Unavoidably Queer?

At Levitican University, a Fundamentalist Christian college in Southern California, something remarkable is going on. Professor Guy Albrick, head of the Department of Molecular Neurology, has devised a radically new technique to help male students who are troubled by homosexual urges.

He grafts genetically-engineered nerve cells into the hypothalamus of their brains; the cells assemble themselves into circuitry that generates opposite-sex attraction, and soon these site-sex attraction, and soon these young men are happily dating women, their homosexuality a thing of the past.

Recently, Albrick has gone one better. He has put his nerve cells into a "vaccine" that he routinely (and secretly) inoculates into the cadets in Levitican's officer-training corps. It's an anti-gay prophylaxis: the idea is to eliminate any tendency toward homosexual behavior.

Unfortunately, the vaccine seems to be too much of a good thing: a number of the injected cadets--now members of the armed forces--have been arrested for rape, gay-bashing, and other crimes of violence. Meanwhile, one Levitican student, whose struggle with homosexuality had been moving towards self-acceptance and pride, has fallen into Albrick's clutches...

This is fiction, of course. It's the plot of my recently-published techno-thriller, "Albrick's Gold." But could it become fact? And if so, what should we be doing about it?

If it ever does become fact, I'll have to take part of the blame. For it was my research, published in 1991, which suggested that brain structure--particularly the size of a tiny cell group in the hypothalamus, where our sexual urges may have their roots--has a lot to do with why a person is straight, gay, or bisexual.

At the time, I was a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute in San Diego. I was deeply immersed in questions of brain organization and development. And I was gay. So it wasn't a big stretch to put these two parts of my life together: to ask whether this particular aspect of human diversity, so central to my own sense of identity and my place in society, could be understood in terms of neurons, synapses and genes.

My interest, I think, was an innocent one--I was just plain curious about it. I had no agenda, and no concern about what my work might lead to, other than to a better understanding of what makes us human. But when my research hit the headlines, everyone assumed I did have an agenda, although they couldn't agree on what it was. To some, I was out to pathologize, perhaps to eliminate homosexuality. "Another example of medical homophobia!" declared one gay academic on prime time television. To others, I was out to justify homosexuality--to prove that we are "born that way" and therefore not to blame for our sexual urges or our sexual behavior.

After all, in many people's minds, however, gay people just are inferior. And these people might want to use scientific findings to "cure" us, to weed us out, or even to prevent us from being born.

How likely is it that such a technology will become a reality? We may have a better idea of the answer to this question after the "Queer Science" conference at Harvard this weekend, at which some of the key players in the field will be discussing the status of biological research into sexual orientation.

A few years ago, I would have said that a person's sexual orientation is far too deeply ingrained to be changed by any means. The history of misguided and futile attempts to make gay people straight seemed to attest to that. But recently, researchers have had remarkable success in changing the behavior of laboratory animals by grafting nerve cells into their hypothalamus: animals that were bred to have an abnormally short, 20-hour sleep/wake cycle by grafting brain cells from other animals into them.

But what really made the prospects of manipulating human sexuality seem more immediate and threatening is recent molecular genetic research by Dean Hamer and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute. In 1993 Hamer's group reported evidence that genes on the X chromosome predispose boys to become either gay or straight.

The genes haven't actually been identified yet, but if Hamer's findings are right, it won't be more than a few years until they are identified. And then it will be a simple matter to develop a blood test that could be applied to adults, to children and even to fetuses. Perhaps it will eventually be possible to change an embryo's "gay genes" into straight ones.

Not that genetic tests will be 100 percent accurate, of course, since gens are by no means the entire reason why an individual is gay or straight. (Even identical twins can have different orientations.) But the tests will be accurate enough to be used to justify pre-employment testing, pre-marital testing, and pre-insurance testing. Accurate enough to counsel a child--to help stiffen his resistance to his gay tendencies. And for some, accurate enough to justify the abortion of a fetus.

Dean Hamer is concerned enough about these dangers that he wants to restrict the use of genetic tests for homosexuality. "We believe that it would be fundamentally unethical," he and his colleagues wrote in their 1993 paper, "to use such information to try to assess or alter a person's current or future sexual orientation." Hamer has talked of patenting the relevant DNA sequences, thus preventing the commercial development of blood tests.

I take a more libertarian view. I am also concerned about possible abuses, but I don't think that legal restrictions are either a practical or an ethical way to prevent them. On the contrary, I believe that we can only prevent such abuses by creating a society in which gays and lesbians are valued as individuals and as a group of people who make a unique contribution to society.

But beyond the possibility of abuses, there's another, more positive side to "queer science." The biological findings reinforce what most gays and lesbians feel about themselves--that their sexual orientation is something given, an attribute that helps define their core identity and not a mere set of behaviors that a person chooses to engage in or not as whim or morality may dictate.

To members of the Harvard community, this may not seem like a surprising assertion. But according to national polls, about half the population of the United States believes homosexuality to be "something one chooses to be." And it is with this half of the population that the strongest anti-gay sentiment is lodged.

How does one respond to such an attitude? Often, I want to say "Forget about science, forget about reasons, just treat us as human beings, as your neighbors, as your children." But in the meantime, before such changes of attitude occur, people need reasons.

One man who I interviewed for the television documentary, "Born That Way?" (The Learning Channel) put it very explicitly. An Arizona journalist who had been writing anti-gay editorials for many years, he changed his mind after reading some scientific articles about homosexuality.

"I became persuaded it was not...something voluntary," he said, "not something you embraced, it was the way you were born. If it's the way you were born then it ceases to be a sin, and then one's whole theological and moral perspective shifts, and then you begin to view the problem entirely differently, and that's what happened to me."

He retracted his earlier views and urged the city of Phoenix to pass a gay-rights ordinance, something that actually came to pass soon afterward.

Science, I believe, has a significant role to play in helping create a more gay-friendly world. But meanwhile, watch out for zombie-like Leviticans with holes in their heads.

Simon LeVay, Ph.D. is the author of several books, including "Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality."