Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality.

By Simon LeVay. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996, 304 pages. Hardcover, $25.00.

Reviewed by Scott Herness, Ph.D., The Indiana University School of Medicine, Muncie Center for Medical Education, Muncie, IN 47306.

The history of science is filled with examples of scientists who, in searching to explain some essence of what makes us individuals--our gender, intelligence, or race--have been deluded by the allure of their numbers into believing that their measurements justified the social prejudices of their day. Thus, craniometrists, citing the number of grains in a rice-filled skull, and psychologists, listing IQ scores with a cool precision, have yielded a score of proofs for the inferior intellect and diminished mental capacity of Blacks, Native Americans, and women, all the while decreeing themselves apostles of objectivity. So too, in the last century, homosexuality, alternately viewed as medical inferiority, psychopathology, neuronal abnormality, hormonal malfunction, or simply bad decision making, has been successfully "cured" by a long dozen of remedies that has included the banter of psychoanalysis, electric shocks of operant conditioning, injections of steroid hormones, cauterization of brain tissue by implanted electrodes, and even implantation of the unalloyed and thoroughbred genitals of heterosexuals. That no one has been cured of homosexuality may seem to call much of the science of homosexuality into the realm of charlatans, pitchmen, and quacks. However, as Simon LeVay points out in his latest book, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality, which surveys a century of scientific research into homosexuality, science contains a plot of human dimension, a cast of characters, a list of heroes and villains. Hence, separating science from the scientist is all important.

What LeVay reveals, and what many practitioners would prefer to ignore, is that scientists are as illusory and introspective as those, such as artists, novelists, actors, or musicians, who are praised for their subjective methods. In fact, the neutrality of an empirically determined number, impartiality of a conclusion, and objectivity of the scientific mind are ideals rather than actualities. In fact, the good and bad news is that scientists bring with them all of human bias, prejudice, and a priori conclusion to the experimental table.

This is also good news because sometimes introspection may provide insight, rather than prejudice. A thesis set early in the book is that the science of homosexuality, either through coincidence or the connected intuitions of those scientists actually close enough to the subject matter to understand it, has circumnavigated to its scientific origin, which was born from the highly developed gay community of Berlin at the turn of the century. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the physician and sexologist who is noted often throughout the text, and his predecessor, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, jurist and advocate, both homosexual and from Berlin, are principally credited with the origins of the modern gay movement. Among his accomplishments, Hirschfeld co-founded the first gay rights organization in Berlin in 1897 --the WhK (Wissenschaftlich-humanitares Komitee, or Scientific-humanitarian Committee); founded the first Institute for Sex Research in 1919--the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft; spent 25 years editing the journal he founded, Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook of Sexual Intermediates); and spent a lifetime of argument for the rights of urnings, the then-current term for gay and lesbian people.

As part of his life's work, the WhK submitted and resubmitted over decades a petition to the German legislature for the rights of gay and lesbian people that eventually gained more than 3,000 signatories, including such eminents as Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Albert Einstein. Hirschfeld also proposed a theory for a biological basis of homosexuality, contemporarily viewed as the third sex. Basing his idea heavily on the ideas of Ulrichs, Hirschfeld theorized that homosexuality was prenatal, a developmental competition between two amorphous centers within the brain of the fetus. Hence, one was born gay. Within the developing brain of every fetus was a nucleus, a collection of neurons that was responsible for attraction to men and another nucleus for attraction to women. In the ideal pattern of heterosexual development, the appropriate nucleus develops, and the inappropriate degenerates. But this does not always occur, and the balance of the developed or vestigial centers in the adult explained a spectrum of sexuality from heterosexual to homosexual. Demonstrating that even homophile scientists are subject to prejudice of the day, Hirschfeld originally equated the development of homosexuality with degeneracy of the parents' seed, because of causes such as syphilis or alcoholism, that prevented the inappropriate nucleus from completely degenerating. He also conceded, however, that homosexuality could arise from normal families, such as his. Through the scientific collection of thousands of interviews and questionnaires; publication of pamphlets, journals, and books; and thousands of public lectures worldwide, Hirschfeld argued, although in perhaps flawed rhetoric for modern times, for the recognition of gay and lesbian people, decriminalization of laws against them, and a biological basis to homosexuality that removed it from the company of sin or crime.

Much came of Hirschfeld's work, including his eventual fall from grace and his perception as being homophobic. Hirschfeld's argument--that what was natural could not be condemned as immoral--was later inverted by subsequent interpreters to a line of reason that suggested homosexuality is an anomaly, a deformity, and for humans to remain "healthy," the sick and degenerated need be purged. His lack of impartiality was attacked. He was accused, in all appearances falsely, of blackmailing some he interviewed and turning over "lists" to the police. LeVay's attempt to vindicate Hirschfeld's reputation as anti-gay is clear and explicitly stated. Today Hirschfeld may be viewed as a significant antecedent to early American gay rights organizations such as the Mattachine Society and as an architect, if imperfect, for a scientific basis to homosexuality.

Praised or condemned, his work was not ignored by either his or a subsequent generation of scientists. Freud disagreed with, even attacked, the "tendentious literature" that tied homosexuality to biological origins rather than the unconscious. There was no third sex for Freud, although he did concede that conversion was mostly not possible, not because homosexuality was a neurosis but because it was a perversion, that is, an inadequate development in his progressive oral-anal-phallic scheme of maturation. This has not stopped a generation of psychoanalysts attempting to "talk" their patients out of homosexuality by relating such advice, for example, that a gay man is fearful of female genitalia because it reminds him of the danger of castration, heterosexual men being thus "braver" than the cowardly homosexual. As LeVay points out, the nadir of acceptability of homosexuality in America in the 1940s and '50s is correlated with the consequent rise of psychoanalysis at that time. Many psychoanalysts were neither objective nor detached, and some harbored undisguised opposition to the gay community. Ironically, the son of one of these psychoanalysts, Charles Socarides, who vigorously argued against the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, and who asserted that this incapacitating pathology rendered homosexuals incapable of employment, is now a gay activist. Other psychoanalysts, such as Judd Marmor, added both humanity and a long delinquent skepticism to the debate.

With the inveterate prattle of psychoanalysis already securely moored to homosexual theory, biology made a comeback in the early 1930s when the first steroid hormones were isolated. Here, as predicted, were tangible molecules, ones whose structures could be drawn on chalkboards and whose physiochemistry could be equated, with some certainty, to a core of biology that defined femaleness or to a pith of physiology that made men men. What uninspired leap of imagination might it have taken for the ensuing theory to appear that lesbians and gay men had unacceptable and inappropriate levels of either testosterone or estrogen? Early results of such experiments were suspiciously befitting to their hypotheses, but the fallacies that rendered them unreliable--the sensitivity of the hormonal assays, the lack of a blind experimental design--went unnoticed by experimenters who, one can guess, had their results before their assays. Thus, when 300 homosexual men in a World War II unit were treated with testosterone to increase their maleness, the army created, according to Alfred Kinsey, "the worst homosexual problem on their hands that they had ever had." The soldiers' sex drive did increase--toward other men. Between 1968 and 1984 this experiment of correlating hormonal levels to sexual orientation was performed 25 times, and all possible results were obtained: The same-sex hormone was too low in homosexuals, it was too high, and, in 20 of 25 cases, there was simply no difference.

Hormonal or otherwise, the abuses of biologically-based cures of homosexuality were heinous. Witness, for example, the case of Alan Turing, a British mathematician who underwent one year of court-ordered estrogen injections as a sentence for a homosexual infraction. He grew breasts but was not cured. A year after the conclusion of his treatment he committed suicide.

Destruction of the brain has been another strategy. No sooner, it seemed, was the hypothalamus, a small region at the base of the brain, discovered to be important in sexual behavior, than electrodes were stereotaxically implanted into the brains of homosexual men and these neurons destroyed by cauterization with the passage of electric current.

LeVay's admiration for Hirschfeld, and his endeavor to vindicate his scientific backslide, may lie in their clear similarity of scientific vision. In 1991 Simon LeVay published an instantaneously famous paper, which, like many seminal achievements, was interpreted correctly by some but simultaneously contorted into vermicular if not excruciatingly torturous interpretations by others. The scientific community had been learning for some time that, in fact, all are not created equal, but that the brains of men and women are different, i.e., sexually dimorphic. Small areas of the human hypothalamus, an area of primitive life-dependent functions, such as eating, drinking, and reproduction, were appreciated, by 1991, to be unlike in men and women. In particular, an area known as INAH3 (the third Interstitial Nucleus of the Anterior Hypothalamus) was at least twice the size in men compared to women. LeVay significantly extended this observation by discovering that the dimorphic nature of this nucleus was not only apparent in differences of sex but also of sexual orientation. INAH3 was, on average, two to three times smaller in gay men than heterosexual men, and similarly smaller in women. LeVay, who was careful in 1991 to state that it wasn't known if these anatomical differences preceded or were a consequence of homosexuality, now seems more comfortable in expressing a more cogent opinion. Reaching back to Hirschfeld, he now de-emphasizes the caveat that anatomical differences may be the result of sexual orientation and instead discusses the prenatal developmental theory as a possible prerequisite to homosexuality. Perhaps it is so. But the prophecies of anatomists sometimes belie our often myopic expectations of physiology or are later discovered paradoxically to contradict even our cleverest calculations of behavior.

In 1917 the Viennese endocrinologist Eugen Steinach reported clear histological differences between the interstitial cells (later determined to be the cells that produce testosterone) in the testicles of heterosexual and homosexual men. Based on these observations, he subsequently published a sensational report of transplanting a testicle from a heterosexual man into an "effeminate, passive homosexual man." The man was "cured" and reported to have lost his attraction to men and to have developed normal heterosexual feelings. From the comfort of hindsight we may now both laugh and cry at the ridiculous and nefarious aspects of Steinach's experiments. What separates LeVay's experiments from any antipodal homophile impartiality lies in its blind design. Neither the sex nor sexuality of any donor tissue was known to the experimenter. What further disconnects it from a century of bad science is that it, unlike a salvo of preconceived conclusions, will likely survive the unconditional acid test of science--repeatability by other scientists. The correlates of such differences of anatomy with sexual orientation, however, may not be completely foreseen.

How then, given the shifting tide in modern research, should these recent findings be interpreted? One might suggest they be viewed as interesting, provocative, even (or especially) exciting, simply not unequivocal. In addition to LeVay's anatomical findings, Dean Hamer has reported a likely locus on the X chromosome for a gay gene in men. Such a view is copacetic with LeVay's observations because development must have a genetic substrate. Hamer used reconstructed family pedigrees to examine a mode of inheritance for homosexuality and found that it appeared as if gay men inherited a trait from their mothers, but not from their fathers. This brought into discussion that a gene may be located on the X chromosome, which a son must always receive from his mother. Hamer then applied molecular genetic techniques, using linkage markers, that allowed his group specifically to focus on whether a small region of the X chromosome was the same or different in different individuals. Using families with two gay brothers, his group found that a small region near the end of the chromosome, called Xq28, was essentially the same in gay brothers but different in their heterosexual brothers. Statistically, such observations could arise by chance only once in 100,000 times. The chromosomal segment Xq28, which contains hundreds of individual genes, may be said to be correlated with homosexuality; the individual gene has yet to be discovered. But one could guess that the protein produced by this putative gene could play some physiological role in the development of the sexually dimorphic development of the hypothalamus. Or not. It is still perhaps too simple a solution to suggest that one gene may connect the known truthful facets of the genetics, neurobiology, and psychology of homosexuality. The imaginative leap that one gene could explain so much is simply so seductive that we must be careful not to lose scientific objectivity in the process of subjective speculation.

Both empirical fact and creative fiction play important roles in science, and it is simply this--separating the dancer from the dance, the scientist from the science--that has been, the challenge in interpreting the last 100 years of this history. Fortunately, science is self-correcting, and the erroneous conclusions based on preconceived notions will eventually be weeded out by their lack of reproducibility, but this process will be painfully slow. The accumulation of recent experimental evidence obtained with modern techniques in a more tolerant atmosphere may finally bring us an answer about the biological basis of homosexuality. But the answers to questions such as Why are we as a society so emotionally invested in this research? Why is it held so closely as a moral litmus test for our society? and Why does this question remain with us with such subterranean persistence? may lie in the historical impact homosexuality has held outside of science, such as the dictates set on society's view by religion. The legal impact of a biological basis to homosexuality is discussed at chapter length, but LeVay seems reticent on religion. Although LeVay reports studies on women whenever possible, the imbalance of the narrative toward gay men instead of lesbians is at once unavoidable, as a result of the medical and scientific sexism of the day, and regrettable. When LeVay began his anatomical studies, the cadavers of gay men who died of AIDS-related illnesses were all too easily attainable, whereas those of lesbians were not. Dean Hamer has spent considerable effort searching for a genetic correlate to lesbianism, but if the putative gene located in Xq28 had been located on any other chromosome, he'd likely still be dataless. Thus, for circumstances alone, recent work again centers on gay men. Even if one might have hoped for more discussion of religion or accounts on the scientific studies of lesbianism, Queer Science is a wonderful book, lucidly written and educational.