If the Genes Fit

I 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.