in turn explain anything else. Burr is as blind as the scientists themselves to this problem. What they have is at best only the distant beginnings of a genuine science. This makes the contemptuous attitudes Burr's "sexual orientation" researchers express toward previous thinkers who have tried to explain "homosexuality" all the more galling and offensive. Sigmund Freud comes in for special derision. Burr quotes Byne casually dismissing Freud's theories about homosexuality as "preposterous." It is not apparent that Byne has any idea what he is talking about. Hamer too is dismissive of Freud; Burr relates how, when asked about certain "outmoded theories of environmental causation" by CBS reporter Paula Zahn, Hamer told her that "when some researchers looked at more than a thousand gay and heterosexual men a few years ago, they found very little difference in environment or parenting style." This, though Burr doesn't make it clear, is a reference to Alan Bell, Martin Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith's 1981 study Sexual Preference, an atrocious, misconceived work that shows nothing one way or the other about the correctness of Freudian ideas. Hamer, like every other so-called "expert" who has taken the line that Bell's study refuted psychoanalytic theories, deserves condemnation. While it may be Byne's view that Freud's theories are preposterous, what really is preposterous is the attempt to create new explanations of "homosexuality" without serious consideration of Freud, both to learn from whatever might be valid in his theories and to avoid repeating the same errors.