To the Editors:
I was dismayed by Richard Horton’s misleading account (“Is Homosexuality Inherited?” NYR, July 13) of the paper which Dr. Shang-Ding Zhang and I published concerning the white gene’s effect on fruit fly sexual behavior (“Misexpression of the white (w) gene triggers male–male courtship in Drosophila,” Proceeding of National Academy of Sciences, USA, Vol. 92 (June 6, 1995), pp. 5525–5529). Dr. Horton’s assertions are false. We never “draw extravagant parallels with human beings,” nor did we “force [our] experimental results with fruit flies to fit [our] preconceived notions of homosexuality.” Indeed, even a cursory reading of our article would confirm these facts. Contrary to Horton’s representation of our motives for doing this work, we, in fact, accidentally stumbled onto this rather startling find while carrying out experiments designed to understand the role certain genes play in Drosophila brain development. We found that the runaway expression of a single gene, white, which we used as a “utility tool” in our experiments, induces homosexual courtship among mature males. It is remarkable that white is one of the most studied genes in man’s quest to understand genetic control and function in Drosophila (described in 1910 by Thomas Hunt Morgan as the first example of sex-linked inheritance in files) and yet this phenomenon had not previously been reported. Using this male–male courtship as an assay, we carried out experiments to test hypotheses addressing causal mechanisms. These efforts led to the observation that wild-type (genetically unaltered) male flies will participate in homosexual courtship when exposed to a vigorous male–male courtship environment, demonstrating that both genetic factors and environmental cues influence this behavior. It should be noted that we never made or even implied the anthropomorphic interpretations of these data attributed to us by Horton.
I am particularly distressed that your reviewer either failed to grasp or deliberately misrepresented our study. I urge NYR readers to read the original version. Such shoddy scholarship hurts not only those who are trying to make sense of the complexities surrounding biological origins of sexual behavior, it also erodes public support for basic research. For this reason, I hope that your future reviews of scientific publications are both more accurate and responsible.
Ward F. Odenwald
The Neurogenetics Unit
Laboratory of Neurochemistry
NINDS,NIH
Bethesda, Maryland
To the Editors:
Richard Horton (“Is Homosexuality Inherited?” NYR, July 13) says, “Historians of homosexuality will judge twentieth-century ‘science’ harshly when they come to reflect on the prejudice, myth, and downright dishonesty that litter modern academic research on sexuality.” He goes on to cite some examples.
Obviously, Horton’s review of Dean Hamer’s work was written before John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune reported on the allegations of “scientific misconduct” by Hamer. These allegations were made by a junior researcher who performed research crucial to Hamer’s claimed discovery. These allegations are now being investigated behind closed doors by the National Institute of Health’s Office of Research Integrity.
As a man who “chooses” to love other men for rational reasons, I predict that history will soon be talking about LeVay and Hamer as “the Kato Kaelins of Science.”
Frank R. Aqueno
New Orleans, Louisiana
To the Editors:
“Is Homosexuality Inherited?” asks Richard Horton’s review (NYR, July 13), thereby colluding, however inadvertently, with a one-hundred-year-old anti-homosexual tradition. That politics keeps positing homosexuality as “the problem.” Heterosexuality, it seems, is problem free.
Why doesn’t a NYRB headline ever ask: “Is Heterosexuality Inherited?” Or: “Has Heterosexuality Always Existed?” Why not ask: “Are There Such Timeless, Unitary, Biological Things as Heterosexuality. Homosexuality, or Sexuality That Can Possibly be Inherited?” Why not an essay asking: “What The Hell Are Those ‘Male Typical’ and ‘Female Typical’ Behaviors and Feelings That LeVay talks About?” When will the NYR head a piece: “Is Desire to Read the NYR Inherited?” The phrasing of our questions implies loaded first assumptions about the shape of the world.
The reviewer praises my history of the heterosexual norm, The Invention of Heterosexuality, then charges that my stand against biological determinism is “uninformed,” a case of “extreme intellectual reductionism.” I’m accused of accepting “the naive dualism of nature vs. nurture” when those two “forces” are “not in opposition.”
Horton, a medical doctor, favors a complex determinism in which fickle forces, “nature” and “nurture,” “biology” and “environment,” together seal our fates. “Many different genes, together with many different environmental factors, will interact in unpredictable ways to guide behavioral preferences.” Sounds reasonable, don’t it? That’s because it’s today’s dominant, “common sense” understanding of sexuality.
But that dualistic, bio-enviro fatalism reinstates biological determinism as half of Horton’s paradigm. And that mushy middle model (so named by anthropologist Carole S. Vance) is just as politically loaded as any other way of viewing the world. Try telling feminists that biology and environment destine women for house-work and men-tending. Try telling African Americans that nature and nurture determine their difficulty getting into college.
Horton’s nature and nurture determinism, LeVay’s biological determinism, and my social-historical understanding are conflicting ways of imagining the basic phenomena at issue. Horton charges that my anti-biological determinist view is political and ideological, implying that his bio-enviro model is free of such bias. Excuse me, I don’t think so!
Dr. Horton is critical of the loony-toons analogizing of “homosexuality” in fruit flies and human beings. I agree. Such biological comparisons completely erase the historically specific social systems in which humans interact with others, learning to feel masculine, feminine, and erotic—and to call themselves “gay,” “straight,” or whatever. (Straight-faced, straight-thinking researchers who compare fruit flies and men long derided as “fruits” should also be criticized for insensitivity to the comic ironies of language.) But the ludicrous analogizing of insects and humans is based on the same biological fatalism that Horton defends as half of his biological-environmental determinism.
I honestly don’t understand how biology can play any role in determining all the different, discontinuous forms of human relationship revealed by historians: “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” and “bisexual,” “lipstick lesbian” and “old butch,” “ancient Greek pederasty,” “Victorian true love,” “romantic friendship,” “early-colonial sodomy,” and the Native American “berdache” (so-called by the French colonizers).
I don’t see how biology can determine the social, historical, and political use of sexual preference to create two dominant and subordinate classes, “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals.”
With many others, I question the medical model that defines heterosexuality, homosexuality, and sexuality as essential biological things to be explained by scientists. With others, I’m asking basic questions about those objects we’ve all taken for granted under the rule of the medical model: “heterosexuality,” “homosexuality,” and “sexuality”; “sexual orientation”; “the body,” “biology,” and “nature”; the idea of a natural “determinism” of desire.
Dr. Horton pits my “ignorance” of nature and biology against his (and LeVay’s and Hamer’s) scientific “evidence.” Such criticism delegitimizes the view of us non-scientist gay people. Horton’s bio-enviro model makes us ignoramuses, with no authority to comment on and reject a paradigm that (supposedly) defines the origin of our feelings. His, and LeVay’s and Hamer’s, rebiologizing of homosexuality and sexual preference puts the “experts” in charge again. Their biologizing makes homosexuality and sexual desire a “scientific” problem, not essentially a social, historical, and political phenomenon, joined at the hip with power.
But it’s political power that privileges the words of medical doctors and scientists, and makes the rest of us incompetents, too “uninformed,” “naive,” and “ignorant” to speak with authority.
The way to deal with the power issues implicit in all formulations of sexual research problems is to make that politics explicit, not assume its absence in the work of doctors and scientists.
In The Invention of Heterosexuality I suggest that the recent popular boom in biological theories of homosexuality shores up slippage in the 100-year-old distinction between heterosexual and homosexual. Defenders of hetero privilege are perceiving that heteros are just like homos, except for the sex of their sex partners—and they’re scared. The hetero/homo distinction upholds heterosexual supremacy. In any case, belief in the heterosexual dictatorship and biological determinism are the problems that need explaining, not homosexuality.
Jonathan Ned Katz
New York City
To the Editors:
Richard Horton’s careful treatment of the biological aspects of homosexuality (NYR, July 13, 1995) is a step in the right direction. It’s a pity therefore, especially as the new editor of The Lancet, that he did not take the opportunity to take the further step of removing from our lexicon the phrase “genetic causality.” Horton uses a wrongheaded form of this causality by embracing an ill-defined idea of a biochemical program. With biological programs, unless we define them carefully, it is assumed we are talking about gene programs. But gene programs are linear while the origin of complex behavior, most would agree, is nonlinear. Once we begin to apply linear logic of monogenic (single gene) traits to multigenic origins of nonlinear behavior we can expect nothing but confusion. Certainly single gene diseases like some forms of muscular dystrophy or cancer can be linked to unique genes but even in these cases genetic diagnosis does not always predict the disease and other factors are involved. Monogenic diseases remain at less than 2 percent of our total disease load. Most cancer and cardiovascular diseases, responsible for roughly 70 percent of premature mortality and morbidity, are complex and show no evidence that they may be understood by linkage studies that have been so successful for monogenic diseases. Knowing this, the technological impulse has been to use such analysis to diagnose not the disease but disease tendency. But tendency diagnosis is predicted to be even more unpredictable than disease prediction when many genes are involved, especially when such multigene complexes are open to environmental signals. The idea that such complex diseases can be equated to genetic programs that are then reduced to a unit amenable to clinical application is nothing more than wild speculation. That homosexuality, or other complex human traits, may be housed in a genetic program is equally unlikely. Nevertheless, that is what the Human Genome Project is all about. Horton states (p. 40), “The question is: How do genes get you from a biochemical program that instructs cells to make proteins to an unpredictable interplay…that constitutes sexuality?” The idea that the program is genetic is reinforced in Horton’s next paragraph with statements to the effect that genes are known to be responsible for the development of lungs, mouth, speech, etc.
But we know of no such thing. We only know, as Horton points out so well in most other areas of his essay, that genes are part of an interactive matrix of enormous complexity. One strong possibility that is now making some headway in biology is that, while the organism is programmed, the program is not in the genes but is located instead in the matrix itself. A regulatory program or matrix coextensive with the cell (or organism) puts the scientific emphasis on complexity and is an idea of enormous scientific respectability (epigenesis) which has been cast aside in favor of the simplistic view of genetic causality now revitalized as genetic program. It is quite possible that Dr. Horton purposefully left the idea of a program vague. He need not have. Nonlinear dynamics provides a sound scientific approach to understanding program at the level of developmental networks that themselves regulate gene patterns rather than being controlled by genes. Epigenetic logic is inherently non-linear and chaotic but includes and contextualizes the linear determinism of a [gene—>protien] equation.
